Cars have had some sort of role in videogames since the earliest days of the medium. Actually, even before, if you count electro-mechanical driving games like 1941’s Drive-Mobile. Cars and video games just go together, since cars are fun things to control, and video games allow people to control fun things, in safe ways without real-world repercussions. I mention all of this because it just makes the plight of the poor Lexus LS400 in the bonus stage of the 1991 Capcom game, Street Fighter II, all the more galling.
Street Fighter II, as you may have been able to infer by its evocative name, is a fighting game. All of the stages involve one or two players controlling some very colorful and pneumatically-buff fighters kicking the crap out of each other. Well, except for one bonus stage, where you get to pick one of several buff fighters with weirdly bold personal style choices to kick the crap out out of a car.
Not a sentient car that fights back or anything, just a car. You just kick the crap out of a normal car.
Not just a normal car, but a specific normal car, even a desirable car at the time, a Toyota Celcior, which we got here in America as the Lexus LS400. These were cars with some dignity, as you can tell by their advertising:
…and, of course, there’s this famous Lexus ad, all about classy refinement and refined classiment:
This was the car that pixellated meatheads would beat into rubble for bonus points in the game.
Look, here’s a whole video (of the Super Nintendo console version) of every fighter option available to smash the everloving clamnuts out of this helpless luxury sedan, including, with some irony, a sumo named Honda:
I’ve been looking for some sort of reason or significance why this particular car was chosen, but so far I’ve yet to find anything conclusive, beyond the fact that this was a then-new and popular luxury car of the era.
There is a little bit of backstory from the game, which explains the presence of the car thusly:
In the storyline, a man takes cars that do not sell and offers prize money for those who manage to break a car within a time limit with their bare hands for $10 per try. The idea unexpectedly became a big hit, with many people going to the harbor to give it a try.
I don’t know, I feel like if that car salesman can’t unload a new Lexus in 1991, they’re just pretty crap at their job. You’d have to sell a lot of smashing sessions at $10 a pop to get anywhere close to the roughly $35,000 that car would have cost back then.
Once the car is well-smashed, I have to give credit to the graphic designers that put in some pixellated fountains of coolant (blue) and gasoline (yellow) at roughly the locations they would be leaking from on the carcass:
Also, it looks like the horns are featured there! That’s some pretty good detail!
If you’ve always felt the Lexus LS400 was done rather dirty by Street Fighter II, you may be pleased to know that, in Japan at least, Toyota got a bit of revenge, not with a Celcior or LS400 exactly, but with a Toyota C-HR, in this commercial:
That’ll teach you punks to beat up perfectly innocent and reliable Japanese luxury cars parked on docks.
Oh, and I suppose the Lexus LS400 eventually got even more videogame-related revenge, as it was featured as the boss enemy in a another 1991 videogame called Turbo Force:
Man, 1990s Japanese videogame developers sure had complicated relationships with Lexus LS400s.
The post The Most Senselessly Abused Car In All Videogame History: Street Fighter II’s Lexus LS400 appeared first on The Autopian.
