Plus, nothing goes in the sim unless it's modelled to the millimetre, so although the car selection would fit on the back of a beermat and there's a distinct bias towards American oval racing, the level of quality is consistent across the whole lot. While the subscription model makes it more expensive than everything else on this list short of an arcade cabinet, iRacing is still far cheaper than buying and maintaining a racing car and you're guaranteed decent competition thanks to a harsh-but-fair penalty system and a host of professional racing drivers who rely on it to keep themselves sharp. Which is phenomenally depressing if you aren't quick in iRacing. If you're quick in iRacing, chances are if you stepped into a real racing car you'd be up to speed almost immediately. Less of a game, more a subscription-based driver training tool, iRacing boasts some of the most complex physics calculations outside of NASA HQ.

Your little toybox Celica whistled around increasingly rapid-fire sequences of chicanes, hairpins and, the rally car's natural enemy: big piles of logs.

The cabinet only had a single pedal, the accelerator, but frankly that's all that was required to initiate the biggest slides this side of a Floridian water park. When everything else in the bowling alley was pumping out bleeps and bloops, this was a pretty big deal. World Rally also had some fantastically throaty digitised audio samples for the engine and when you dropped your pound coin into the machine you were treated to exactly the same start-up sound that Carlos Sainz Snr would have heard at the start of a day at the office. Or at least photos of a scale model of a Toyota Celica GT-Four, it's difficult to tell at this resolution. World Rally opted for a top-down view but benefited massively from a main sprite that was digitised directly from photos of a Toyota Celica GT-Four.

Before Sega Rally came along, this was as realistic as arcade rally games got.

Pc games where you drive a police car