Test Drive III: The Passion

Test Drive III: The Passion was released exclusively for MS-DOS and brought numerous changes to the formula seen in the series' previous two entries.

Accolade developed the game in-house following a legal dispute with longtime collaborator Distinctive Software. The conflict arose when Distinctive (as Unlimited Software, Inc.) reused code from Test Drive II: The Duel to develop the MS-DOS port of OutRun for Sega, leading to the landmark lawsuit Accolade, Inc. v. Distinctive Software, Inc.

As a result of the split, Test Drive III abandoned 2D sprites in favor of a custom 3D engine. It features an open-world landscape allowing for off-road exploration, a departure from the linear paths of its predecessors.

Version Differences#

There are three known versions of TD3: version 1.0 was the initial release, while version 3.0 served as the final iteration of the original game. The version can be checked in-game by pressing the V key.

The original release (1.0) is infamously difficult due to oversensitive steering, an issue exacerbated when played on anything faster than a 386DX-33.

Version 2.0 addressed this by adding an in-game menu to manually set steering sensitivity, accessed with F3.

Version 3.0, while keeping the sensitivity menu, fixed the issue with a "progressive steering" algorithm that makes adjustments automatically.

Anti-Piracy#

TD3 has a traditional copy protection screen, where a police officer asks for a technical stat number of a car. The answer is in the physical code wheel included with the game.

Answering incorrectly means a short demo of two minutes of in-game time, and no extra lives.

Unused Messages#

The game's executable contains several humorous or technical messages that are either impossible or extremely rare to encounter during normal gameplay.

AAAHHHH!! Unknown horrible hardware failure!!

Critical hardware error.

BARF! Bad Course Data! REBOOT!

Triggered when trying to load a corrupted circuit SCENE.DAT file.

Greetings Tom, enjoy your game!

Likely a greeting intended for developer Tom Loughry.

HUH?

A short and cryptic error message.

Unknown failure mode!

Another unused error message.

Wow, a TIE! How did that happen?

Virtually impossible to see on the score board due to the extreme precision required to register a tie.