Before racing games could reliably render a closed track convincingly, Test Drive III: The Passion was already trying something more ambitious: open, scenic point-to-point routes across mountain passes and coastal roads, with a garage of exotic supercars to burn through them in.
A Garage Full of Fantasy Cars
Developed by Distinctive Software and published by Accolade in 1990, Test Drive III is the third entry in the long-running Test Drive series, and it hands players a rotating selection of high-end machines — the Ferrari F40, Lamborghini Countach, and Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1 among them. Rather than laps around a closed circuit, races unfold along winding, one-way routes with a rival driver to beat and traffic, police pursuits, and shifting weather thrown in as obstacles.
Distinctive Software would later become part of Electronic Arts’ Canadian studio operations, and Test Drive III shows the early version of the arcade-racing formula they’d keep refining through the series’ later entries: accessible handling, exotic car fantasy, and open routes over sterile closed tracks.
What’s easy to underestimate today is how much of a fantasy proposition the car roster itself was in 1990. Owning, or even seeing in person, a Ferrari F40 or Lamborghini Countach was completely out of reach for the overwhelming majority of PC owners buying this game, and Test Drive III’s entire appeal leaned on letting players live out that exotic-car fantasy from behind a keyboard, years before most racing games treated licensed dream cars as a standard feature.
Getting Through a Route in One Piece
- Ease off the throttle earlier than instinct tells you to on blind corners — these are point-to-point routes, not memorized closed circuits, and losing control at speed ends a run fast.
- Watch for police as much as for the rival driver; getting pulled over costs time you can’t easily make back on a linear route.
- Weather changes affect handling noticeably. Treat a route differently once conditions shift rather than driving it the same way you would in clear weather.
- A joystick configured through DOSBox handles high-speed cornering more predictably than keyboard input, especially on the more mountainous routes.
- Learn a route’s general shape before pushing for a fast time on it — unlike a closed circuit you’ll lap repeatedly, a point-to-point road only shows you each section once per run.
Distinctive Software’s Broader Racing Legacy
It’s worth putting Test Drive III in the context of what Distinctive Software became. The studio’s later absorption into Electronic Arts’ Canadian operations put it at the center of some of the biggest racing and sports franchises PC and console gaming would produce over the following decade, and the arcade-first, accessibility-over-simulation philosophy visible here carried through a lot of that later work.
That makes Test Drive III worth playing less as a standalone curiosity and more as an early data point in a much longer studio history — you can trace a direct design lineage from these scenic, hazard-filled point-to-point routes to the arcade racing sensibilities that showed up in Distinctive’s later output long after the Test Drive name had moved on to other developers entirely.
An Early Swing at Openness
Compared to most PC racing games from 1990, which were still largely confined to simple closed tracks, Test Drive III’s commitment to scenic, hazard-filled point-to-point routes was a genuinely ambitious swing for the hardware of the time. It doesn’t have the physics depth that Papyrus would bring to the genre a few years later with titles like IndyCar Racing, but that was never really the goal here — Test Drive III is chasing the fantasy of driving an exotic car fast on an open road, not simulating one.
The arcade-style handling is a deliberate choice, favoring accessibility over strict simulation, and it mostly succeeds at that. Where it shows its age is in the rigidity of the point-to-point structure itself — there’s not much reason to replay a route once you’ve cleared it, and the traffic and hazard patterns can feel more like memorization than genuine unpredictability after a few attempts.
I’d also note that the sense of speed, which was genuinely impressive for 1990, can feel a little flat next to what racing games would achieve just a few years later once VGA and faster processors became the norm. It’s not a fair comparison to hold against a 1990 release, but it’s worth setting expectations accordingly if you’re coming to it after playing more technically advanced entries in the genre first.
The rival driver AI is another spot where the game’s age shows through — it can feel scripted rather than adaptive across repeated attempts at the same route, which takes a little of the edge off the competitive tension once you’ve learned exactly how a given run tends to play out. It’s a minor complaint against an otherwise genuinely ambitious early racer.
Sourcing a Copy
Test Drive III is a commercial title without a legal free download option, so look for it through official GOG or Steam re-releases. First time setting up DOSBox? Our setup guide covers the process end to end.
DOSBox Configuration for Test Drive III
Mount the game’s folder as a virtual drive using mount c [folder], switch to that drive with c:, and start the EXE from the DOSBox prompt. A joystick configured through DOSBox can make high-speed cornering considerably easier than keyboard controls alone — our DOSBox guide covers the full setup.
Watch a Route in Action
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