I'm reaching between my knees to yank at the column-mounted gear lever of a tiny, cramped car that owners were so desperate to leave behind, they abandoned them in the streets of Prague en masse.
How did I get here? The short answer is Jalopy. The idiosyncratic 2018 simulator, in which you drive and maintain a ramshackle car based closely on the East German Trabant, changed my view of games and of the world.
It's a bit of an anorak's game, Jalopy. That's not my choice of word—it's the one lead developer Greg Pryjmachuk used to describe himself the last time we talked. Pryjmachuk used to be a designer on the annualised Formula 1 games made by Codemasters, and became obsessed with the pit stops and tyre changes. "What if I took away all of what makes Formula 1 great, the high performance race show," he once told me in an Edge interview. "And just looked at a crappy car that you had to keep running?"
In Jalopy, you set off from East Berlin at dawn in a Laika 601 Deluxe with a mismatched door and your Uncle Lütfi as co-driver. With his advice, and replacement car parts swapped for crates of contraband found at the side of the autobahn—"the fruits of the road"—you'll eventually make it to Istanbul. There, as the Iron Curtain finally lifts, you'll find out who you really are. In the meantime, you'll listen to the engine sputter and fart as the Laika crests a hill, brought almost to a halt by the incline.
When your fuel runs out in the middle of nowhere, you're forced to continue on foot, temporarily leaving Lütfi behind and trudging between the white birches of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic with a jerry can. At times like these, the bare landscape and aux-cable-hum of the petrol station lights make Jalopy feel empty. Even the cities in which you hunt for motels can't be classed as destinations—existing in a kind of perpetual twilight, their citizens asleep behind dark windows. Liminal is a word overused by Twitter accounts that mainly post photos of stairwells, but this is a game that captures the uncanny majesty of in-between spaces.
It's also one that celebrates the mundane to an almost perverse degree. As you walk back and forth to the garage counter, having left your wallet in the glovebox for the seventh time, you might start to think of Jalopy as an anti-game built in opposition to the thrills and spills of the racing genre. Yet its nuts and bolts are also immediate and pleasing; the way an engine pops out of its compartment into your hands reminiscent of knocking a chunk of dirt loose in Minecraft. There's a tactility to the process of changing a tyre, turning the crank to lift the vehicle before teasing off the wheel, that brings about a meditative calm. As I neared my 30s, looking for permission to embrace being boring, I found all of this quietly transformational, and my gaming tastes changed as a direct result—leading me to Euro Truck Sim, MudRunner, and Death Stranding.
You might start to think of Jalopy as an anti-game built in opposition to the thrills and spills of the racing genre.
I was altered, too, by Jalopy's setting. As a PC games journalist, I'd long felt an affinity with Germany and its people, who kept on buying crunchy RPGs and strategy games even when they fell out of fashion in the wider world. I'd been flown to Hamburg to see the point 'n' click teams at Daedalic, and to Frankfurt to meet the engine nerds at Crytek. When I visited Berlin—to see a pre-battle-royale Fortnite, of all things—I was put up in a grand-yet-austere hotel which was a relic of East Germany, an entire country I'd been completely ignorant of. That nascent curiosity was fanned into a full-blown fascination by Jalopy, which is the story of not just an East German car but a family wrenched apart by the division of Europe after World War 2.
The Trabant became an emblem of East Germany because, by 1990, it was a midcentury invention that was crumbling and soon to be redundant. Cutting its citizens off from Western influences and imports, the East German government had told its people they had cars at home—then spent more than three decades failing to meet demand for its vehicles, which were in any case quite rubbish.
It was a characteristic move from a government that was both authoritarian and insecure. One of the factors that led to the building of the Berlin Wall was a 'brain drain' that saw an estimated 2.7 million East Germans leave for the west between 1949 and 1961, resulting in a shortage of skilled and educated workers. If the East German government couldn't convince people to stay, it would simply stop letting them leave.
This controlling relationship extended to everyday life in East Germany. Eventually, one in every 6.5 citizens was an informer for the Stasi, the East German secret police. Ordinary lives would be monitored and recorded in absurd detail; over the course of their four decade existence, the Stasi kept files equivalent in size to all of Germany's records since the Middle Ages. They employed a policy of Zersetzung, or "degradation", which involved chipping away at the self-confidence of troublesome citizens through secret acts of sabotage to their careers and relationships. This kind of insidious, slow-burn tragedy is exactly what Jalopy is about—a life that has been pulled fundamentally off-course, from the beginning, without their subject even knowing.
Of course, the risk of developing an interest in a cul-de-sac of European history is that you become a bore. But part of what Jalopy taught me, I think, is that sometimes it's OK to be boring—particularly if you're remembering something important. By remembering, you honour the people whose suffering ought not to be forgotten.
That's why I'm here in Berlin, on my 30th birthday. Tomorrow, we'll visit the Stasi museum. But today, I'm winding down the driver's side window of a flimsy, underpowered car which gradually fills up with fumes if I don't keep my foot down on the accelerator. A powerful incentive to keep moving. And a powerful reminder.
