This was a fun one for me and was my first time trying a totally improvised video essay. It didn’t go exactly as planned and required some reshoots but I still think it’s a great topic and a great video. What are your thoughts?

Wtf am I doing

My older sister always ignored the races when we played the need for speed games as kids so she could go 'house shopping' and pick out where she would live in that world. It used to drive me crazy but when I got a bit older I found myself doing the same thing and making up my own little stories and characters when I got tired of racing

I love how your channel is basically "Instead of playing a video game, let's just stop and look at it."

10:10 That machine is called a pallet jack. It's basically a hand-pushed, hand-pumped equivalent to a forklift, used to move large amounts of goods that have been stacked onto shipping pallets. I use one at work to move bulk samples about. It's absolutely the sort of equipment I would expect to see in that sort of situation (in my job, a lot of people spend break times very close to the loading dock due to the easy access to fresh air).

Austin is such a king of slowing down, I'm surprised he even owns a racing game

There's just something so enchanting about wandering around in these drab, repetitive places that were only designed to be driven past and don't really make logical sense as a place for people to actually exist in. Then, once I'm tired from walking around San Diego, I head back to my apartment to play some video games.

Spot on. The interesting thing is that this approach goes for how it sounds as well. I worked on Forza Motorsport (2023) as a sound designer, on a bunch of things but most relevantly on the tracks Le Mans and Suzuka. It wasn’t open world but the same principle applied: I put in ridiculous effort to try and make it sound like those places in real life, have plausible birds and bugs for what looked like the season, and to make the environment reflections sound realistic at any speed. Nobody ever noticed, because it all sounded pretty much identical at 200 mph, and the wind+engine were obviously much louder than any owl hoot system or Japanese Cicadas. Sometimes tech is indeed the limitation (rendering tens of thousands of fully rigged and animated crowd members with individual voices and cheers and locations is still basically impossible, even if you make everything else look/sound like butt). But it’s certainly an order of magnitude less constraining than it used to be, and when you pump the brakes to look around, it still ends up in a similar place.

Just wanted to leave a comment to appreciate this kind of content your channel is a goldmine for random video game shit like this that no one else focuses on I love it

When I was a kid I once tried to properly follow traffic laws in GTA 4. It's funny because that's when the simulation breaks down, just like if you look closely at these environments. Other cars ran red lights and stopped on greens, and I eventually got a Wanted rating for a car accident that I didn't even cause.

My sister and I used to roleplay random storylines in burnout and completely ignore the races. We would drive around to where we weren't supposed to go and listen to the soundtrack that had the music she liked at the time. This brought me back to a memory I didn't even remember I had, and that's one of the best things from your channel.

I feel like the Tony Hawk games are ripe for this kind of analysis. Can't tell you how much time I spent in American Wasteland and Underground 1/2 just wandering around and looking at stuff. One of my favorite pastimes was going into the park editor and just building towns, always designating one spot as "my house." Even figured out a way to clip inside of the place-able shack so I could just sit in there and hang out.

The billboards in Remastered replace actual for-sale ad space in the original release, up to and including ads for the Obama campaign. Burger King, the clothing brand Diesel, XM radio shows, and car brands, all bought space.

Burnout Paradise had one of the most surreal, uncanny moments in gaming: On PS3 they integrated your PS Home avatar onto the in game billboards (if you had one). It somehow both added and removed immersion at the same time. I can't even find search results that prove they did this so it could just be a mandela hallucination.

The idea that older games' "don't look" areas are the same fidelity as their "look" areas, is a super remarkable point. Right, that's part of why exploring them can sometimes feel more exciting, because every part of the game says "there might be something here" even when there isn't. But with higher fidelity, its easier to see the sloppy areas for what they are.

This reminds me of one small part of the book Fahrenheit 451. In that dystopian future, they describe that billboards have had to be stretched out to a very high degree. The reason being, the cars have gotten too fast to read the original billboards. With racing games, it's the opposite of this. Instead of making things longer so you can purposefully focus on them while driving, they use the fact that you won't look at the details so that they can make less environments.

I’m sitting here watching an Any Austin video. If he had his way I would ignore the hair clips in his hair. How crazy is that?

when i was a kid playing need for speed with my brother, my fav thing to do in the game (outside of spectacularly crashing my car) was to leave the road and drive in a the countryside until i found a nice enough spot where i would just stop and just…. soak the atmosphere in. i spend way too long looking at random shit in this game lmao

I’m reminded of Tom Scott’s video a while back about driving his favourite video game in real life after he realized that the Need for Speed demo track is based on Vancouver He mentioned wishing he could get out of the car and ride the train or look out at the totem poles, something he’s now been able to do I remember feeling really similarly about racing games as a kid; that video and this one really speak to me

i love the sort of raw literalist outlook you like to have in video games, like "what if this place were reality? does this snack machine make sense? does this hallway make sense?"

As someone who has worked on a QA team for a racing game, I have spent a lot of time looking at this kind of stuff. This really captures the heavily curated falseness that is very particular to racing game environments.

Some of my favorite gaming memories is being a kid and exploring the map of need for speed underground with my cousin. It accomplished nothing, but we just wanted to explore and see the world. You do a great job at capturing the emotion of those feelings and that drive, that is unique to video games? Not exactly the same, but i remember reading a story about a guy who had his grandpa play LA noire because it was it was a time capsule for him. He drove sround and pointed out places to his grandson.

Oh this is going to be a million sub channel in no time

It's kind of crazy seeing someone else interested in this incredibly hyper-specific topic. As a kid, I would _always_ do this with racing games. I loved completely ignoring the races and just driving around seeing the environments. Some of the racing games I remember exploring this way were Mario Kart Double Dash, Flatout 2, Lego Drome Racers, GT Legends, Test Drive Off Road 3, Hot Wheels Stunt Track Challenge, and a weird little game called Chicken Hunter: License to Grill (which I doubt anyone else even knows about). As a kid I had a fascination with out-of-bounds areas in games, or the little background details that were never meant to be looked at closely. I guess they gave me a weird dream-like feeling, which today would be called liminality, but at the time I didn't even know what that word meant. Details like that still fascinate me today, but it's kind of hard nowadays to find games with un-polished areas, let alone the ability to go out-of-bounds to see them without 3rd party engines. This was so much more common in early 2000's games which only makes their nostalgic oddness more potent to me today.

The hair clips really elevate the look 👌

great video. I like the little bit about beautiful sunsets as seen from parking lots, the thing I take away from those pictures is just that's where people happen to be when the beauty of the world around them simply happens, since they aren't seeking it out. There's something surreal about the mundanity of our suburban structures being subjected to the majesty of the natural sky every once in a while.

Gerard Butler starred in a movie called Gamer. It was a surreal idea of a world that has always stuck with me because someone on production put a lot of effort into the world building for a rather mediocre forgettable film. In it, the crowd of the action sequences that the convicts kill each other in are criminals who basically pay off lesser crimes by being npcs for the death games. There is an entire throw away scene detailing this. The crowds in racing games always make me think of this. Just people trapped in an existential horror of being an npc glued to an animation sequence for the main protagonist

6:21 I like how you can see tire tracks as if he's had to redo his parking several times lol

This kind of thing has been on my mind, lately, playing Splatoon 3. There's a huge amount of detail on the multiplayer stages that you really don't have time to appreciate during matches. A ton of attention seems to have been put into the design, to allow players to quickly interpret the environment as a bunch of surfaces relevant to painting and traversing them. When I use Recon Mode to just hang out and explore a stage, though, I notice details, decorations, or realize what some part of the level geometry is actually meant to be, that I've been rushing past so many times. Putting that much extra detail that many people won't notice during play seems like a cumbersome, and possibly very counterintuitive thing to prioritize along side of making sure the visual language is so mechanically clear, but it's really impressive how well it works in that game. There's also examples of the lower detail areas you're meant to ignore, but in Splatoon those are usually locations you can't actually reach. In-bounds areas seem to be consistently filled with little artistic embellishments.

You should do a video on games that really hone in on unreasonably realistic aspects of worlds in video games. The powerlines spurred an idea - how many games showed you exactly how things worked, but we were too busy playing to look at? Great vid, okay hair clips

10:10 That's a pallet jack. It makes it easy to lift and move heavy pallets. The prongs go in the bottom of the pallet, and it uses hydraulics to lift it up off the ground, above wheel level.

There are faux advertisements like billboards and posters, meant to give the impression that you're in a public space, where advertisers want to get your attention. Yet, these faux ads in video games are meant to do the opposite.

With all the respect in the world, understanding what you meant and also sharing the idea: I laughed a LOT with the phrase "books have terrible graphics". +10

When you mentioned GTA IV, it made me think about how GTA San Andreas does it. In some places, they really go above and beyond to make things be right, but then other times it looks like they just didn't bother at all. Kind of makes it even more fun to explore, because now it can be rewarding in two different ways.

When I was a kid I did this a lot with Mario Kart Wii. The time trials were great for this. I drove around Moonview Highway on the right side of the road, or I came up with stories with the characters in a dollhouse fashion. With MKWii it becomes super obvious how strangely proportioned everything is to account for the camera perspective, the barriers and buildings up close are too big or too small but are designed to look the best while moving. Very interesting stuff

The guy on break is standing next to a loading jack

reading the unintelligible newspaper stand made me laugh

As a child, my friend and I would play in the Mario Kart Wii racetracks. We wouldn't race and we'd turn off CPUs. We would actually roleplay little stories for characters that worked at Coconut Mall for example. We noticed all these little details and it was always exciting to explore the maps in a new manner

ok laughed too hard when you called a pallet jack a machine

i think i remember recommending "odd and unusual places in midnight club 2"...i'm glad racing games got a video :)

The first game that evoked this feeling for me was Motorcross Madness 2. Despite not actually having a free roam mode, there were no barriers on the race tracks so there was nothing stopping you from exploring the map. For some reason, they included a button that let you cycle the camera between all the AI vehicles. You could forget you're even playing a racing game and just watch the strange facsimile of rural living from the perspective of a bus, a train, a biplane. (Of course, everyone knows this game from the way it launches you back into the map when you go out of bounds, lmao)

One of my best memories as a kid was to try to find secrets in Star Wars Podracer… I literally dragged my podracer against every surface in that game. I found several spots on the Dreamcast version that let you clip through the floor.

Holy shit you blew up. I haven't checked out your channel for a while, but I like seeing what you're up to now and then. We spoke on Patreon sometime 2016, I'm glad you're still around.

Need For Speed Underground 2 has an arch made in memoriam to one of the devs who died

Idk about GTA4 but in Red dead redemption 2 I saw a video this guy followed the power lines from the Saint Denis across to all the settlements with power. Ones without power lines only use oil lamps for lighting

these little areas is what really captivated me in games when i was a kid. i would just run around on empty counterstrike maps, try to get out of map bounds and just find cool places you're not meant to be. my playstyle is a little different now, but im glad you reminded me to look for it again.

I was playing Tears of the Kingdom today. I went toward a shrine from an angle you were surely never meant to do it from. Basically, I scaled a mountain on the shoreline from the shore side and trecked along the remarkably empty mountainside to the shrine. And, as I did this, I thought of Any Austin remarking on the fact that this was a superliminal location that only existed because other locations existed.

Austin you consistently have a way with humanising video games. Especially what you said at the end here, to just go back once you are done, and reclaim the joy of just wonder at what's going on in the game you are playing. It brought me back to my childhood playing fucken Cars Maternational of all things. I'd spend hours just driving into walls, trying to explore and see what random shit was in the shop signs, or to see if the main street was 1-1 for what was in the movie which I'd seen ad nauseum. You are an absolute legend when it comes to humanising Austin, Absolut Legend.

Austin’s finger wave curls have been COOKING I can’t wait to see the results they’re going to be amazing

Really cool premise for a video. Well done man!

Everything about your speaking/presentation style and how you analyze overlooked details in games is incredibly comforting and appealing ☺️ Immaculate vibes

Your channel throws me back to OG 2000s KZfaq in the best possible way. Love the nostalgia and musings, love your humor and thoughtfulness, keep doing whatever doinks your dink. I'm here for it!

This channel is the definition of “videos you watch while you eat”

you always get me thinking about these video game spaces a little differently :) plus you’re a very witty writer-“books have terrible graphics” and “these games are meant to be viewed at 80mph” are very snappy and imaginative and effective things to say

I absolutely love this concept of slowing down and spending time in unintended places in video games. I used to do it constantly in Zelda Twilight Princess as a kid, but yeah, as an adult I never let myself stray from the video game objectives! Awesome video.

I love not driving in driving games. My siblings and i would race backwards a few laps in mario kart and then flip around and see if we could beat the easy computers before they finish their race. Saw a lot of detail that probably wasn't meant to be focused on lol

love your weird holistic approach to completely unimportant sections of games. as a game dev the industry is trying (at the expense of the devs including me...) to move towards the rockstar model where there's detail everywhere all the time that isn't necessary, it's neat occasionally but in honesty it doesn't really make the game better, and these weird pseudospaces you talk about in your videos have their own charm, it's wonderful that you don't just point them out but seem to genuinely enjoy them. thank you for celebrating the unloved parts of games, they are the parts that let us make the loved parts.

When me and my brother were little and playing trackmania (old version on a CD) we discovered we could drive off the course and into the water. In every course there was a background scenery of a few islands/hills and we would travel to one of them, which we called volcano island. It took around 20 minutes of pressing the forward key to drive the way to the island through the water. And when we arrived we would drive around the island for a couple minutes, trying to climb the mountain, before the car ultimately tumbled, landed on it's back or side, and we had to click back to the last checkpoint on the course. 20 minutes from the island. It was always worth it for some reason.

something I started doing in gtav recently was go around looking for any phone number written somewhere in the world. I had to use my in game camera to be able to zoom in far enough to see the numbers in most instances. on billboards, fliers on poles, various company vehicles, posters and pamphlets inside buildings, and sometimes rubbish. there's one billboard advertising a clown and if you call the number it'll say it's no longer in use. that was the only one that was different, as far as I could tell if you called any of these other phone numbers you'd hear one of three responses: 1 it gets picked up and hung up immediately 2 a guy tells you to stop calling/pranking him or 3 what I can only describe as the worst machine noise ever. those and the clown number response are all different than if you just called a completely random number where it would say the line is busy. one detail I didn't notice until I started doing this, was that on the door of a taxi and on the back of the seat visible in first person when you're passenger, the number for the company is there and it works. there's no need for the player to have this information though, cos all three characters already have it in their contacts. but that was what made me start looking at other company vehicles too. I'm still investigating so maybe I'll discover more things idk. if anyone else wanted mess with this, remember the beginning of the number will always be (323) 555-whatever as 323 is apparently the los santos area code and fictional numbers start with 555.

Funnily, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 is the game that made me discover the art of just slowing down, turning off engine sounds/music and exploring the scenery. That game has a lot of unremarkable and interesting places. But what I liked were the spots that emit sounds you usually only hear in passing. One spot in the mediterranean tracks was just an italian mum arguing with about 5 kids over and over

Hey Austin, you prolly wont read or even see this, but I just wanted to let you know that I am currently watching every single video of yours (starting from the oldest) while im on a long trip through South Africa. Please never change and always do what you enjoy doing! (currently at the COD:Ghosts Eggbusters EX episode) I hope its okay btw if I download a couple episodes as I dont always will have internet but I make sure to load the video first so in case of an AD pops up you still get the money for it!

The game does actually expect you to park. There's actually a scoring system for parking your car in burnout paradise, its just not for the lots, only for parking in the street; you should try it out.

I swear to god learning how oversteer works in video games saved my life. Long story short, i was driving my friend's V8 truck on a rainy highway and i started to hydroplane when i accelerated 😅 I managed to correct it, while going at 65 MPH!!! Luckily there were no cars on the left or right of me. I maintain that, because i learned the ins and out of how car physics works through video games (namely, Driver Sanfransisco which i had just played 2 months prior), me and my friend didn't die that day.

Kudos for doubling down on the Indifatiguably.

I will always love the Crew 1 and the details in the environment I constantly would stop to snap pictures in interiors clipping through building with the camera so many little details and cool areas.

Burnout Paradise is probably my favourite game, played it on XBox and now on Switch. I like how the objective of finding all of the yellow gates and billboards forces you to look at the surroundings more, especially when you get to the end and only have a few to hunt for.

This video really is a testament to the whole "video is actually way more interesting than it sounds" concept. It's peak KZfaq really

Great topic! The part about grocery store parking lots having great skies is funny to me bc i worked at a grocery store for a summer and I fucking hated that I’d be stuck inside bagging or pushing carts or whatever while this beautiful sunset was there watching me. It felt mean, like take me with you !!!

Thank you for another phenomenal presentation. I think indefatigably would make a GREAT T-shirt design. P.S. that machine is called a pallet jack. ♡

San Francisco Rush and San Francisco Rush 2049 are among my all time favorite racing games and they were on the N64. It's more than racing, though. You actually unlock some things by exploring the tracks Midway has created and finding keys and coins. Both games even reward you with cool secret areas that you would never see if all you did was stay on the obvious paths and shortcuts and race (meaning you really have to go out of your way to see and collect everything). That also reminds me of the time I made a track in ModNation Racers that wasn't really meant to be raced on, but for a chillout spot (It was a simple loop with an exit leading to the rest of the terrain). I added some secrets and even had a small challenge to "collect" the sheep. I miss that game.

How did this hair clip thing start

Idk how many hours I spent as a bored kid just staring at this exact kinda stuff. Love this channel so hard

need that powerline type video fr

I've been playing vehicle levels in Halo games on foot to see how different it feels and I've noticed so many strange and odd things in my journeys. Like that part in Halo 2 after the tunnel segment when you're supposed to hop in a warthog and drive it to the Scarab boss fight, that big open grassy park like area is bizarre and magnificent and I never noticed in when zooming around in a car, how unsafe and non OSHA compliant all the structures in that area is. I also found two easter eggs I never knew about, a weird alcove with no doors or windows on the side of a building that no human could reach without a ladder as it's like 8 feet up and the only thing in it is a trash can sign, with no trash can. Also a billboard thing with propaganda on in it trying to get people to join the army, as well as one telling people to rise up and fight the aliens who are at that moment invading Earth. That last one is especially funny to me because nobody would bother to stop and read it, they would be running for their lives and some propaganda guy is just sitting in his little office typing crap out when people are dying and getting blasted nearby.

seeing all those hair clips I was half expecting to see you put on more and more as the video went on, like the Scary Movie hat

Love the concept and the more freeform approach. You're engaging, funny and bright. Always enjoy your work. Cheers.

I watched the recent eclipse in a grocery store parking lot in the path of totality. That unremarkable and odd space was glorious.

"Whatever that machine is IDK" bro never worked retail 💀

in games as well as in life my favorite thing to do is explore the map and find the odd nooks and crannies and distant unknowable things. these videos are a delight

This takes me back to the early days of Burnout Paradise, where the community was thriving with ways to go out of bounds, sharing glitches to show you how to get to places that you aren't supposed to be - and there were *A LOT* of them. It's insane how I recognize most of these places because of it.

I love looking at all the little details on Mario Kart tracks. Why are the Toad bystanders three times as large as Donkey Kong?

You are the youtuber with the most clips in their hair! No. 1 youtuber, no other tuber has as many clips in their hair as Austin!! The tuber with the most hair clips per quantifiable unit of content!

I just wanted to say at 5:30 i feel like these are all a more realistic version of what we call liminal spaces nowadays. None of them are spots you would spend much time in, like a grocery store parking lot or a back alley, but they are transitionary spaces you have passed through and that you recognize now. Throw in the mid-2000s looks and you have a liminal space that reminds you of places you have gone and sometimes felt comfort previously. Combine that with the nostalgia of the time and you have a seemingly innocuous space that somehow calls out to you and you just cant put a finger on as to why.

Y'know NFS Porsche Unleashed? When i was a kid, there was something that fascinated me. See in all these games, the map is devoid of humans. It was no different there. Mind you, there was traffic, houses, etc, but no people to speak of. Except one single old guy sitting on a rocking chair on his porch, slowly moving back and forth. It was on one of the rural maps, quite hidden, and in a shortcut. I always stopped there, switched to front bumper car, and just vibe with the old guy, the only resident of an empty world.

this and your last vid have been real bangers. such a specific feeling that you appreciate the way it should lol. have you considered looking at incidental birds in various games?

10:11 That is a pallet jack! It's like a small hand forklift.

One of my favourite sorta Easter Eggs in Forza Motorsport 3 (which I can't describe perfectly right now because I don't have a working XBox 360) is that, if you stop somewhere on the long straight on the Le Mans/Circuit de la Sarthe track and look along a side road in one direction, there's a reasonably well-modelled and fully-branded McDonald's restaurant that's far enough from the track that you'd never see it if you weren't specifically stopping the car and looking around (unlike, say, the McDonald's in the New York Times Square circuit, which is right next to the track and impossible to miss). Another one i like is that, on the Quebec City map in Project Gotham Racing 4, there's a fully-modelled Esso station (they had to change the signage because I guess they didn't have the license but it's quite obviously an Esso).

my brother and i used to do backwards laps on moonview highway from mario kart wii, and he loved intentionally running into the bomb cars over and over. most of the wii tracks you could not do backwards because there were one-way jumps over gaps, but moonview highway was completely flat, and thus the arena for our tomfoolery

Dude getting that JOJO pin in hair drip

I really appreciate that you share a sense of analysis for the logistical facts of these worlds with me. I often find myself playing games and examining my surroundings and wondering just how much or how little thought has been put into the hows and whys of the world I'm inhabiting as I play. I look at the buildings and wonder how goods and services are exchanged and carried out from that building. How feasible is it for any given object to actually enter that building and how is it transported to a given room? is there equipment present that makes such things possible? stuff like that. You add another layer of perspective to my curiosity and that means a lot to me. Thanks man. Keep going. I love your stuff and the way you seem to think.

This brings to mind the quotes from developers of Outer Wilds, specifically in the NoClip making-of documentary. They tried to design the world(s) so that if you see something interesting, there should be something interesting there, and you generally won't find anything hidden in visually-uninteresting areas. (With the exception of things that are explicitly designed to be hidden until discovered via other means.)

I remember playing racing games (both "realistic" like GTA and cartoony like Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing) and it got to the point where we'd just drive around obeying the law. it was a nice change from just running NPCs over and causing damage and trying to find new shortcuts. I highly recommend just driving with traffic in any racing game you have and just taking in the sights.

Da fuq on yo head bro

Trying to imagine how people live in the places you're not supposed to look at for more than 5 seconds max was one of my favorite pass-times as a kid, and I still do this now from time to time. The racing games are always the weirdest and the best.

I LOVE doing this! One of my favourite things I've found is in Assassin's Creed Unity, in the bottom left of the map- far from any mission you'll do- is a little vineyard, and there's a dude going about his day on his farm, and one of his animations is stomping grapes, for like 2 minutes straight. It's absolutely delightful

i always hate when videos have titles like "this is what they wanted you to FORGET..." but ill make an exception for you austin bc like. the title of this video is true. the backgrounds of racing games are MEANT to be ignored, this aint clickbait, its just A Fact

So sick of Austin doing these clickbait trends with no substance like philosophizing about liminal spaces in Burnout from 2008

That thingy in GTA4 is a pallet jack, just meant to be a handheld forklift without needing classes to use

One of my favorite spots in a racing game is the beach near the lighthouse in Forza Horizon 4, I went there on a whim for a decent screenshot of my car and now whenever I play the game I feel compelled to just kinda sit there and listen to the ocean, sometimes even go onto the dock and just park, it’s some of the most peaceful moments I’ve felt in any game

I too love walking slowly in games you're not supposed to. Spiderman is a fun one. A lot of repeat shops, but you'll also find something as small as a squirrel scuttling about! GTA IV is one I really spent over a hundred odd hours walking slowly. You're right that they put so much detail into the world and I wanted to experience it fully and slowly.