Remembering Enthusia, The Racing Sim Too Weird For Its Own Good

As a teenager I’d walk into GameStop and make a beeline for the rack of unloved and unwanted PlayStation 2 games, all priced between $1 and $8. That’s not an exaggeration — I have a copy of Tourist Trophy for the PS2 marked $1.79 to prove it. On one particular visit I left with Enthusia Professional Racing, an oddly named sim racer developed and published by Konami primed to cash in on the hype that surrounded Gran Turismo 4 and Forza Motorsport in 2005.

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Unfortunately for Konami, Enthusia released the very same day as the first Forza, which is perhaps why this post was headlined “Remembering Enthusia” rather than “Hey, Don’t We All Love Enthusia?”

Enthusia was a weird game. This is fact, not opinion, and proven by the intro cinematic. Just watch it. Me explaining it will do zero good and if the thumbnail doesn’t pique your curiosity already, nothing will.

Credit: PlayscopeTimeline via YouTube

That’s the least intelligible Enthusia ever gets, but it was also strange in far more mundane, game design-type ways, too. There was no economy to the single-player campaign; rather, you gained one of your rivals’ cars at random after each victory. That would seem like a great way to sample a vast range of vehicles, except Enthusia actively penalized you for switching cars.

An arcane mathematical formula played out after every event, determining the number of “Enthu Points” you’d pull from a win, which would then inform a “Rank” that basically governed your progress through the career mode. Competing in an inferior car to your opponents raised payouts, while crashing in races decreased it. The crashing nanny aspect was exceedingly annoying, particularly to teenage me. It felt at times like the game didn’t want me to have any fun. It just wanted me to be confused.

Endless numbers and bars, literally after every race.Screenshot: Konami

In reality it was just extremely pedantic, even to a level that Gran Turismo still hasn’t quite matched. Case in point: Enthusia remains one of the only games that has ever properly replicated the behavior of automatic transmissions and their torque converters. It was also pretty miserable to drive on a DualShock 2 gamepad, but said to be very satisfying on a wheel. With such a heavy emphasis on mid-corner throttle input, there was absolutely no way the experience on a controller without analog triggers was ever going to play out any better than disastrously. That’s a shame, since the development team was really, really proud of its physics:

Credit: PlayscopeTimeline via YouTube

Enthusia also had some weird cars. To my knowledge, it’s the only game that ever offered a licensed Chevrolet Astro or J100 Toyota Land Cruiser. It’s one of apparently two titles to feature the Cadillac Seville STS, the other being The Grand Tour Game, which I regularly forget ever happened. And it also had some Bring-A-Trailer mainstays that are commonplace in the medium now but used to not be, like the E30 BMW M3 and Fiat 131 Abarth.

Many racing games today prominently include the Nürburgring Nordschleife. But can you name another that gave the Green Hell its own song, perfectly timed to accompany a lap? Didn’t think so.

Some 15 years after I first booted up Enthusia and sat, mouth agape, through its intro film, I still don’t understand it. But it sure as hell was the best $4 I ever spent in a GameStop.