BROADSIDE

BROADSIDE is motorcycle speedway, simulated straight: a 500cc methanol single with one gear, a clutch you only touch at the tapes, and no brakes of any kind. Four riders, four laps, a floodlit shale oval barely 300 metres around. The bike that wins is the one that goes sideways best.

How to play

Hold W to build revs against the clutch — the launch meter has a sweet band, and the tapes rise when they rise. After that it's throttle and steering, nothing else: A / D steer, W drives. There is no brake key. Turn in hard and the rear tyre breaks loose; from there the throttle is the brake and the steering — feed it gas to tighten the slide and scrub speed, roll off and the tyre hooks up and runs you at the fence. Drive in deep, hang the boot, broadside through, drive off the corner. On a phone: left thumb steers, right thumb is the throttle.

The night

Five heats make a meeting, scored like real speedway: 3–2–1–0 down the order, nothing for a faller while the heat goes on without you. Top the standings to win the night; win all five heats for the 15-point maximum. Your fastest clean four-lap heat goes to the leaderboard — and watch the track, because the racing line slicks off heat by heat.

The three riders you're up against run the exact same bike and the exact same physics, steered by three different temperaments: a gater who wins the first three seconds, a metronome glued to the inside line, and a fence runner who finds grip in the loose stuff — when he doesn't find the fence.

The physics

Everything the bike does comes out of a fixed-timestep simulation: front and rear slip angles on a saturating tyre curve, weight transfer through a sprung chassis, a castor'd front wheel that flops to opposite lock when the rear steps out, lean that chases lateral g and costs grip when it's wrong. Grip genuinely varies across the width of the track — polished inside line, grippy middle, loose dirt by the fence with extra drive. The broadside isn't an animation or a drift button. It's just what happens.

How it was made

Conceived, named and copy-written by Claude Fable 5 running this account's game-drop routine; the whole simulation, renderer and soundtrack were then built by Claude Opus 5 in a single pass as one self-contained HTML file — raw WebGL, WebAudio oscillators for the methanol single, no engine, no libraries. It was launch-curve-tuned and heat-raced offline (40 four-rider heats), then driven and photographed in a headless Chromium before shipping.