I'm not going to try and go into statistics, but if you were a gamer in the '80s, '90s, and even the 2000s, the chances of a racing game being one of your first-ever gaming experiences are pretty high. If not, there's still every likelihood that a racing game made its way into your heart and has stayed there forever. Some racing games have genuinely withstood the test of time, and one of the biggest reasons why some of these titles live on forever in our memories? The cars they let us drive.

There have been thousands of cars that games have offered us over the years, but some have become so iconic that they're burned into our brains. The exhaust note, the way they handle, the way they look, and the way they made us feel, ultimately becoming an extension of our own identities as gamers — that's what made these cars in gaming so incredibly iconic.

Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak – Gran Turismo

This was well before hypercars, million-dollar track toys, and futuristic concept cars became the norm for racing games. In Gran Turismo 2, the untamed monster that was the Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak was everything a young gamer wanted. It was pure, unhinged velocity, with a huge spoiler and a gigantic front splitter that could've scooped up lesser rally cars whenever it wanted.

This was a car that could even climb walls at the right speed, with a 981-horsepower beating heart that roared through our CRT-attached speakers all the way back before the turn of the century. An incredibly iconic car for any Gran Turismo players, the Escudo made a comeback in Gran Turismo 6, and stayed for good in the latest and greatest in sim racing on the PlayStation 5, GT 7.

FZR 2000 – Need For Speed II SE

The quintessential futuristic hypercar

"And the bonus car wins!" Those are the words a lot of us have grown up hearing while playing Need for Speed II SE on the PlayStation or on Windows. Well before NFS became all about underground racing or cop chases, it was about racing down some of the prettiest tracks in exotic locations all around the world, and the second NFS game did that incredibly well.

The ultimate prize in that game was the FZR 2000, a fictional hypercar that pushed the boundaries of imagination well before Gran Turismo started their VGT series. The FZR 2000 simply didn't like seeing rear bumpers, so it always stayed ahead of the pack, even at the highest difficulty. It was definitely a bit of a cheat code in the game, but in its exclusive bright-red livery, it's magnetic downforce that made handling a breeze, and its screaming engine, there was simply nothing else like it. Decades later, it's still the go-to car for anyone who boots up this fantastic game from late '90s.

McLaren P1 – Forza Horizon 2

A British masterpiece on Italian roads

Any great gaming franchise worth its salt has really found its footing with its sequel, and that is especially true for the Forza Horizon series and FH2. The game's gorgeous European setting felt incredibly fresh at the time, and with it, the McLaren P1 enthralled our minds and eyes when it came to our screens. When it came to the roads of Southern Europe, with tracks in France and Italy, the McLaren P1 looked born for it. In every race, the McLaren P1 looked like the showstopper, and the way sunlight bounced off it made it feel like this car itself heralded next-gen graphics on the Xbox One.

Even on an older-gen Xbox 360, driving the McLaren P1 felt like a dream (but it still stood out like a brand-new supercar parked under a rickety old shed). The P1 was the Horizon franchise's coming-of-age moment, and when it came to the lighting and texture work on the Xbox One? This was a game-and-car pair that told us that racing games could be works of art.

Brian O'Conner's Toyota Supra MK4 – The Fast and the Furious '06

The game owed us a 10-second car

The bright-orange Toyota Supra MK4 from The Fast and the Furious is one of the most iconic cars ever, across gaming and film media, and for good reason. This was the car that was behind kicking off an entire generation of underground car culture in gaming, and even today, it'd be tough to find any single video game that doesn't have a community-made livery of this exact car to pay homage to the once-great movie franchise and the late Paul Walker.

Driving the Supra in the 2006 Fast and the Furious game on the PS2, which, many still consider the only good Fast and Furious game ever made, felt downright surreal to kids at the time, myself included. The neon lights, the nitrous, the bright-orange livery and the green stripes? Still as iconic, almost 25 years later. Now, I could've included the Forza Horizon 2 Fast and Furious DLC for this bit, but there was just an immensely unique and unparalleled charm to the 2006 PS2 game.

Lamborghini Centenario – Forza Horizon 3

The most wicked game to play

I sincerely believe that Forza Horizon 3 has one of the greatest video game trailers of all time, with Wicked Game playing while revealing itself to be the first game ever to feature the Lamborghini Centenario. In hindsight, no other car could have captured the energy, the freedom, and the adrenaline of Forza Horizon 3 and the Australian Outback like the Centenario. It was exotic, it was angular, and it was completely ridiculous — the perfect poster car for a game set in Australia's vast playground.

There was something euphoric about driving the Lambo Centenario across beaches, through rainforests, and down the Australian highways at 300 km/h while EDM (the music of choice during those years) played at full blast. Behind that carbon fiber body was pure escapism.

Warthog – the Halo franchise

It's called a Puma in some other universe

How could any discussion about gaming's most iconic vehicles be complete without Halo's Warthog? It's the most chaotic, beloved, and completely nonsensical off-roader in all of gaming. Every Halo fan knows the sheer joy (and terror) of driving this tank-like buggy off a cliff while your AI gunner yells something that gets lost in the wind, and that's what we all associate it with — unhinged chaos from days we wish would come back.

The Warthog's physics made no sense, and we loved it for it. You could flip it over ten times, and it somehow landed perfectly upright every damn time. In the co-op campaigns, having a Warthog meant everything. A symbol of camaraderie and absurd fun, it's impossible to look at any image of a Warthog and not have the One Final Effort soundtrack play in your head immediately.

Pegassi Infernus – Grand Theft Auto

The head-turner in any GTA game

The It-car of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the Pegassi Infernus was the car to have in every GTA game. This was the kind of car that would make you drop everything you were doing, whether you were on a mission or were being chased by the police, just to chase and steal it for yourself every time you saw it on the road. Fast, flashy, and dangerous, the Infernus has been in every GTA game since GTA III (except GTA Advance), and for good reason. It's still one of the fastest cars in the franchise, as long as you keep things vanilla without modding the heck out of the game.

Eerily similar to a Lamborghini Countach, the Infernus was Rockstar's own supercar, and if you say you don't remember the first time you ever stole one and what GTA game it was in the series, you'd be lying.

Sweet Tooth's Truck – Twisted Metal

Do we all scream for eye-scream?

Sweet Tooth was one psychotic clown who could give any kid nightmares, and his flame-topped ice cream truck was just as iconic as his appearance, and the game he featured in — Twisted Metal. One of the pioneers of vehicular combat, Twisted Metal also gave us Sweet Tooth's ice cream truck, a vehicle that pretty much distilled everything wrong and right about car combat games into one deranged pink four-wheeler.

Sweet Tooth's truck was an agent of mayhem, whether you were driving it yourself or seeing it hurtling at you head-on at full speed. That menacing grin on the truck's flaming clown is an image all '90s gamers remember, and everywhere it went, chaos followed.

Ferrari Testarossa – Sega Outrun

A car-and-passenger pair we all wanted

Thanks to Miami Vice, the Ferrari Testarossa was one of the most popular Ferraris in pop culture, and it was also the hero car in Sega's OutRun from 1986. At the center of Sega's sun-soaked fantasy was the Testarossa Spider, which, almost 40 years later, is still one of the most iconic vehicles ever digitized. That open-top red convertible, with the blue skies, a girl in the passenger seat, and the wind in her hair with the endless horizon ahead? That was gaming's original driving dream, and it became invariably tied to the Prancing Horse.

The Testarossa embodied escapism in the best way, making things less about competition and more about the fantasy of freedom, travel, and style. Every pixel of that car screamed luxury, and it led to countless bedrooms being adorned with posters of this beautiful Maranello-made masterpiece.

BMW M3 GTR – NFS Most Wanted '05

The mythic machine in a fabled franchise

This is it. The 'hero car' of an entire generation of gamers growing up. The absolute golden age for the Need for Speed franchise was with the Undercover games in '03 and '04 respectively, but in 2005, they pivoted to a cops-and-racers theme with a complete story-backed campaign that made NFS Most Wanted one of the best racing games of all time. The central car in it? A blue-and-silver striped BMW M3 GTR. This car was the soul of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and today, it has achieved mythic status. This was the car you came to Rockport City in. It gets sabotaged and stolen from you, and used by Razer Callahan to climb up the city's street racer blacklist while you remain at the bottom, trying to climb up.

The sheer joy of reclaiming this beautiful, siren-sounding Beemer at the end of the game is unparalleled, and I truly wish the proper Most Wanted sequel wasn't canceled, even though Criterion's soft reboot in 2012 was admirable. Over the years, the NFS franchise hasn't shied away from showcasing this M3 GTR in other games, down to the appearance of the original '05 car itself in NFS Unbound's DLC, where Razer reclaims the car after getting out of jail.