GRANDMA TURISMO

How street racer SZROT became a celebration of Eastern European cultures

- Jeremy Peel

For Hjalte Tagmose and Gustaw Mackay, the frustration started with mislabelled food in The Witcher. “The pierogi is called a dumpling,” says Tagmose. “It’s like calling sushi a rice sandwich,” adds Mackay. Now, these two Polonophiles are determined to counter the Americanisation of games by creating, in their words “the least American game possible”.

The result is Szrot. “It’s a Polish word,” says Mackay. “You have to know how to do the rolling, trilling R. It can mean junkyard, or it can also just refer to an old, beat-up car.”

That’s fitting, since Szrot is a driving game about steering jalopies around post-Soviet cities. One in which even the countdown to a race is written in Croatian and translated in subtitles – as if in the opening credits of a foreign language film. It’s reflective of the Danish developers’ fondness for Eastern European cinema, which began with the cult Russian neo-noir Brat, before extending to more esoteric movies from Poland.

The idiosyncrasies don’t end there. The masterstroke was to render