Motorbike is the Citizen Kane of gaming.
You play as a racer tasked with completing race tracks. The tracks are often convoluted, inconsistent and in some areas bizarrely designed. Despite these faults, it is obvious there is a creative designer at work. Here we see meaning on some level; this game serves as an allegory for God's relationship with the world. It serves also as an allegory for life - a race track, difficult to navigate, often unpleasant, and at times suffering frame-rate issues. This is life.
These broad strokes - recreating metaphors and allegories that have been explored many times before - are only the beginning, however, as the game continues into a rich examination of other classic ideas.
One such partly involves a social commentary on the 2006 global financial crisis. While the racer (a banker) may be responsible for some failings, it is ultimately the design of the track (the banking system) that incites them. It's pertinent to our times and apposite to the 'system versus individual' debate that is still rife in so many academic disciplines. The game also features levels in a desert, which is probably it saying something about Africa, probably.
The game's sounds and graphics are nuance in approach. Characters appear plastic and environments like bland backdrops to a simple nineties cartoon. Noises are caricatured shrills and shrieks that hold little resemblance to their real-life counterparts. The message is simple: we need to rediscover a time when simplicity and surreality were held above gritty realism and complexity. The point is illustrated beautifully, although not that much so because the graphics are still quite rubbish.
Clearly, Motorbike stands above its fellow games as something more; a work of art, a painting of the human condition, a piece that must be experienced by all.