I’m a child of the ’80s, so if you give me a neon-soaked art style in a video game I’m going to gobble it up. So when I skimmed the forum thread for an upcoming game called Rad Trails, I was taken with its neon colors and wireframe art style. Rad Trails is actually the passion project of Swedish developer Daniel Grönlund, and it’s been in the works for over a year. The mission statement, if you will, for Rad Trails is: “Rad Trails is my vision of how a physics based dirt bike game should look, feel, and work like on a touch screen. It’s a celebration of the simplicity of early video games merged with a more modern, colorful design language. I’m particularly interested in capturing elements of simplicity that is usually found in older video and computer games. I want to steer clear of many of the tropes associated with modern mobile games, including cluttered interfaces, product pushing and for-profit user manipulation. Instead of spending time implementing those kinds of features, I’ve focused on making an awesome game that’s just fun to play." Hear, hear, Daniel! Here are some gifs showing Rad Trails in action.

So, Grönlund knew what type of game space he wanted to explore, and figured out how he wanted it to look and feel, but now Rad Trails is at the point that it needs to find its “fun factor" and that’s where you can come in. Head over to the game’s forum thread to find a link to sign up for beta testing and help shape Rad Trails into the totally rad motocross game that it wants to be. And if you’re particularly interested in the game development side of things, I actually found this awesome post while poking around the game’s official site which gives a brief history of the game’s development and shows off all its incarnations. It’s fascinating to see a game go through so many changes and eventually find itself, and boy has Rad Trails been through some changes! At any rate, we love the look of this one so we’ll be keeping an eye on Rad Trails progress as development continues and be sure to sign up if you’re interested in taking this one for an early spin.