What Happened To Anki Overdrive?
A look into the past of the future of slot car racing
What Was Anki?
The robotics startup behind Anki Overdrive1 (unsurprisingly named Anki) began in 2010 and debuted their inaugural product, Anki Drive, at the 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). This game featured robot cars that drove around premade track mats. The cars drove the course automatically thanks to Anki’s AI, but players would get to control the speed and racing groove of their car as well as use weapons to slow down other players. Drive was a massive success, as the WWDC showcase alone brought Anki $50 million in funding.
By 2016, Anki were ready to debut a new toy line. This new robot went by Cozmo and was a lot slower-paced and cuter than their racing robot line. Cozmo had a few different cubes that allow users to play a few simple games through its mobile app, but the real fun came in its emotional responses to different stimuli. 2018 saw the release of Cozmo’s successor, Vector, which accepted voice commands and overall tried to be more functional than the toy-oriented Cozmo.
Cozmo also ended up being a major success, as its “low” price point for the market made it a top seller, but by the time Vector came around, it was clear that Anki as a company wasn’t going to last much longer. Anki folded in April 2019 due to a lack of funding, and all of its product lines were absorbed into Digital Dream Labs (DDL) by December.
What Was Overdrive?
As you can probably tell by now, I left one product line off of my brief history of Anki: Overdrive, which released as a sequel to Drive in September of 2015. Overdrive’s new innovation at launch was modular track pieces that used magnets to connect with one another. Overdrive offered some compatibility with Drive from day one—while Overdrive’s supercars could not be used on Drive track mats, cars from Drive were able to navigate Overdrive’s infinite track layouts and connect with its mobile app.
I find it interesting how little coverage Overdrive seemed to get in any history of the company I was able to find. Lots of them (including Wikipedia at the time of writing) treat the product as a footnote, despite giving detail on both Cozmo and Vector. It’s possible that most viewed the product as “Drive with new tracks” and while that’s true to an extent, I came into this expecting Overdrive to be the company’s runaway success and not a distant fourth place.
What’s In The Box?
Every Anki Overdrive player purchased a Starter Kit for $149.99 containing two Supercars and ten track pieces (four straight and six 90-degree turns), which allowed for eight tracks to be built right away. Like all Anki products, Overdrive came with a free mobile app, where new players would sync the cars to their device and play a tutorial. Accessories such as a charger, tire cleaner, and two risers were also included. In 2017, Anki released a second Starter Kit with branding from the Fast and Furious movie franchise, which will be covered in more detail later.
What’s The Track Like?
With Overdrive kits being modular, buying just a few more track pieces added dozens of new layout possibilities, and Anki were smart enough to release a lot. At the simplest level, the Speed Kit and Corner Kit contained two straight pieces and two 90-degree turn pieces, respectively, and were priced at $20 each. These were as simple as could be, allowing a course to have a long straightaway or a winding set of turns.
For $30, you could get more unique expansions, including the Launch Kit, Collision Kit, and 180 Kit. The Launch Kit is as simple as it sounds—two standard straight pieces are replaced by specially elevated ones, and the cars fly over the hill with great speed. The Collision Kit contains a plus-sign piece that allows for lots of T-bone collisions as cars fly straight through perpendicular parts of the track. Finally, the 180 Kit would have allowed players to build out-and-back courses instead of only closed circuits, but this was scrapped due to programming issues2.
Finally, if you had $10 burning a hole in your pocket, you could purchase one of their more useless accessories. The Rails Kit, Banked Turn Kit, and Elevator Kit gave players plastic they could affix to standard track pieces to keep cars on the track, provide faster turns, or allow more overpasses in track layouts.
The actual track pieces are thin and flexible—it’s very easy to bend it when holding each end of a track piece in each hand, but despite this it’s extremely hard to break one. The magnets easily stay together, and I’ve never had a problem with them breaking apart during gameplay.
What Else Did They Release?
Releasing alongside the Starter Kit were four other Supercars valued at $50 each3. Your options were Nuke (green), Thermo (fast), Guardian (police), or Big Bang (heavy). Naturally, I purchased all of these because I was ten and didn’t have any other place for my disposable income to go. Thermo and Big Bang are more specialized, with the former having incredible speed boosts and the latter dealing lots of AOE damage despite being the slowest. Meanwhile, Nuke and Guardian are more balanced, with Nuke being pretty good and Guardian being pretty bad. Of course, vehicles from Anki Drive could still be used here. In 2017, Nuke would receive a…sequel? I’m not sure what to call it—known as Nuke Phantom, which sported white in place of green and had different stats and weapons. Naturally, I picked this one up too.
On October 3, 2016, Anki released a new line of Overdrive vehicles—Supertrucks. The line debuted with Freewheel and X52, and only one other truck, X52 Ice, ever saw the light of day. Supertrucks drove like slower Supercars, which meant they were incompatible with the Launch Kit, and the game would stop the process of scanning the track if it detected the two being used together.
2017 saw the release of a second Starter Kit, this time centered around the Fast and Furious franchise. This version of the kit included two new Supercars from the franchise, branded at the time as Ice Charger (now Dynamo) and International MXT (now Mammoth). The two Supercars were not sold outside of the Fast and Furious pack and were rebranded once the licensing deal expired. Additionally, each track piece was different cosmetically, and one straight piece was altered to become the Power Zone. It’s very annoying to unlock (yes, its abilities must be unlocked)4, but once unlocked, running over the F&F logo depletes the health of others on the piece.
How Do You Play?
This is where we get to the most complicated part of the article, the section which made me want to write about this in the first place. There are two main versions of the app that have wildly different playstyles and modes. I will be referring to these versions of the game as Overdrive 2.6 and Overdrive 3.4. For those who aren’t familiar with the number line, 2.6 is the earlier version, and there are game-changing differences5 between it and 3.4 I’ll be diving into.
The first of these differences is the screen players are shown during a race. The layout is mostly the same, with both featuring a section on the left to control speed, a section in the middle displaying race progress and health, and a section on the right for weapons, armor, and boost items. In 2.6, the left section of the screen is a slider, but in 3.4, it’s a gas pedal. On the right side, the way items are slotted is different, but the top slot is strictly for weapons6 and the bottom slot is for boosts, tractor beams, and other items that affect driving.
The huge difference on this screen, though, is the health bar. In 2.6, using weapons drains the bar, which is constantly recharging. This leads to a very interesting tradeoff for players—you can fire your weapons or boost along the course all you want, but that makes you more vulnerable to getting hit by other players, and makes deciding when to use your weapon an excellent exercise in strategy and timing. In 3.4, the health bar is distinct, and each slot has its own separate cooldown to prevent players from simply mashing a weapon. While both work just fine, I prefer 2.6 for its tradeoff mechanic, as even with the cooldowns present in 3.4 there’s still a lot more spamming.
There are several different modes of play across the two versions of the app:
Race: It’s a race. No weapons are allowed, so the only way to win is by outlining your competitors.
Battle: There’s no racing element in a Battle, and the goal is to disable other players while the cars navigate the track.
Battle Race: Like in a Race, the winner is the fastest to complete a set number of laps, but disabling other players to slow them down is allowed.
King of the Hill: When the game begins, the first player to disable another will become King, and other players will attempt to become the new King by disabling the previous King (or hoping they fall off the track, in which case the title is up for grabs again.) The first player to spend a certain number of seconds as King wins.
Time Trial: Each player in a Time Trial takes turns completing a set number of laps around the course on their own, and the player with the fastest time wins. Boost items are enabled for this mode.
One Shot: A version of Battle Mode where every car has exactly one weapon, the Golden Sniper, with the ability to disable a car in one shot at the cost of a very long recharge time.
Takeover: A hybrid between Battle and King of the Hill that requires a Supertruck to play. The truck begins the race by driving around unattached to any player, but players can take control by disabling it. Points are scored by disabling others only while in control of the Supertruck, which changes hands when the truck is disabled again.
What’s The Racing Like?
Tragically, it’s not perfect.
The Singleplayer Experience:
Both main versions of Anki Overdrive have a singleplayer offering that can loosely be described as a “story mode”. The Campaign mode in 3.4 has 9 commanders, each of which have three difficulties (Bronze, Silver, and Gold.) Each difficulty has its own set of three objectives, and to 100% complete the campaign, all 81 must be completed. The first objective for a given commander is simply to defeat them in a certain mode, and the other two objectives are almost always “win with X car on Y track in under Z seconds.” The only other variation is requiring a certain type of weapon to be used. Because the campaign can only assume that players own a Starter Kit, there are only two possible cars and eight possible tracks, which makes the trophies get stale quick. I also don’t like how this discourages expansions, but I know I’m in the minority with how much I own.
While it’s possible I’m blinded by nostalgia, I find the single-player mode in 2.6 (then named Tournament) to be better than its newer counterpart. This is mostly due to its less repetitive nature and its efforts to provide a bit of worldbuilding. I had extremely low expectations for a story from a game like this, but 2.6 meets them. The first match is against a robot Commander that doubles as a tutorial. After that, the Overdrive Tournament begins. The game has a play-by-play and a color commentator providing analysis on the tournament as players move along, which is played during the track scanning each time. Additionally, each Commander has a couple lines of dialogue, and none are reused for multiple stages. The modern campaign lacks almost all of those features. There is dialogue, but it’s randomly played during the races without any connection to events. (2.6 had something similar, but there were special lines that played at match point in a Battle, for example.) The changes to the singleplayer mode take a lightly themed tournament and turns it into a list of things to do, and that’s hard to get invested in unless the racing itself is super interesting.
I would also like to note that in some versions of the game, buying the Fast and Furious Edition would give you access to a different campaign, but I believe the only meaningful difference is in the Commanders they crafted.
The most annoying part about playing by myself, though, was having to fetch the cars when they went off track. The most frequent issue is players going full throttle and flying off turns, which isn’t a big deal to me. The game would be even worse if every car could run flat out on every track, and players will learn quickly why they shouldn’t. The actual problem is all the other ways the race can go haywire—Supertrucks plowing through cars or using their unbalanced abilities to send them off-track, the chaos caused by the Collision Kit and Launch Kit expansions, and failure with the hardware themselves, just to name a few. (Hardware failures will get their own section later on, because what I experienced was catastrophic.) I know that Overdrive is trying to push itself as “the future of slot car racing” or whatever, and I’m sure slot cars fly off the track too, but slot cars don’t require the same input as the Supercars. If I’m playing against CPUs and one of their vehicles goes off track, I have to either awkwardly control the game with my left hand while scrambling to guide the errant car, or my car has to parade around at its slowest speed while I lose time to everyone else.
The Multiplayer Experience:
This is the type of game that’s more fun with friends, and when all that’s required is a mobile device and an Internet connection, it’s very easy to get a few rounds going (or at least it was in its heyday.) While multiplayer isn’t feasible now, I definitely have enough data to speak on the experience.
First is the process of setting up a room. Everyone would need to connect to the same WiFi network and update their Overdrive app to the same version. This does lead to some slowdowns at the start of sessions (ditto for those installing the game for the first time) but it’s pretty quick. After that, one player would create a room while the others joined the waiting room, and the host would manually have to add each player. Once the cars and race mode are selected, the race proceeds the same as any other. I found the experience of setting up a room to be tolerable. The host having to add everyone manually led to some hiccups, but nothing that wasn’t solved pretty quickly.
The issue of cars falling off track is mitigated when playing with friends. Everyone becomes responsible for their own car, and while it still leads to slowdowns, it’s a lot less frustrating when those slowdowns are never for other cars. On the other hand, the short battery life becomes even more of a killjoy when playing in multiplayer. The time spent recharging means the wait time to play is essentially doubled. Imagine a large group of six or eight people all waiting around for their turn with the two cars, and every two races everyone has to sit around and twiddle their thumbs for five minute. I don’t think Anki mind, though, since the solution to this problem is to buy more cars.
Did You Run Into Any Other Problems?
Absolutely. Both software and hardware issues plagued my experience.
My first main concern is with the app experience, which forced all three experiences to be single-player. When I played with my brother, I couldn’t sideload or redownload the game on his iPhone, but my puny first-gen iPad Mini still had it. To my surprise, I was able to limp it along to the point where we could form a multiplayer lobby on my iPhone. I was able to select a car, but my brother did not get such a luxury, and after several minutes of loading on that screen, we decided we’d take turns on my phone. I would later learn that due to server hosting issues Digital Dream Labs have been experiencing (which will be covered in greater detail later on), this was the best we could do.
Even after that, some of my Supercars had trouble connecting when being called upon by CPUs, which forced us to reload the app and pick a different CPU to end up with a different vehicle. It wasn’t much better with my friend Eli, as even though the APK file was somewhat easy to find for his Android, the sideloading process was too involved for our apathetic minds. While my phone worked fine on my own, some of the connection issues were still prevalent.
The main hardware failures came from the state of my busted Supercars. Eli didn’t have his at the ready for his session, so any recollection of how these used to perform will be from distant memories (and italicized). During my first session, my brother and I first had to recharge everything, as the cars had been sitting in storage for months unplugged. The cars all charged fine, but I’d like to point out the abysmal battery life. Anki advertised around 20 minutes of playtime on an 8-minute charge, and even out of the box, both of those numbers were wrong—20 minutes is more like 15 and 8 minutes is more like 5. That’s not really a failure, though, more so a limitation. The tires are the actual problem. I own 7 cars and 1 truck, and maybe three vehicles drove properly, two of which have significantly less wear. Anki has a tire cleaner packaged with every Starter Kit, and it cleans the dust and small debris pretty well, but eventually the axles give out. A couple of my cars had trouble turning due to their wear, and others couldn’t even drive straight. Instead, they rotated around themselves in one direction until I disconnected them from the game. There are definitely more problems, such as how easily the Elevator Kit pieces break, but players can’t even get to experiencing those problems if the cars don’t work.
What’s Next For The IP?
As I mentioned way back at the start, Anki was acquired by Digital Dream Labs in 2019, and they had plenty of promises for the future of Overdrive as well as Cozmo and Vector. In the short term, their focus was on issuing repairs to the thousands of Supercars that had gone haywire by that point. Specifically, DDL planned to offer replacement tire kits and batteries for purchase. While some of these may have shipped, it’s definitely not something they still offer. DDL’s main focus was on a brand-new piece of the franchise: InfiniDrive.
I wouldn’t describe InfiniDrive as a sequel to Overdrive in the same way that Overdrive is to Drive. There aren’t any brand-new track pieces or cars, at least for now. The main goal was to upgrade Overdrive vehicles to the point where charging them is no longer necessary, hence the “infini-” prefix. The planned expansion pieces were clips attached to Overdrive cars and coils attached to track pieces, which allowed the cars to be charged while the races took place. DDL also promised new kits and vehicles that had the wireless charging technology built right in.
Unfortunately for us, what DDL has done instead is nothing. InfiniDrive products were supposed to ship at the end of 2021, but it’s 2024 and they seem to have no plans of doing anything. In August 2023, the company announced there would be maintenance to its servers, which has not been restored at the time of publishing. So far, the only thing they’ve released is Overdrive 2.6, which is a rerelease of the original Version 2.6 for $2.99. Since the servers are down, only single-player is supported, and since the campaign requires a second player to advance past one of the early Commanders, it’s impossible to progress. There are zero indications that InfiniDrive will ever release unless the company is bought out and the IP ends up in different hands.
Should I Play This?
The short answer is no. It’s a lot of squeeze for a little juice.
My full thoughts are a bit more complicated. This game is gimmicky, first and foremost. That isn’t always negative—the Wii Remote could be considered a “gimmick” and I’ve spent thousands of hours using that—but I’m not sure if Overdrive sticks the same way. Once the novelty of the technology wears off, it’s a pretty simple racing game. However, its novelty is the very thing that makes me want to recommend it to others. If you know a friend or family member who bought Overdrive, or find a cheap Starter Kit on eBay, I’d push you to do so.
Nowadays, though, the experience of playing is such a hassle that I can’t genuinely recommend anyone go through it. I already expanded on the many issues that could arise, such as the cars no longer driving in a straight line or the app no longer allowing for multiplayer. While some issues with hardware are inevitable over this length of time, it disappoints me how much the software gets in the way. Between 2.6 and 3.4, there’s a very deep game in there somewhere that will keep a huge fan of the racing occupied for a while. Unfortunately, I don’t see Digital Dream Labs doing anything more than letting the IP die with a bunch of wasted potential.
I believe this is supposed to be stylized as “anki OVERDRIVE”, but I refuse.
Now that I’ve explained what each piece does, I desperately need to point out how all three are being used incorrectly in this official render.
Upon purchasing the Launch Kit, players are instructed to construct track designs that have at least one straight piece before the first Launch Kit piece. This was mostly to allow cars to accelerate enough to reliably make the launch, and several layouts are achievable with only the Launch Kit and Starter Kit at your disposal. While this was a soft rule (there were hard rules about Launch Kit track design that would force players to reconstruct), I find it funny they chose to ignore that guidance in their own render.
While the Collision Kit use is not technically incorrect, the chosen layout makes them redundant, and using straight pieces would be functionally the same. (In fact, using the Collision Kit in this way technically removes functionality, as it cannot be used with the Rails Kit like a straight piece.) This isn’t its fault, though—the track is just designed in a way that a complete loop happens without using both sides of either kit.
Speaking of the loop, however, the 180 Kit exists in its own completely separate universe, not connected to the loop whatsoever. Not only is it inaccessible, any player that somehow got on it* would be stuck in purgatory, looping back and forth between the yellow and blue pieces until someone else wins. While the reason I found for this kit not releasing was the difficulty in programming, I secretly think it’s because nobody knew how to build tracks using them.
*I tried to think of other ways for cars to get on there and I’m lost. Due to the, uh, collisions produced by the Collision Kit, players will sometimes be bumped into a 90-degree turn instead of going straight, which will lead to them losing or gaining time depending on where they are in the lap. Usually, these are T-bone collisions, and so I initially ruled that out as a possibility to access the purgatory section of the track.
However, I realized it might technically be possible to end up turned 90 degrees from a parallel collision. A mechanic not yet discussed is that cars can be “disabled” by other players, which for our purposes means they stop in place for a short period of time. I think it’s feasible that a fast-moving car could hit a slow car and turn it left or right to the point where it would take the other Collision Kit path. Maybe it’s just my sense of humor, but I think a player getting stuck like that in that extremely rare case would be really funny. The problem, though, is that the mapping software would either not map the purgatory section because the complete loop does not pass through it (and cars that get turned would be guided back onto the loop), or it would realize there are two useless Collision Kits and stop the mapping. While I could draw up a mapping strategy where the cars identify there are Collision Kits used like straight pieces, finish mapping the complete loop, and drive back to the site of the Collision Kit to see what’s on the side outside the loop (which could be nothing and send cars onto the floor), that’s both a ridiculous way to do it and inconsistent with the way Collision Kits are mapped in the real game.
This made me curious how much all the parts in the Starter Kit would be if bought separately. By my math, the two Supercars come to $100, the ten track pieces come to another $100, and the charger adds another $30. Even without valuing the tire cleaner and the two elevators included, you’re getting around $75 in value.
To unlock the abilities of the Power Zone, players must beat (or re-beat) a specific Bronze Commander in Campaign Mode. For the standard Overdrive app, it’s Cam, the third in the campaign. Once it’s unlocked, its use can be unleashed in any game mode. If you’re still craving more Power Zone info, head over to this DDL support page.
These restrictions do not always apply to Supertrucks, but the weapons still lie on the right side of the screen. The trucks have a special ability called Rage Mode, which pops up in the center of the screen when activated. Supertruck drivers will need to build up their Rage Meter by doing damage to other cars. The Rage abilities vary by truck but all of them are overpowered.