What Happens When Road Rash Meets Kerala Traffic?

Arun Sajeev
6 min read · Sep 28, 2026

Road Rash, but with Kerala roads, private buses, autos, KSRTC and a lot of bad decisions.

Growing up, computer period was the best period of the week. Not because of the lessons.

We would beg the teacher for the last ten minutes so we could play Road Rash. There was usually only one or two computer with the game, so everyone wanted that seat. Someone would be racing. Everyone else would stand around shouting instructions. Then the teacher would come and pull us away because the period was over.

I still remember how fun it felt. You could race, punch another rider, steal a weapons, hit traffic, get chased by the police and somehow still try to finish first.

This is the memory I wanted to bring back.

This started as one more icon on my portfolio

My portfolio, InspiredMonster OS, looks like Windows 95. Projects open like apps and files. Even the case studies sit inside a fake Internet Explorer window.

I wanted to add a small game to the desktop. Nothing serious. Just an icon people could open, play for a minute and move on.

Road Rash felt perfect for it because it was one of the games I remember most from school.

The Original Plan

Make a small Road Rash style game, put it inside the portfolio, have some fun and stop there.

That last part did not happen.

I started on Friday night. By Sunday night, I had a playable game.

I wrote about the portfolio itself earlier here: I Turned My Portfolio Into a Fake Operating System.

The Initial Prompt I gave Claude

This was pretty much the idea I gave Claude.

If you have ridden a bike in Kerala, most of the game design is already there.

A private bus suddenly stops because someone waved from the side of the road. An auto gives one indicator and goes the other way. A cow walks across like everyone else is wasting its time. Dogs sleeping on the roadside and suddenly jumping on to the bike.

That was the version I wanted to build. Not Kerala as a background. Kerala as the game. The real Kerala story 🙂.

The first version looked wrong

I told Claude I wanted Road Rash. The first version came out looking like a 16-bit game.

It was not bad. It was just not the Road Rash I remembered.

I grew up with the 1996 PC version. The riders looked almost like photos. The buildings were painted. The road was grey with white lines. The speedometer and rev counter were always there at the bottom of the screen.

Once I showed the exact reference, everything clicked. That small mistake taught me something useful. "Road Rash" was too vague. "The 1996 PC version of Road Rash" was clear.

I could not just copy the original game

At first I also thought about using the original sprites and audio. That would have been the easy way.

But the original assets belong to EA, so I made everything from scratch instead.

That actually made the project better. If I could not use the old riders, I had to make my own riders. If I could not use the old traffic, I had to make Kerala traffic. The game slowly stopped feeling like a copy and started feeling like its own thing.

Why invent riders when your friends are already perfect characters?

Making it feel like Kerala

This was the part I enjoyed the most.

I kept adding little things that felt familiar:

• KSRTC buses and private buses.
• Autos that sometimes use the wrong indicator.
• Cows, goats, dogs and elephants.
• Kerala Police on Bullets.
• Weapons like a vadi, chain, umbrella, cricket bat and kambi.
• Manglish taunts and Malayalam shouts from the roadside.

Driving on an empty Kochi road was a dream!

The roads also had to feel different. Kochi has the Metro and traffic. Kuttanad has narrow roads and water. Munnar has tea estates. Wayanad has bends, rain and forest.

The career mode got the same treatment. You pick a race at a chaya kada (Tea shop/cafe), buy bikes at Pappan's Workshop. These details did more for the game than any fancy technical feature.

Fun fact: Pappan used to race JCBs on Thamarassery Churam.

Friday night to Sunday night

I built the game with Claude Code. I was not sitting there writing every line myself. I would explain what I wanted, Claude would build it, then I would play it and tell it what felt wrong.

Sometimes my feedback was very clear. Sometimes it was just, "The bike is glitching on corners," or, "Now the buildings are gone!!!!"

Then we would fix that and move to the next problem.

The surprising part was how quickly the game became real. Friday night it was just an idea for my portfolio. By Sunday night I could race, fight other riders and actually play the thing from start to finish.

I got a little too into it

That weekend I was completely hooked.

Every time something worked, I wanted to add one more thing. Then fix one more bug. Then try one more race. Sleep started to feel like something I could deal with later.

Eventually my wife had to drag me to bed. It reminded me of the old computer lab again, when the teacher had to pull us away because our Road Rash time was over.

I still did not fully stop.

I kept the laptop semi-closed and used Claude's remote control from my phone to check the build while I was in bed. So yes, technically I had left the laptop alone.

Mostly.

Happy wife, happy life. 🤌

Getting it working was the easy part

A playable game came together fast. Making it feel good took much longer.

The rivals crashed too much. The bike felt shaky in corners. The first load was slow. Multiplayer bikes could jump around when the connection was bad.

I did not want to fill this case study with every technical fix, because that is not the interesting part.

The important part is that I kept playing the game like a player. If something felt wrong, I went back and fixed it.

• ✅ Rivals stopped crashing all the time.
• ✅ The bike became smoother in corners.
• ✅ The first screen loaded much faster.
• ✅ Multiplayer became stable enough to actually enjoy.

For me, that was the real design work. Not asking AI to build more things, but knowing which things were worth fixing.

What Claude was good at, and what I still had to bring

Claude made it possible to try ideas very quickly. I could ask for something, test it a few minutes later and decide if it worked.

But it did not know what Kerala felt like.

It did not know how a private bus should behave. It did not know why a name like 'Chacko K T' made malayalees laugh. It did not know that an auto using the wrong indicator was something worth putting into a game.

That part came from me. The memories, the jokes, the references and all the small local things.

Claude made the building faster. I still had to decide what the game should be.

Where it ended up

What started as a small portfolio easter egg became a full browser game with five roads, eleven riders, twelve bikes, six weapons, a career mode, a leaderboard, online multiplayer and sound effects to make a malayalee laugh.

But my favourite part is still where it lives.

On InspiredMonster OS, Road Rash: Kerala is just another icon on the desktop. Someone can open my portfolio, double-click it and suddenly end up racing past a KSRTC bus.

Road rash icon on my portfolio desktop

That feels much more like me than another project thumbnail on another portfolio page.

🏍️ Play Road Rash: Kerala: inspiredos.com/roadrash
🌐 Find it inside my portfolio: inspiredos.com

I started with one computer lab memory and one small portfolio idea. Somehow I ended up building the game I wish we had back then.