What an odd coincidence! I was just about to start going through the old Hard Truck series (with the plan of continuing through to the SCS Soft games later). I had to rub my eyes and sleep on it after seeing this release announcement in my e-mails last night, to make sure I wasn't just making things up. This is definitely not a game I would've expected to show up here. Freaky!
As such, though, I have a theory on why the first game isn't here. It's almost impossible to get it to run on a modern system. I figured out that the physics model depends on the CPU speed, so on any relatively modern CPU, the game crashes due to calculation overflows almost right away. I had some success in playing for a longer time using CPU slowdown tools, but the experience is less than smooth. The game also trips over newer versions of DirectX, disabling accelerated and fullscreen modes for no reason. I also didn't succeed in fixing that using a wide variety of tools, but that one might be easier to fix for someone with more experience in that kind of thing.
I actually ended up being able to play the game relatively well on my mom's old Asus eeePC with Windows XP. It's slow enough to not crash, and the DirectX version is old enough to allow both fullscreen and 3D-accelerated modes. It's still not the most stable game ever, but it works.
Fun, most recent discovery: the game runs
best on my new computer, in a VirtualBox VM running Debian 9 and Wine32 1.8. No issues at all. And all of those details are important: don't try VMware or Hyper-V, it won't work. Don't try using a Windows guest system, it won't work. Don't try other distributions – on Linux Mint with Wine it was exactly the same as on bare PC: immediate overflow crashes and no fullscreen mode. I suspect it has to do with the newer version of Wine (3.0). Debian 9 still ships Wine 1.8.6 (I think), which can run the game. Later versions of Wine add support for more recent versions of Direct3D, which I assume is the reason why they also added back in the same incompatibilities as Windows. You can probably fix it with some trickery, but I couldn't find out how yet. And don't use Wine64, but Wine32, or you'll have no sound.
But, the first game also used real truck manufacturer names, so a licensing issue is certainly possible as well.
About the game: The "Hard Truck" name was owned by publisher ValuSoft. Ater
Hard Truck and
Hard Truck II developed by SoftLab-NSK, they released sequels
Hard Truck: 18 Wheels of Steel, which I believe was the first published trucking game by SCS (and the reason I'm going through the Hard Truck series in the first place), and
Hard Truck: Apocalypse which you can still get on Steam.
Maybe someone can clear something up for me: In Germany, the first Hard Truck was sold under the title
LKW-Raser (which is the version I have). There was also an
LKW-Raser 2 by the same publisher (Ari Data), but it's
not Hard Truck II. It's a quite horrible arcade racer with terrible physics, that says it was developed by Buka Entertainment. Here's some
gameplay footage. Does anyone know if that game was also released in the U.S., and if so, under which title? I'm not sure what other games it might have been related to.
