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The real story

We did not make most of this up

The otters really did stop traffic on Orchard Road. The tank really did hit a traffic light. The border queue really is the busiest on earth. Here is every level, and the true story it came from.

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SG Bumper Cars is a comedy. It is also, almost line for line, a scrapbook of things that actually happened. When we needed a hazard for a level, we did not invent one: we went and found the news story, checked the figure, and built the level around it. That is why the jokes land harder for people who live here. They are not jokes about Singapore. They are Singapore, driven at 150 km/h with a taxi uncle shouting over the top.

Every number below is sourced, and the sources are listed at the bottom of the page. Where a level quotes a figure, it is the real one.

It starts with a real deadline

The whole plot is one drive, in one night, because a Certificate of Entitlement expires at midnight. That is not a fantasy premise. A COE is the licence to own a car in Singapore at all, it lasts exactly ten years, and it is bid for in an open market twice a month.

In the July 2026 bidding, Category A closed at a record S$129,000, beating the S$128,105 record set in October 2025. That is the certificate alone, before the car. So the opening scene, an ordinary driver taking one last drive because the clock is running out on a piece of paper, is just what happens here every day. The player is not fighting a villain in level one. They are fighting an expiry date.

Gameplay in the game's deliberately low-resolution retro style: a two-lane heartland road in daylight, pastel HDB tower blocks along both sides, the player's car centre-lane, and a pixel HUD showing health, boost, speed and score
Level 1, Yishun Heartlands. Two lanes, pastel blocks, and the first PMD swarms of the night.

Chapter 1: the island at night

Fourteen levels, north to south, in the last hour before the certificate expires. The full tour of the night is on the Drive Home page; what follows is the part that actually happened.

Yishun, where the news stories come from

Yishun has a reputation as Singapore's strangest neighbourhood, the local equivalent of the Florida Man headline. Cat killings, mall stabbings, a running joke about building a wall around it. Netflix even shot a Stranger Things promo asking whether Yishun was cursed.

Then CNA's Talking Point actually checked the numbers, and found Yishun ranked 13th out of 28 estates for preventable crime, sitting behind Changi, Geylang, Rochor and Marine Parade. The town is roughly average. What is not average is the feedback loop: once the meme existed, every new incident got written up because it fitted the meme, which made the meme stronger.

So the level's subtitle is not a joke at Yishun's expense. It is the actual finding, which is why it reads "Where the news stories come from" and not "Where the crimes happen".

"Yishun leh. Whatever happens tonight, confirm end up on Stomp tomorrow."

Taxi Uncle, Level 1 commentary

The PMD swarm that will not go away

Personal mobility devices are banned from public footpaths in Singapore, with effect from 5 November 2019, and they were already off the roads before that. The ban was abrupt, it landed hardest on food delivery riders, and it did not make the devices disappear.

In the game the riders swarm anyway, and hitting one costs you 200 points and, the game notes, a lot of paperwork. The level 1 hazard card exists to teach you the mechanic. The joke is that the rule is total and the compliance is not.

Gameplay screenshot of a three-lane expressway under a dusk sky, city blocks on the horizon and an overhead sign gantry spanning the road, drawn in the game's chunky low-resolution style
Level 3, the CTE Jam Escape. The gantry charge is real, and so is the jam at midnight.

ERP, and why the toast keeps popping

Electronic Road Pricing gantries charge you for entering a congested road at a congested time, deducted from a stored-value card in the car. In the game the deduction pops up as a toast at the worst possible moment, usually while you are threading a gap. That is not a gameplay flourish. Anyone who has driven a Singapore expressway at peak hour has had exactly that beep land in exactly that moment.

Chapter 2: the morning after

Seven levels back north, in daylight, against a noon deadline. The full tour of the drive is on the Morning After page; these are the four true stories it is built from.

Sixteen otters, single file, with a police escort

In March 2022 a family of up to 16 smooth-coated otters decided to cross Orchard Road outside the Istana. Istana sentry guards turned the traffic light red and held it for about two minutes. When the otters were still not across, one guard walked into the third lane and put his hand up to stop the traffic himself. A commuter filmed it from the top deck of a bus, it went everywhere, and the Prime Minister posted it.

Level 17 is called Istana Otter Jam and its subtitle is "The family has right of way". That is a description, not a punchline. The game gives them the police escort because they had one.

"Sixteen otters, single file. More discipline than the entire CTE."

Taxi Uncle, Level 17 commentary

PSI 400, when the sky left

Singapore's air quality is reported as a Pollutant Standards Index reading. Above 300 is officially "hazardous", and the government's guidance notes that a reading above 400 sustained over a day may be life-threatening to the ill and the elderly.

The all-time record is a 3-hour PSI of 401, on 21 June 2013, during the transboundary haze from peat and forest fires in Sumatra. The 2015 episode ran above 300 for days and cost an estimated S$1.83 billion over two months.

So the level named PSI 400 is not hyperbole, it is roughly the worst day on record. In the game the haze eats your draw distance until you find an N95 pickup, which is the most literal possible translation of the real experience: you cannot see the lorry, and the lorry cannot see you.

Gameplay screenshot of an expressway under a thick yellow-brown sky, with tower blocks and the traffic ahead fading into haze a short distance away
Level 18. The sun is a rumour and half the drivers are navigating by pure vibes.

The tank that hit a traffic light

Level 19 is subtitled "Tank-ful no one hurt". That is not our pun. It is a real July 2025 headline, written after a Leopard tank clipped a traffic light along North Bridge Road during a National Day Parade preview. MINDEF later said the fault was an isolated incident and the vehicle rejoined the parade after fleet-wide checks.

The wider fact is stranger than the incident: the NDP Mobile Column really does drive 55-tonne main battle tanks along ordinary public roads, in convoy, out into the heartlands, past the void decks. In the game one of them has steering that has, quote, developed a personality. Everything else about the level is just Tuesday.

"Don't race a tank lah. Even if you win, you lose."

Taxi Uncle, Level 19 commentary

The busiest land border on earth

The Johor to Singapore Causeway is a 1.056 km road and rail link built in the 1920s. It now carries around 350,000 travellers a day, which makes it the busiest land border crossing in the world.

Level 20, the Causeway Crawl, is deliberately the densest level in the entire game. It is the one place where the design goal was not "dodge the traffic" but "barely move, and feel every second of it". The player is not even going to Malaysia in that level. They need the Kranji exit, 400 metres and forty-five minutes away.

"The bikes filter through like water. You? You are a fridge."

Taxi Uncle, Level 20 commentary
Gameplay screenshot of a wide multi-lane road on the approach to the Causeway in daylight, traffic strung out ahead under an overhead gantry
Level 20, the Causeway Crawl. The densest traffic in the game, by design.

Chapter 3: the JB Run

Chapter 3 crosses the Causeway into Johor, and it is the chapter where Singaporean players start nodding and Malaysian players start laughing. All of it is procedure, and the procedure is the comedy. The full tour of the drive is on the JB Run page.

The three-quarter tank rule

Under the Customs Act, and in force since 1991, a Singapore-registered vehicle leaving the country by land must have its fuel tank at least three-quarters full. The rule exists to stop drivers filling up on cheaper Malaysian petrol and avoiding Singapore fuel duty. Fall below it and you are turned around at the checkpoint, with fines of up to S$500.

The result is a real ritual at every Woodlands petrol station: drivers filling to exactly three-quarters and not one drop more, because anything above it is money wasted on the expensive side of the border. Level 22 is named after that ritual, and the uncle who pumps $3.85 and checks the needle with a torchlight is drawn from life.

"Below three-quarter at the border, $500 fine. Above, you wasted cheap petrol. Cannot win one."

Taxi Uncle, Level 22 commentary

VEP, and the fine you cannot drive away from

Malaysia's Vehicle Entry Permit has been fully enforced against Singapore-registered cars since 1 July 2025. No valid, activated RFID tag means a compound fine of RM300, and, critically, you are not allowed to leave Malaysia until it is paid. By November 2025, JPJ had issued RM1.39 million in fines to 4,634 Singapore vehicles at the Johor border.

In level 24 a VEP gantry beeps angrily at a tag you do not have, and the game notes the fine is payable before you leave the country, so you are never leaving. Checkmate, gantry.

Gameplay screenshot of a Johor highway at dusk with roadside shoplot signage, the player's car on a pitted road surface
Level 24, EDL Pothole Paradise. Selamat datang. Mind the crater.

Why the prices change to ringgit

Once you cross, every amount in the game switches currency. Pothole rim damage is quoted in RM, the speed-camera summons is in RM, duit kopi is in RM, the banana cake is in RM. This is a rule we hold ourselves to: the money on screen is always the money of the place the scene is set in. Chapters 1 and 2 are Singapore dollars. Chapter 3 is ringgit. Nothing is converted for the player's convenience, because nothing is converted for a real driver's convenience either.

The part that is not a joke

Between runs the game stops being funny for one screen and shows a road safety fact. Those screens are the reason the rest of the game gets to be silly.

149 people killed on Singapore roads in 2025, up 4.9% on 2024 and the highest in ten years.
9,955 people injured in traffic accidents in 2025, up 6.6%.
15% / 55% Motorcycles are about 15% of the vehicle population, but riders and pillions are involved in around 55% of all fatal or injury accidents.
75% of pedestrians killed were elderly, from an age group that is 12.9% of the population. Fatal accidents involving elderly pedestrians more than doubled.

The police called the five-year trend "worrying". That is the sober note the game keeps coming back to, and it is why one of the bonus modes, Tailgate Champion, is built as a trap: it rewards you for riding the bumper in front, then brake-checks you and shows you your own measured reaction delay. It is the only mode in the game designed so that winning teaches you something you did not want to know.

All the road safety figures, sourced

How it is made

There are no image files in this game. Not one. Every car, every building, every road texture, every interface icon and every shareable brag card is drawn in code at runtime: the 3D models are Three.js primitives, the textures are painted onto canvases when the level loads, and the icons are hand-placed 10 by 10 pixel bitmaps. That is why it loads almost instantly and why it looks identical on every device.

The scene renders at 480p or 240p and is upscaled with hard pixels under a CRT scanline overlay. That is the only rendering mode. There is no high resolution path to switch on, because the arcade cabinet look is the point, not a filter over something else.

And the voice is real voice. Over a thousand Singlish lines are baked to audio clips, performed in character, with device text-to-speech only as a fallback. You can hear the whole cast on the cast page.

Sources

Everything above is checked against published reporting and official guidance. If a figure here goes out of date, it is a bug, and you can tell us.

SG Bumper Cars is a work of satire. Naming a real place, landmark or incident is affectionate comment, not a claim of any affiliation with, or endorsement by, any person, brand, company or government agency.