This was my experience when I made Speed Haste, a 3D racing game back in 95. I spent a few nights banging my head against my car physics code, and being frustrated and tired, I switched to tuning camera code to clear my head. Voila! Car physics and handling felt completely different. As you say, audio was huge too, even back in these primitive and (by today's standards) cartoony times.
I've used this anecdote when teaching gamedev students, to hammer in their heads that games are complex because they're the sum of their parts + the sum of all the interactions between all the parts.
(for the historically inclined, code for the game is available at https://github.com/TheJare/SpeedHasteSrc)
Fascinating since we evolved with no cars or engine noise yet our brain is still making correlations around the audio inputs.
Good memories and a fun game, you also had that flight game, but I don't remember the name.
Can confirm. I was physics lead on a console driving game, and we discovered to our surprise that the camera is a critical piece of making sure the physics actually feels like physics, and that it’s quite difficult to get the camera right. The camera can make real physics feel sluggish, cartoony, or just wrong, and a great camera can make fake physics feel real. We humans are pretty sensitive to subtle motions.
Making physics feel right is also about lots of other cues too though (cues which aren’t here in this game). Sound and effects and even sometimes tactile feedback are also needed to complete the illusion. Sometimes real physics is surprisingly sluggish, and we don’t notice how slowly momentum changes until we take away the sounds and bumps and dust and skid marks.