Decorate My BMW M5

This is a dress-up game with a car instead of a person. There is a BMW M5 parked in the middle of the screen, a tray of parts down the side, and nothing whatsoever telling you what to do with them. No timer counts down, no judge scores the result, and no objective screen appears when you finish. You drag pieces onto the car until it looks the way you want, and that is the whole of it.

The Car Underneath

The M5 is BMW's performance version of the 5 Series saloon, and the generation these games usually depict is the E60 — the one built from the mid-2000s, notable for a 5.0-litre V10 engine that was unusual in a four-door road car and derived from BMW's motorsport work at the time. Picking it as the subject was not arbitrary. It was a genuinely fast, genuinely expensive machine wearing the body of an executive saloon, which made it an appealing blank canvas for a genre built on making sensible cars look ridiculous.

Where This Genre Came From

Browser car-tuning toys arrived in a very specific window. Need for Speed: Underground had turned street-tuning culture into a mainstream video game subject in 2003, and MTV's Pimp My Ride was on air through the middle of the decade putting spoilers and screens on donated hatchbacks. Flash portals filled up with cut-down versions of that idea almost immediately, because a customisation screen is by far the cheapest part of a racing game to build — no physics, no track, no AI, just images layered on top of each other.

Calling them games is generous. They are compositing tools with a car-shaped background, and their popularity says something about how much of the appeal of tuning games was always the garage rather than the road.

How the Parts Work

Everything happens with the mouse. You pick a part out of the tray, hold the button, drag it across to the car and let go where you want it to sit. Parts stack on top of one another in the order you place them, which is the only real mechanic in the game and the source of most of the interesting results — a piece dropped later will sit over the top of one placed earlier.

Controls

The catalogue in these toys typically runs to wheels, body kit pieces, spoilers and wings, lights, exhaust tips and a set of decals and paint effects. Nothing enforces realism, so a wing can go on the roof and a set of lights can go anywhere you feel like putting them.

Making Something Worth Looking At

• Do the wheels first. They are the hardest part to align and everything else is easier to fit around them than over them.
• Place large panels before small details. Layering means a body kit dropped on late will cover the trim you carefully positioned underneath.
• Line up on the shadow, not the outline. Matching a part to where the car meets the ground reads as correctly placed even when the perspective is slightly off.
• Work symmetrically where you can. The eye forgives an unrealistic part far more readily than it forgives a lopsided one.

What You Get Out of It

There is no progression here and no reason to pretend otherwise. What it offers is five or ten minutes of unhurried arranging, which is a legitimate thing for a small browser toy to be. The same instinct drives character creators in games people take much more seriously, and those are frequently the part players spend longest with.

It is also a small artefact of an era. The parts on offer, the styling assumptions baked into them and the choice of car all date it precisely to the mid-2000s tuner boom, and there is something worth noticing in a genre that existed purely so people could decorate a vehicle they were never going to drive.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a way to win or a score at the end? No. There is no scoring system, no timer and no judging screen. The game ends when you decide the car looks finished.

Can I remove a part after placing it? Parts are layered as you drop them, so the usual approach is to drag another piece over the top or start again rather than expecting a dedicated undo.

Does this game work with a touchscreen? It is built entirely around click-and-drag, which maps reasonably well to dragging with a finger, though the smaller trim pieces are much easier to position accurately with a mouse.

Is it based on a real BMW? Yes, on the M5 performance version of BMW's 5 Series saloon. The parts and modifications themselves are invented rather than drawn from any real catalogue.

Can I save the car I made? There is no built-in garage or save slot. If you want to keep a design, capture the screen yourself before closing the tab.