[A-Z Games] O: OutRun

Racing games are all about the feel and what works better than sun, Sega blue skies^[1], a soft top, a bright red Ferrari and one of the most evocative soundtracks ever made?

OutRun was just outrageously cool and seemed to capture the joys of driving so beloved of advertising executives around the world. In my mind, I don't think there is a car more associated with the 80s than the Ferrari Testarossa and then with the blonde beauty on the arm - OutRun may have created that cliché for all I knew.

Racing games in 2D were not quite the same as racing games are now, being much simpler in terms of how you could control the car with a lack of real racing lines and suchlike. They compensated with creating an interesting world to drive through which Sega chose to showcase with a point to point branching structure. At the end of each stage (lasting about a minute) you could decide to take the left or right route in order to continue. Your decision was rewarded with a markedly different stage to keep it fresh. OutRun was about racing, for time, across the levels and so a lot of the challenge was overtaking non-competitors on the public roads that you were racing. Yu Suzuki (who may be the most important person in the development of Sega and coin-ops) does not describe it as a racing game, but as a driving game as it really is a thrilling drive rather than a race. With no competition, it is a time trial of sorts across a mixture of European themed landscapes.

Although there were plenty of versions and spin offs, it was only decades later that a sequel came to the arcades with the imaginatively titled OutRun 2.

This kept a lot of the same essence of OutRun but added a lot of modernity into the mix with 3D graphics and, more importantly, 3D gameplay. The intervening years brought a lot of change and Sega had become true masters of the arcade racing genre with games such as Scud Race, Initial-D and Crazy Taxi. These features were expertly added into the game along with a lot of love and attention to detail. Slipstreaming was now used so that you did not just avoid the other cars, you used them to your advantage - and received Crazy Taxi style points for overtaking close to other cars. The major addition, and the most important part of any arcade racer, was the new drift mechanic. Drifting in games (particularly from Ridge Racer) had transformed the approach of games and gamers to driving with high speed drifting seen as the way to show skill, get an adrenaline buzz and still have a varied environment for the background. Outrun retained the (as default) outside view for the car and so you could see the drift angles and it was a simple lift off the accelerator initiation so it was still impossibly cool. Games that can do that for the lamest of people - make players feel superhuman for even just a moment - get the point. A little like this PlayStation advert.

3 other O titles that might be interesting:
Okami, Beautiful collection of Japanese myths made into the most lush of adventures.
Omega Boost, A shooting game by driving game company behind Gran Turismo.
Operation Wolf - Light gun game that seemed to spawn a genre.

^{1. A great phrase that really does sum up a beautiful day. It also makes me think of Namco skies which are closer to dawn or dusk - though that may be mainly Ridge Racer Type 4.↩}