To put it simply, arcade racing is “happy place” gaming at its absolute finest. It can’t be that hard to find a racing experience that feeds your particular fix, can it? So, why arcade racing, anyway? After all, despite the current racing landscape not being entirely all-encompassing, it does still cater to a broad variety of gaming tastes. Yes, 2006 was the last truly exceptional year for arcade racing.
OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast (PC, PS2, Xbox, PSP / 2006) I’d like to take a moment here to call some attention to the very best of them.īefore I start with that, though, for those of you who have yet to take a deep dive into arcade racing, recently or perhaps ever, here’s a short list of the very best Big Four experiences to be had today:ĭaytona USA: Championship Circuit Edition (Saturn / 1997) With Horizon Chase Turbo and Hotshot Racing as the only signs of life, when you don’t extend the definition to include action racers, arcade racing is by no means “alive and well.” Ridge Racers 2 may be the GOAT, but there’s so much more to experience in arcade racing…Įmulation and the widespread demise of region-locking are opening many doors, however, and if you’re willing to look beyond our shores and/or the current generation of hardware (or in some cases, simply beyond the advertised product), there are a lot of true gems out there for you to discover.
Most other efforts at revitalizing the genre have either died on the vine like indie hopeful turned cautionary tale Drift Stage, or have otherwise gone into radio silence for so long that vaporware rumors can’t help but start up, as is the case with Nicalis’ ‘ 90s Super GT, leaving fans with little hope for a resurgence. The problem comes when you realize that even those four franchises have not been seen outside of the odd port or spinoff since 2017 (but only in arcades), 2008, 2006, and 2012 respectively. Since the early 1990s, genuine arcade racing has been dominated by a clear “Big Four”: Sega’s Daytona USA, Sega Rally Championship, and OutRun, and Namco’s Ridge Racer. That is to say, because action racing games still sell reasonably well and get released at a fairly regular pace, and because the majority of the gaming public hasn’t consciously recognized the difference between action and arcade racing, there’s a widespread perception that arcade racing is doing well, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fans of the arcade racing genre have been a long-neglected lot, thanks to an overall lack of output from genre pillars Sega and Namco, as well as some blurring of genre lines with the proliferation of “action racers” – or rather, your typical Need For Speed or The Crew fare, with still very exaggerated handling but an overarching design far too cumbersome to fit into an arcade-style format (and often some mechanical aspects that tend to further separate them from arcade racers).
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