25 years of the N64: Ridge Racer 64

Ridge Racer is a multi-console series now, but that wasn't always the case.

On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ridge Racer was, as far as consoles go, a Playstation-exclusive series for some time in the 1990s. There were also arcade-exclusive games in the racing series, but Sony’s initial Playstation system was where you would go if you wanted to play Namco’s racer in the comfort of your own home, and the quality of these games was also such that they and their exclusive nature contributed to the success of the Playstation in general. That is, until Nintendo stepped in late in the life of their own fifth-generation console, the Nintendo 64, to get themselves their own Ridge Racer, which in turn opened up the field a bit in terms of which platforms would see Ridge Racer games on them.

While this Nintendo-led effort was not wholly original, it was something of a combination of previous efforts on the Playstation, as well as some N64-exclusive tracks, all developed from the ground up for the 64. Between tracks from the original Ridge Racer on the Playstation, its console sequel, Ridge Racer Revolution, and those brand new tracks exclusive to the N64 game, Ridge Racer 64 came with 20 in total. That might not sound like a whole lot, really, not in 2021, but you have to remember that this is also back during the same console generation that saw Daytona USA released on the Sega Saturn. That game had three tracks, each one assigned to a different difficulty, and that game still rules despite the relative lack of places to race. Having 20 tracks was a bounty in 2000, even when you recognize that it’s not 20 individual tracks in the game, but more a lengthening and changing of old tracks to make more complicated and longer-running versions of courses you’ve raced earlier on in the game. New twists and turns and obstacles to master and overcome, even if the scenery looks a lot like some you’ve seen before.

And since Ridge Racer is designed in such a way that it’s essentially required that you memorize every one of those twists and turns in order to react to them both accurately and quickly, you won’t mind so much about the whole driving by the same stuff over and over again thing. You have to finish in first place in order to unlock the next track in Ridge Racer 64, and while that’s not particularly difficult to do early on, as you advance, you will absolutely need to master the game’s more intricate systems, like powersliding, in order to continue to advance. Your opponents will powerslide around corners as necessary, and if you don’t follow suit, you simply will not be able to keep or exceed their pace. As later races add even more opportunities to powerslide, that will only become more true.

Before we get too deep into just what Ridge Racer 64 is like, let’s talk a little bit about who made it. Previous Ridge Racer games were wholly Namco properties: this one, however, was published by Nintendo, and developed internally by a Nintendo studio, too. Namco’s name is still all over the game, of course, given Ridge Racer is their series, but it was all licensed out to Nintendo for this one particular title. The developer was not one of Nintendo’s Japanese studios, but instead, their American one: Nintendo Software Technology. NST had just been formed a year prior to the release of Ridge Racer 64, with their first game being Bionic Commando: Elite Forces on the Game Boy Color. For the most part — not entirely, but mostly — Nintendo Software Technology has focused on developing sequels in preexisting series. Bionic Commando, like Ridge Racer, was not a Nintendo franchise, but Nintendo had a chance to make their own Bionic Commando game for one of their own platforms, so they did, utilizing NST to do it.

Nintendo Software Technology is also responsible for Pokémon Puzzle League on the N64, and the extremely divisive Game Boy Color version of classic action RPG, Crystalis. They handled the English localization of Sin & Punishment when it released on the Wii Virtual Console after its years as a Japanese-exclusive N64 game, they developed Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS, and they made quite a few Nintendo DSi games, as well, like Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! and Aura-Aura Climber. You’ll often find them in this kind of role, where it feels like they either pitched a concept based on a preexisting franchise to Nintendo, or were asked to contribute something the Japan-based studios didn’t have the bandwidth for. That’s not to say what they’re doing is secondary, or anything diminishing like that: they just have their role in the Nintendo ecosystem, and this kind of thing, as well as whatever is going on with Mario vs. Donkey Kong at a given time, is that role. They’ve been pretty busy since their inception, with credits on 28 games and seven applications since 1999, and Ridge Racer 64 was the second of those games way back in 2000.

Anyway, on to Ridge Racer 64 itself. There are the 20 tracks, as mentioned, only unlocked as you come in first place in the previous one. There are cars to unlock, too, which you don’t unlock by winning the standard races, but instead, you are given the opportunity to unlock the cars in a one-on-one “Car Attack” race with that car itself: these opportunities are, in turn, unlocked by advancing through the main game, the “Grand Prix” mode. You’ve got a time trial mode, a garage to look at what each of your individual cars has accomplished in terms of their records and trophies earned, and multiplayer, as well.

Multiplayer itself is not a surprise in a racing game from 2000, but one thing the Nintendo 64 version of Ridge Racer had that other versions of Ridge Racer did not is its four-player mode. Being able to play a game with three other friends was always a wonderful selling point for Nintendo 64 titles, and part of what made Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye 007 so memorable for gamers who grew up with them. Ridge Racer 64 might have been late to the party in some ways, but between exclusive tracks, the care put into it to make it run so smoothly despite the speeds involved, and that it could all be played by four people at once, it was still absolutely a party worth being at.

I mentioned the game’s powersliding previously. That’s really the key to figuring out how to advance through the grand prix and to unlock all of the additional cars. It’s even more important, in some ways, than those unlockable cars, since those newer vehicles aren’t going to do much for you if you can’t drive them the right way. The game won’t tell you how to do it: this is the kind of thing you were supposed to read the manual for. So, in 2021, without access to the manual itself despite having an actual physical copy of Ridge Racer 64, I had to look to the internet for assistance. Thankfully, every problem you’ve ever had with an older game has been had by someone on GameFaqs in the past, and was asked and answered. This is also how I learned that it’s much easier to pull off a powerslide if you play Ridge Racer 64 by holding the left and right wings of the N64 controller in order to utilize the D-pad, instead of controlling the car with the middle’s analog stick — you can do either, at any time, without needing to change any settings. Your mileage may vary on that one, but that unexpected tip during my powerslide how-to digging proved valuable in my own experience.

It’s a fast-paced game, especially as you unlock tougher courses and become more adept at powersliding your way through them. Because of how the game is designed and how it feels to play — adrenaline-releasing is one way to put it, given the top speeds and the turns and the powersliding and the opponents that can run you right off of the road — it’s ideal for 15-20 minute bursts, where you attempt to complete a track a few times or complete one then move on to unlock a new car afterward. That’s probably why it ended up released later on as a DS game, modified for that platform: while the DS version doesn’t hold up in comparison to the N64 one for a number of reasons, I totally understand where the idea for putting this game on the DS came from in the first place, since it’s truly perfect, from a design point-of-view, for a pick-up-and-play system like that.

Ridge Racer 64 is also an attractive racing game, one that didn’t have some of the problems with fog that other racers of the time did. Sure, if you slow things down, you’ll notice some issues with details, details any racing game of this particular era of polygons was dealing with, but again: this is a fast-paced game. You don’t really have a lot of time to sit back and admire the scenery like you would in the much slower-paced Mario Kart 64. All of that being said, I was a bit surprised to find out that Ridge Racer 64 is not one of the games supported by the Expansion Pak for improved graphics resolution or framerate: it’s just out of the box a smooth-as-hell, fast-paced experience that, in motion, looks as good as it feels to play.

There might be a few better racers in general on the N64 — we are talking about a system that covered essentially every form of racing game out there, with representation for kart racing in more forms than just Mario’s, Formula 1 racing, futuristic racers, a game dedicated exclusively to Volkswagen Beetles for some reason, motocross racing, snowboarding, and even wave racing — but its Ridge Racer title is likely the best of the many arcade racers on the console. I was playing it just because earlier on this year, and then later on realized that of course it would make sense to write about in this little birthday project, considering it’s still enough fun to play that I was playing it for no reason other than that it’s enjoyable here in 2021.

If you’re an absolute expert at racing games, maybe there isn’t quite enough here for you to go back to. If you’re more like me, though, someone who struggles a bit more to adapt to an arcade-style racer thanks to a history of racing games that is more Mario Kart and F-Zero than anything else, then there is plenty of time to be spent with the 20 tracks that are here. They are not a breeze, but they are a lot of fun to play even when you’re losing, thanks to tight controls and track design that make the whole trying again and again thing a whole lot easier to accept.

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