Past meets present: R.C. Pro-Am (series)
A look back at Rare's once prolific racer that vanished for decades before reappearing on the Xbox One and Game Pass.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
There was a time for Rare where they weren’t mostly or majority owned by another company. Before they were a second-party developer for Nintendo — which of course also came before Microsoft made them a first-party studio — they were simply heavily backed, financially, by the Big N in order to make NES games. One such game, published by Nintendo but still very much Rare’s property to do with what they pleased, was R.C. Pro-Am. A top-down racing game featuring remote-controlled vehicles driving and drifting around dozens of courses at high speeds, trying to avoid slipping and crashing and exploding.
R.C. Pro-Am was a fairly prolific series in Rare’s pre-second party days: the original released on the NES in 1988, Super R.C. Pro-Am released for the Game Boy — no, not the SNES, despite the “Super” in the title — and then an NES sequel, R.C. Pro-Am II, came out in December of 1992: all three of those titles were published by Nintendo. The first game also received remake in ‘92 for the 16-bit Sega Genesis, this time published by Tradewest. You uh, weren’t spelling “NINTENDO” out with collected letters picked up on the course in this version. But the fact Rare developed a game for the rival Genesis is all the proof you need that the checks they were getting from Nintendo were big, but not big enough to stop this sort of thing from happening.
That would change around the time that Rare developed Donkey Kong Country for the SNES in 1994, with Nintendo going from benefactor to a sizable minority shareholder. There also wouldn’t be anymore R.C. Pro-Am after 1992, either. These events were probably related, to a degree: Rare had plenty of other things to do in The Console Wars, and while R.C. Pro-Am was fun and successful and all of that, it wasn’t a system mover. Donkey Kong Country was the third-best selling SNES game, with its sequel, Diddy’s Kong Quest, finishing sixth. The third entry, despite releasing in November of ‘96 — two months after the North American debut of the Nintendo 64 — ranked 11th. Rare’s 1995 arcade fighting game, Killer Instinct, was 13th. The two Donkey Kong Land games ranked 12th and 22nd in the Game Boy’s library in sales, and the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong Country finished 27th. Super R.C. Pro-Am came in at number 50 with 1.14 million units sold, which was obviously good but not so much so that it was an obvious point for Rare to keep hammering on like Donkey Kong had been.
Coming in at 50 and selling over a million copies of a game is obviously good, but Donkey Kong Land outsold The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Literally a Zelda game, and one of the best ones, too. There’s no contest there when it comes time to focus on what’s next, and when you consider that one million copies of N64 classic Blast Corps was considered a disappointment.
The N64 was trying to remain relevant in the face of the Playstation, on a console that already had loads and loads of high-quality racers — including ones that were somewhat in the vein of R.C. Pro-Am, like Micro Machines 64 Turbo. It’s no wonder that, for Rare’s own racing games on that console, they tried to stand out more with (1) the licensed Disney racer, Mickey’s Speedway USA, that’d theoretically get attention just for existing and (2) a Donkey Kong-adjacent racer, Diddy Kong Racing, rather than dip into the R.C. Pro-Am well once more. There are plenty of situations where “why not both?” could be applicable, but you have to remember that Rare was already spreading itself pretty thin making new and shiny system exclusives again and again for Nintendo’s 64-bit system. And there’s Nintendo having developed the weapons-based Mario Kart series by this time, as well: how many racers where the gimmick involves taking damage and drifting and exploding does one company need to put out when time and developer hours aren’t infinite resources? I kind of get just leaving R.C. Pro-Am behind given that, unfairly or not, it felt a little old at a time when new new new (and reliable cash-cow sequel) was the goal, and Rare hadn’t done much to change up the formula from 1988 through 1992 despite changes in hardware and technology, anyway.
That all being said, we did end up with four R.C. Pro-Am games in a pretty short span of time, and while they vanished from existence for decades— none of these games showed up on the Wii’s Virtual Console, for instance, with Microsoft not ready to contribute to Nintendo’s success in the console space like they were with a Diddy Kong Racing port and original Viva Piñata game on the handheld DS, since that kind of thing allowed for unification against Sony — but thanks to the Xbox One’s Rare Replay collection, the two NES games are playable in the present, and with some quality of life modifications and Achievements included, too. The Xbox One might be last-gen now, but Rare Replay is backwards-compatible on Xbox Series S|X systems, and it’s one of the Microsoft Game Studios’ titles on Game Pass that don’t look like they’re going to go anywhere, given Microsoft’s promise to keep a certain number of their own games on the service always.
Here’s a basic rundown of how R.C. Pro-Am games play. You control a remote-control car, and not a particularly speedy one at first. It doesn’t go slow (except for in the Game Boy edition), but there’s room for upgrades to both the vehicle you’re using and in switching to faster, sleeker vehicles in general, both of which will make you drive much faster and take wilder turns. The B button is for accelerating, the A button for using whatever weapon you have ammunition for, be it mines, missiles, buckshot, whatever. There are a number of tracks in each game, and your goal in R.C. Pro-Am, Super R.C. Pro-Am, and Championship Pro-Am is to eventually earn first place and a gold trophy in each of those courses before running out of continues, while R.C. Pro-Am II adds a point system on top of that. If you come in last (or out of the top three, depending on whether there are four total racers or more in a given race) you’ll fail to qualify for the next race, and lose a continue, of which you have a limited number, while also seeing your score reset back to zero. Run out of continues, and that’s it: you’ve gotta start your racing run all over.
Each game (besides Championship Pro-Am on the Genesis, which really is just a 16-bit version of the original NES game) has its own little wrinkles to consider. In R.C. Pro-Am (and Championship Pro-Am), you find upgrades for your remote-controlled car by driving over them on the track: that’s how you get improved tires that’ll allow for more controlled and impressive turns, a higher top speed, and better acceleration. You can also pick up tiles with letters on them, which will eventually spell Nintendo: spell the entire word, and you get an upgraded car. (In Championship Pro-Am, you instead spell out “CHAMPION.”) You lose your tire, acceleration, and top speed upgrades in the process, but the base of the new vehicle is better than your previous one, so you’ll want to do this in order to keep pace with the opposition — especially since they, too, can upgrade their vehicles over time. On the screen in between races in which you can see your upgrades, you also get a look at how many laps the next race is, as well as the track conditions for it.
The courses are full of obstacles to avoid, like puddles of water that will slow you down, or oil spills that will spin you out — if you crash into a wall or another car during the most violent part of a spin out, you might see your car explode. There are also speed boosts to drive over, moving rain clouds to avoid that will shift where the puddles are sitting on the track, and some turns that’ll make you feel like you’re playing an off-road rally game on occasion. It feels even more like that if you play R.C. Pro-Am using the NES Advantage arcade stick rather than the standard controller, since the joystick allows you some additional maneuverability, like if you were playing Neo Drift Out: New Technology on the Neo Geo.
The games rules work largely the same for Super R.C. Pro-Am on the Game Boy, but your initial vehicle does drive slower, and, given it was difficult to render in a way that clearly distinguished it from a puddle of water, oil isn’t a problem for you like in the NES game. The nifty thing about the (initially) slower vehicles is that the tracks also seem to be a bit wider, which gives you more time and room to experiment with these sweeping, drifting turns versus extremely tight, nearly 360 turns on certain corners, and figuring out how to weasel your way in front of the competition by throwing the car’s body in front of another car in what, relatively speaking, feels like slow motion, too. Races also don’t end the moment the first racer crosses the finish line here: you keep going until you cross the finish line, for better or worse, whereas sometimes you could be saved in R.C. Pro-Am from falling even further behind, or be screwed over because first place crossed the finish line before you yourself could get ahead of the second place car.
R.C. Pro-Am II is the most significant departure for the series, as you no longer pick up non-weapon upgrades on the race track. Instead, there are tons of bags of money to collect, as well as temporary improvements like speed boosts you use by holding down the A button. These are particularly useful for stretches of road where your car is being slowed down by bumps or sand or what have you, and for making the inclines that could be ramps to jump off of, if only you were traveling fast enough, into those very things. While you have boosts queued up, though, you can’t use weapons as easily, since the controls will default to using those boosts, so don’t sit on them for too long. After all, you might need to drop a mine or shoot a missile at the competition.
The buckshot doesn’t temporarily destroy the other racers like those do, but instead causes them to drop money. This still has an excellent use despite the lack of explosions, as you can hinder your opponents’ progress in upgrading their car by stealing their cash, while speeding up your own build. In between races, you get a chance to spend your money on better tires, more advanced weaponry, ammo, a more powerful engine, etc., so if you’re ahead of the game in the money department, you’ll also be ahead when it comes to upgrades, making it even easier for you to continue to earn more money. You pick it up on the course, yes, but you also get cash bonuses for finishing higher in a given race, in addition to the points doled out for finishing in one of the first three slots.
R.C. Pro-Am II was derided for not being different enough from the original, but it feels pretty different to me, from the track design to the upgrade systems to the way you end up with new cars to race. There are fewer courses here, which is a shame, but they’re more varied. Then again, some reviewers didn’t like that one of the changes was that there were now remote-controlled airplanes loaded with bombs or machine guns that could blow you away seemingly at random. This, though, seems like it’s making a bigger deal out of the mechanic than there should be, since these planes don’t show up all that often, and you can also track their movements pretty easily in a way that lets you avoid ever taking damage from them once you’ve picked up on the timing of it all. In fact, ramming opponents to get them caught in explosions or refusing to move over to let them out of the path of a machine gun is pretty funny, once you really get a handle on it.
It’s pretty clear how this series ended up influencing Mario Kart, Super Off-Road, Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing, and others, with its focus on speed, chaos, and weapons, but once those others arrived, Rare put the series away. When Rare Replay arrived in 2015 with R.C. Pro-Am and R.C. Pro-Am II on board, it brought with it some changes like the ability to rewind a short bit whenever you feel like, which is obviously helpful in a game where one wrong turn can have you slam against a wall or drop three spots right before the finish line comes up. It’s not necessary to use the rewind ability, of course, but it’s there if you want to deploy it. And, as always, rewind systems help you learn from your mistakes right after you’re making them: they can help you practice enough that you never need to use them in the future, since you can see a pretty obvious cause and effect chain in motion, again and again, until you’re satisfied enough to move on for real. R.C. Pro-Am is certainly a perfect game for that sort of experimentation and learning.
R.C. Pro-Am managed to go four-for-four in terms of quality outings, though it’s still understandable why the series was left behind and never picked back up again, even after the days of Nintendo fending off Sega and Sony were also left in the past. At least half of the series (or two-thirds, if you want to discount Championship Pro-Am for being a 16-bit remake) hasn’t been lost to history, and it’s entirely possible that Super R.C. Pro-Am shows up on the Game Boy version of Nintendo Switch Online at some point in the future, too. Hey, Microsoft and Nintendo are obviously buddy buddy due to their joint lack of appreciation for Sony’s whole deal, to the point that Microsoft-published games show up on the Switch sometimes and the two worked out complicated licensing issues to both put GoldenEye 007 on their respective modern consoles, so why not revive the one original and missing R.C. Pro-Am game together to complete the set, too?
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