Remembering Toaplan: Rally Bike

Or Dash Rascal, as it was known in Japan. A top-down bike racer that translates Toaplan's memorizer gameplay systems to a new genre.

Toaplan rose from the ashes of two other short-lived developers, and made a mark on the arcade scene of the 80s and early 90s. They were influential, they were innovative, they made the games they wanted to make, but they couldn’t survive the changing landscape of arcades, and shut down in March of 1994. Still, their influence continued both because of the games they had made and the games the branches of their family tree would go on to make, and Toaplan is now seeing something of a revival in many ways: all of this will be covered throughout the month of March. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Toaplan is best-known for their shooting games and the array of innovations and polish that they brought to the genre, and with good reason: 14 of their 31 games were traditional scrolling shoot ‘em ups, with another two run-and-guns, to boot. The other half of their library, though, was all over the place genre-wise. Platformers, action, puzzle, a fighting game, multiple eroge Mahjong games, and one racing game. That would be Rally Bike, a top-down motorcycle racer that, while not being a shoot ‘em up, still took lessons from Toaplan’s style there, in the sense that it’s very much what you’d call a memorizer.

In a memorizer, repeated plays that allow you to learn and — wait for it — memorize a game’s layout are the key to everything. Your reaction time and reflexes play a part in things, sure, but in order to truly master a game designed like this, it’s going to take playing again and again. Which is not to say that you won’t have any fun before you’ve played a ton, because you will: the idea is to start with a bit of challenge but not so much that a player is scared off from the game, and is instead drawn in by a feeling of success. Then, they feel as if they can make it through that obstacle next time now that they know it’s there — it’s not the game holding them back, it’s their own lack of experience, which can be rectified with another credit.

While racing games are often about reflexes, you do need to remember when to start a turn, the best place to position yourself on the road, when to use a nitro boost, and so on. And back in 1988, when racing games were less complex than they are now, it made even more sense to tone down the reflexes part and crank up the memorization aspects, as Toaplan did with Rally Bike. The result was a game that thrived for a while in Japanese arcades — Game Machine ranked it second in popularity among table games in their ‘88 July 1 issue, behind only Namco’s World Stadium, and it stayed in the top 10 for another couple of months, and the top 25 table games for another six months. While it received ports, the 1990 NES one by Visco wasn’t beloved nor particulaly popular — the X68000 port was closer to the arcade original in both look and gameplay, but as a Japan-exclusive home computer with a small userbase, it’s not like Rally Bike could have racked up huge sales numbers there.

So, it’s a game that’s relatively forgotten about, considering those circumstances, and despite its apparent quality. This was the age of OutRun and Super Hang-on, of Namco’s Final Lap, of pseudo 3D racing that was pushing graphical and gameplay boundaries, and often involved impressive-looking deluxe cabinets. An exceptionally polished top-down racer, even one with top-notch 2D graphical effects and large sprites like Rally Bike’s, was going to have trouble sticking out in the market at this moment in time. It received those ports and no others (though, there were plans to put it on the Mega Drive a la Slap Fight M; those were scrapped), and a lone re-release through Evercade. It will end up more widely re-released in the present at some point courtesy M2’s Toaplan Arcade Garage series, but that’s also either Japan-only or included in boutique international physical releases, so it still won’t really have its deserved moment unless it gets spun out separately on multiple modern platforms like Pipi & Bibi’s or Snow Bros. have.

Still, though, that’s no reason to avoid writing about Rally Bike, which has some intriguing gameplay systems and remains plenty enjoyable 35 years later. You don’t have lives in Rally Bike, and can instead keep driving until you run out of gas even after multiple crashes. In order to advance to the next race — of which there are six, plus a pair of bonus stages — you must reach a certain rank. You start out the first race in 60th place, and must be in the top 30 to advance. In the second race, you’re once again at the back of the pack, but have to finish in the top 25, and so on. You’ll get more bonus points after a race for a better rank, but around the minimum to qualify is just fine if your goal is merely to survive this gauntlet of courses with your score intact. If you fail to qualify, you can continue from the race you were on, it’ll just cost you a credit and your score.

One of the little wrinkles to contend with is that you have a gas gauge, but your opponents do not. So, when you stop to refuel, you can actually see yourself being passed by other racers: they drive by in the background, and then your rank changes. There’s no way to avoid this, because you don’t have enough gas in any stage, not even the first one, to make it to the end without a pit stop, and the refuels are also rather small instead of meant to fill up the whole tank. However, you also drive faster than every other bike on the course, so you can make up for lost time and then some. The key, then, is in figuring out when it makes sense to get gas: you want to do it earlier, if possible, so that there are no interruptions or momentum breakers late in a course when you should be fighting either to ensure qualification or for the highest rank you can and the points that come with it. If you do have time late in a race for gas, though, you will receive bonus points for what’s left in the tank at the end, so there’s a calculation to be made there, as well.

There are some secret ways to improve your standing further, to, such as in the very first stage. If you hit a particular ramp that your bike will jump off of, you’ll land in the back of a flatbed truck transporting some pigs. Instead of controlling your bike for the rest of the race, you now actually control the truck, which also drives faster than the competition, and doesn’t have to worry about little things like crashing into other bikes and then being passed by drivers behind it. No, instead, it just runs them right down. Morbid, yes, but a surefire way to get ahead in a race where apparently this isn’t against the rules.

The action switches to a side view when you refuel: note the biker in the back about to pass by the gas station you’re stopped at.

It’s worth pointing out that if you don’t land in the back of that flatbed, it will spend the rest of the race chasing down racers, anyway: the difference here is that it will also be chasing you in this scenario. I believe this means that there is no blood on your hands, you were merely catching a ride and are as much of a murderer as the pigs sharing the bed of the truck with you. Please ignore that you are in control of the truck once you land in it so that this paragraph works on moral grounds.

As mentioned, you’ll crash if you come into contact with other racers when you’re just driving your motorcyle. This also occurs when you hit obstacles or walls, but the good news is that your opponents aren’t impervious to this like they are to fuel usage. In fact, if you crash at certain points, you can create a little bit of a bottleneck that sees the drivers behind you all colliding into the mess you’ve created, keeping anyone — or at least very few racers — from passing you before you respawn and can get back to it.

Other riders will attempt to force you into collisions by shifting left or right to block your path as you approach. You’ll spend quite a bit of Rally Bike attempting to avoid entanglement, but luckily, if you guess wrong or react too slowly to avoid them at your current speed, you can slow down. There’s a brake button, of course, but more useful is that you can let go of the joystick or pull back on it to slow down, adjusting your speed instead of outright cutting it. This is helpful for avoiding other bikes, but also on tight, late turns, or to try to avoid a crash as you weave between racers and obstacles to pick up a useful item.

The items are a surprise in terms of what they’ll be, but you always know one is coming, as they’re airlifted in by a helicopter. There’s the turbo engine, which briefly speeds you up, and, if a second turbo is picked up, lets you go even faster than that. There are gas cans, which can save you a trip to a gas station, or at least delay one. And there’s the “Helper” pickup, which gives you two other bikes on your flank, and can be used to purposely crash into other racers in order to knock them out and climb the ranks. The Helper bikes survive every crash with another racer, but if they hit a single obstacle, they’re lost until you collect the item again.

The memorization aspects of Rally Bike are obvious once you’ve seen how the courses work. Roads split, are sometimes narrow but mostly empty of other racers, are sometimes wide but loaded with them. Some paths have a giant truck bearing down on you, and slowing down at any point will mean your likely doom. Some ramps lead to helpful pathways, and sometimes they’re the exact wrong think to take if you were in need of gas, because now you’re going to overshoot that gas station that the chime was alerting you to. Sometimes it’s not other racers you need to worry about, but non-racing drivers who are participating in some kind of synchronized car dance parade(?) — there’s a lot to consider, is the point, and it’s only through repeated plays that you’ll be able to consider it all in the way you need to in order to truly succeed at Rally Bike.

It’s a little disappointing that the credits for Rally Bike (like so many other Toaplan games of the era) are so shrouded in secrecy. We know Toaplan made it, sure, and we know that the game’s composer was Osamu Ōta, but that’s about it. Toaplan’s composers weren’t just composers, but also programmers and designers and game directors and producers, so Ōta likely had more to do with the game than “just” creating its oddly laid back soundtrack for a game with a murder truck, but even that’s unclear with the resources on hand. So many of the translated interviews at outlets like Shmuplations focus on Toaplan’s shoot ‘em ups, so more light has been shed on who was responsible for directing or designing those titles, but even then it’s a bit of a black box. Maybe at some point that will change, and we’ll know more about who actually created games like Rally Bike. For now, though, there’s the game, the wait for its eventual re-release on platforms besides Evercade, and the knowledge that it deserved better than it got.

Thank you to @cosmoschtroumpf for compiling Game Machine data used in this feature.

Light edits were made after publication to account for Rally Bike’s re-release on the Evercade platform.

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