XP Arcade: OutRun
Out Run? OutRun? Either is fine, the game rules regardless.
This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
The most important thing to know about Sega’s 1986 arcade hit OutRun is that it rules. It ruled in 1986, and it still rules today, in what will be 37 years later this fall. The concept seems so very simple — drive fast to avoid running out of time so you can keep driving — but again, this was 37 years ago. Things that seem commonplace now, like the speed of OutRun, its surprising attention to realistic details, the way its checkpoint system incentivized improvement so you could make it all the way to the end and get the highest score, the entire idea of sitting down in an arcade cabinet meant to simulate a car… none of that was the norm for racing games back in ‘86. It’s no surprise, then, that OutRun is one of the most influential games in the genre, but that it’s also still a blast to play all this time later is a nifty bonus.
Yu Suzuki was not just the designer and creator of OutRun, but also the person responsible for most of the development work on it. That’s because Sega, despite the success of Suzuki’s previous ambitious arcade projects like Hang-On and Space Harrier, didn’t provide Suzuki with a dedicated team: instead, a handful of developers who weren’t in the middle of working on other projects would help out. OutRun would be finished in 10 months, and included far more work than just programming, sound, and so on: Suzuki toured Europe in a BMW 520 for two weeks to find inspiration for level design and the game’s visuals, and the team also did extensive work replicating the Ferrari Testarossa for in-game use after Suzuki saw one during his trip.
According to an interview with Retro Gamer:
On returning to Japan, Yu Suzuki and his team set out to conduct further research. Suzuki had already explored the potential for OutRun’s scenery and environment throughout his European rent-a-car expedition; his team’s next objective was to learn more about the Testarossa, but this was fraught with problems, as Suzuki relates: “Only a tiny number of Testarossas had been brought into Japan, so we had some trouble finding an owner to help us with collecting car data. Eventually, five of us squeezed into a small car and drove for three hours to see a [privately owned] Testarossa. We took photos of it from every side, at five-degree intervals, and we also recorded the sound of the engine.”
That interview also explains how Suzuki and his team wanted to make OutRun’s driving compare as much as possible to real driving, with a focus on simulating torque and drift, among other features, in a way that other driving games of the time did not. Obviously, these sorts of things (and more) are considered in more modern racing and driving game development, but someone had to be first. Given that OutRun ended up being the most successful arcade cabinet of the second half of 1986 despite a fall release, as well as the highest-grossing in 1987 with notable rankings throughout the rest of the decade, it’s no wonder the rest of the game development world took note of its ideas and started to integrate and iterate. OutRun being Sega’s most successful cabinet of the entire decade, the one they sold the most units of, was no accident.
OutRun builds on the ideas of Suzuki’s earlier arcade hit, Hang-On, to a degree. It’s also a game that uses the sprite-scaling Super Scaler 3D technology, but not the same board: Suzuki started fresh-ish, building the Sega OutRun arcade board, which was based on Sega’s System 16. This sprite-scaling gave the illusion of 3D, with sprites shrinking or growing depending on what was needed to make it appear as if there was movement and depth in the background, in much the same way Nintendo’s Mode 7 capabilities on the SNES did half-a-decade later. But what Sega’s arcade cabinets were able to process could all be going much faster than what the SNES could handle. F-Zero is fast, sure, but it’s also not nearly as busy as something like OutRun or Space Harrier, which are also plenty speedy in every way. That the boards could be customized to a particular designer’s needs is part of the difference compared to what 16-bit consoles could handle: Suzuki wasn’t held back by whatever went into the Genesis, for instance, since he could build a new board based off of existing technology, only with the additional tweaks he needed to make it all work. The Super Scaler board that powered Hang-On and Space Harrier wasn’t enough to make OutRun work the way Suzuki wanted, so, enter the Sega OutRun board.
Like in Hang-On, points accrue the longer you drive, and the faster you get to the end of the course, the more bonus points you’ll receive. While Hang-On had just the one extremely long course — something its tremendous sequel, Super Hang-On, modified by coming up with a number of courses of varying lengths — OutRun went in a completely different direction. You would come to intersections after completing a segment of the course, and be given the chance to go right or left. This would then send you down a branching pathway with some regional differences and distinct visuals, as well as a completely different course design in terms of straightaways and turns. A single play of OutRun, from start to finish, isn’t notably lengthy, but these forks in the road and the branching pathways they lead you to mean there is a whole lot of driving to do that you can’t on a single playthrough. There are five different finish points, each with their own distinct ending animation — people celebrating your drive, your Testarossa breaking down, etc. — and 25 variations on how to get to these endpoints.
And it ended up being a system that moved out of this particular genre, too, influencing game development outside of racing and driving: Taito, in particular, fell in love with the idea, using it in their shoot-em-up series, Darius, as well as in Night Striker, a Super Scaler arcade game that is very much like Space Harrier, if Space Harrier occurred in a sci-fi future with flying cars and attack helicopters and robot dragons instead of in the Fantasy Zone.
All of these various paths are going to test your reaction time and driving ability a bit differently, too, and not just because they were designed to be distinct in their layouts. Your car sits very low on the road, which means your view of the horizon is often obscured: turns, traffic you need to navigate around, potential hazards on the side of the road, all of these can be hidden from view just long enough for you to be punished for poor reaction time and decision-making. It’s all part of what makes OutRun sing, though, since it’s not a racing game so much as it’s a driving game, where the only thing you’re really racing against is the clock. Without other competitors to worry about, your own times, score, and potential obstacles like 18-wheelers that aren’t going 180 miles per hour become the obstacles to overcome.
OutRun just feels excellent to play, even in its original home conversion form. OutRun on the Genesis doesn’t suffer from the kind of slow gameplay as Super Hang-On’s conversion from arcades to console, as everything still feels fast and like it reacts to your button presses and direction changes in real-time instead of with apparent sluggishness. The downgrade in the OutRun proceedings on the Genesis has more to do with the visuals: generally, everything looks worse than it did in the arcade version of the game from five years prior, but there is also just less going on in the backgrounds, too. It’s not as interesting to look at, in a way that makes Suzuki’s tour of Europe seem like wasted effort. In this context, anyway: that tour and the ideas generated from it created all kinds of visual intrigue in the high-powered arcade edition of the game that hit first.
Speaking of that specific version of the game, it came in four different cabinet styles. Each of them had a steering wheel, accelerator and gas pedals, as well as a stick shift for transitioning from Low to High gear, or vice versa. There were additional features (or a lack of them) in the cabinets otherwise, though, with a pair of uprights and two sit down cabinets, one of which, the Deluxe model, had you sitting in a Testarossa lookalike:
The more standard edition of the OutRun sit-down cabinet lacked some of the visual features, like those back tires, but it still featured the front end of the Testarossa with the monitor tucked away inside of the windshield. The upright cabinet looks a little funny these days, since driving and racing games are basically uniformly sit-down units that catch the eye, but Arcade 1Up created both a sit-down (non-deluxe) mini cabinet and an upright one in the last few years if you want a similar experience without the cost of the real thing. In a semi-related story, I’m in a one-sided feud with the local Round1 for having OutRun cabinets strewn about, unplugged, in one area of the arcade. Let me play your OutRun cabinets, you monster. I don’t have room in my basement, not justification, for an Arcade 1Up unit, so plug the real thing in and let me give you my money.
OutRun’s soundtrack, composed by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, is famous for a number of reasons: one is that it’s spectacular, another is that being able to select which song you’re listening to on a radio ended up being a thing other driving games emulated down the line, and third is that an entire genre of music is now nicknamed “outrun” because of Kawaguchi’s work and the popularity of the game. One of the many names of “synthwave” is “outrun,” and it’s not a coincidence. Kavinsky, a French musician whose focus is on the sounds of the 80s, named his debut album “OutRun,” which also was not a coincidence. The only conclusion to take from this sort of thing is that Joanna Newsom is a big fan of the exploits of Adol Christin. Please ignore whatever she says about the origins of Ys in interviews; we know the truth, and its power is in video game music.
OutRun is real easy to find these days. As said, you can purchase an Arcade 1Up 3/4 replica of the upright or standard sit-down cabinets, and given that it was such a massive hit for so long with so many units sold, you can still find the original cabinets hanging around arcades (and if someone would plug them in, you could even play them). You don’t have to leave your house to get the game, though: the Genesis port is available on the Sega Genesis Mini 2, while superior conversions of the arcade game with plenty of modern touches exist on the Nintendo 3DS with 3D OutRun, and on the Switch with its Sega Ages releases that built on M2’s 3DS port.
Like with the Super Hang-On 3DS port, this is just such a fantastic way to play the super scaler classic. You’ve got options and customizations aplenty, unlockables like options for cars, difficulty, a New or Old version of OutRun, how much time you have to drive… it’s like a little arcade cabinet in your pocket. You can only grab that until the end of March 2023, however, but at least if you have a Switch you can grab a similar experience for $8 there. And those Sega Ages games are on sale pretty regularly, too, if you can show some patience and just pick up a bunch of them in one go down the road. Regardless of the where, though, OutRun is still tremendous. The sense of speed is still there, the design decisions that went into making it both a relaxing ride and one you needed to display skill and quick reactions in order to make it to the end still hold up, and the fact that it’s got those branching pathways means you can have a bunch of differing runs in a row without getting tired of what you’re doing. A true classic, and one that Sega has thankfully kept around throughout the years to be enjoyed by fans new and old.
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