XP Arcade: RoadBlasters

What if you drove really fast and also gunned down everything in front of you before it could blow you up?

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.

RoadBlasters has a pretty simple concept that you’ll experience again and again across its 50 levels, but simple isn’t a negative. You drive fast, you shoot whatever’s in front of you, and you try not to run out of gas before you reach the end of the road. It’s not a racing game so much as a driving game, but unlike with OutRun, where you dodge everything in your path in the hopes of reaching the end before you run out of time, in RoadBlasters, you blow up whatever is in your way, and do so not just because it’s in your way, but because fuel is your clock, and you can earn more fuel by attacking other cars.

Some cars are attacking you back, while others are just out on the road at the wrong time. Fire at and blow them up from far enough away, and you’ll unleash red orb pickups that’ll increase your main fuel supply when you collect it. Scattered along the tracks at set places, as well, are green orbs which will fill your reserve gas tank. Doing your best to use your reserve tank as little as possible is the key to getting through RoadBlasters’ increasingly busy and complex tracks: if you don’t have to dip into it often, it’ll be full of lots of fuel for you when you do need it, keeping you from having to restart a stage again. Like I said, simple, but mastering it is another story.

RoadBlasters was developed and published by Atari Games, which by this point in 1987 was a separate company from Atari, the console manufacturer. The split occurred in 1984, when Warner Bros. broke up Atari, Inc., held on to the profitable coin-op branch of it while christening it Atari Games, and sold the computer and console assets to Jack Tramiel, who would rename his own company for the much more famous one after the acquisition. There were some barriers put in place to avoid market confusion, like Atari Games always needing to be called such so as to avoid confusion with Tremiel’s version of Atari, and for Atari Games to not utilize the name Atari in any form in the console or personal computer arenas. Which is how subsidiary Tengen ended up forming, so Atari Games did have a place to put home conversions of their coin-op games as well as other projects they had the rights to (or just decided they were going to code and publish, like in the case of their unlicensed conversion of Sega’s Shinobi on the NES) without using the name Atari on those platforms. A clever workaround, up there with Konami forming a shell company, Ultra Games, to get around Nintendo’s limits on how many games one publisher could release in a year for the NES.

Image credit: Arcade Museum

Atari Games would then transfer the coin-op division to a new entity, AT Games, formed out of a partnership between Warner and Namco (with Namco holding the controlling interest), and be referred to as Atari Games Corporation, while the existing Atari Games bits still exclusively under Warner became Atari Holdings. Namco would eventually sell some of their shares to some of Atari Games’ employees, leaving no one in charge of it: per Steve McNeil’s book, "Hey! Listen! A journey through the golden era of video games, Namco retained 40 percent of Atari Games, Warner still had their original 40 percent, and the employees had the remaining 20 percent that Namco had sold.

These splits and future sales are also why folks who don’t know about the difference between these Atari groups all these decades later might wonder why arcade classics like Marble Madness or RoadBlasters weren’t included on compilations like 2022’s Atari 50, the anniversary collection that goes through Atari’s entire history both in the arcade, at home, and in the portable market. The answer is because that Atari isn’t the same one that developed, published and still has the rights to Roadblasters et al. Which becomes all the more confusing when something like RoadBlasters also appeared on systems like the Atari ST and Atari Lynx, which were produced by Atari Corporation, i.e. the one for which Atari 50 was produced.

By “still has the rights,” I mean that the independent-ish Atari Games would end up folded entirely back into Warner after their merger into Time Warner, and then would end up sold to WMS Industries, which controlled the Williams, Bally, and Midway arcade brands. Atari Games was then merged into Midway Games a few years later after Midway was spun off into an independent company for video game productions, before shutting it all down and sticking around mostly as a rightsholder for the rest of the aughts. In 2009, Midway Games declared bankruptcy, and many of their assets were then acquired by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the video game wing of Time Warner that had been introduced years after the corporation had originally exited the market. Meaning Warner had now reacquired what they had sold off years before during that exit. Got all that?

This is all a long way of explaining why RoadBlasters hasn’t had a proper home release since it was included in Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1 for Windows, Xbox, GameCube, and Playstation 2, all the way back in 2003 and 2004. Sure, it exists within an arcade cabinet inside of 2015’s Lego Dimensions — published by Warner Bros. Interactive — but that’s not nearly the same thing. Put RoadBlasters on Arcade Archives or something, because while it released in arcades with a steering wheel and gas pedal, it can certainly be played without those, as its many home conversions can attest.

Let’s get back to RoadBlasters plays. You’re driving around a car that’s as fast as it is red that also has a blaster mounted on it, and that blaster can take out other cars on the road with a single shot. Some cars take more damage than that before blowing up, but you’ll want to have one of the upgrades that are airdropped in before you bother taking them on, lest you fail in your goal and just ram into the back of them, blowing yourself up in the process instead. Those upgrades range from a fast-firing “UZ” cannon to one that fires missiles and stuns/damages everything on screen, but regardless of the what, they’re all limited fire, unlike your primary gun, so use them wisely. Or at least before you crash and lose them that way.

In addition to the cars that either just get in your way or are outright attacking you, you also have to contend with stretches where mines are placed on the road, and turrets that are firing at you from the sides of the highway. An alarm goes off when you approach mines, but they’ll still come up on you very fast, so you have to keep an eye out for just where on the road the stretch of them is laying if you want to avoid blowing up. Taking damage automatically explodes your vehicle in an impressive way, and while you can continue as many times as you’d like after an explosion while picking up right where you left off, it does cost you a bit of fuel to get going again. Slamming on the gas pedal to immediately start gunning for over 200 miles per hour doesn’t come free, you know.

You’ll want to avoid crashes as often as possible just because of how much gas you’ll end up losing this way. There’s a checkpoint in each stage that’ll refill your primary fuel tank to a degree, but the key to getting through the tougher stages is to not have run out of your primary fuel before that checkpoint in the first place. That’ll leave you with more fuel in reserve, which you can dip into for the stretch run before the goal, or to tide you over until you can pick up another red orb to refill your primary tank a bit after it’s been emptied out.

While your reserve tank will refill bit by bit with green orb pickups, the primary way to refill it is by scoring points: after completing a track, your reserve fuel gauge will fill up by an amount that corresponds with how many points you scored in the stage. Scoring points happens just by driving, but also by defeating enemies and other cars, and the key to scoring more points is to keep your multiplier going for as long as possible. You need to be accurate with your shooting to start and keep a multiplier: every connecting shot increases the multiplier by 1x, but every miss drops it back down. There are kind of two ways to go about this, however: if you want to focus on accurate shooting and filling your reserve tank as much as possible after each level ends, then don’t fire wildly and make your shots count in order to increase score. And if you want to not have to worry about accuracy but instead fire at will and hope this results in enough red orbs dropping to keep your primary tank full — meaning you’d rely on your reserve tank less — then you can do that. Both paths are more easily described than taken, though, but that’s why RoadBlasters is a good time.

You can continue as many times as you’d like after failing a stage, up to a point. The first 49 stages just let you try and try again after failing, but the final, 50th stage requires you get it in one go. It’s like Psikyo’s shoot-em-ups, which let you restart from where you died on a continue in all of the stages besides the final one, which will send you back to the beginning when you get a Game Over instead. Except even crueler, since we’re talking about the final of 50 stages here, and you just get the one shot. Basically, you’ll want to make sure your reserve tank is loaded up for track 50.

Luckily you don’t actually have to play all 50 stages in one sitting to get to the end of RoadBlasters. The tracks are lumped into groups for different “worlds,” and when you get to the end of one “world,” you can choose which one you’ll go to next. At the start of the game, you get a similar choice: start at the first stage because hey, it’s the beginning, or start at track four instead and get a 50,000 points bonus, or begin your race on track 11, for a bonus of 200,000 points. You’ll have less fuel in reserve by starting out at a higher level, but you also get to skip a bunch of stages, and bring in a serious points haul, too. And you get these choices again later, as well, not just at the beginning, which lets you decide if you want to race more courses to try to fill that reserve tank up, or just challenge yourself and fly to the end as quickly as possible.

The sting of failure was greater when actually playing in the arcade, since it would mean feeding more quarters into the cabinet, but when playing RoadBlasters on Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1, you just have to try again, free of charge. It’s easier that way, but not easy, since you still have to succeed and all. You just get to keep your quarters. Home conversions could be tougher, since lives were limited, but there were also sometimes options for reducing (or increasing) the general difficulty before starting the game, so as usual with these sorts of things, a balance was introduced to make them more fit for the living room.

Speaking of those conversions, the NES one is certainly playable, but not ideal. This was put together by Tengen, and you don’t need me to tell you that it doesn’t look as good as its arcade counterpart, which ran on the Atari System 2 board. It does look fine here, for the system it’s on, though. Graphics are one thing, but it also doesn’t play or run as smoothly as the arcade version, with more sluggish movement and control, and the need to force you to press up on the D-pad to accelerate to go since there were only so many buttons on an NES controller.

The sound also took a hit, with the hum of the engine not just sounding worse than the arcade’s powerful roar, but quieter, too: it all sounds more “video game” than the arcade version, which isn’t a bad thing in a vacuum, but RoadBlasters makes you feel like you’re driving around a powerful vehicle in the arcades, and achieves that less so with the NES version. Some of the challenge has also been removed, since the midpoints are gone and replaced with your fuel being refilled a bit whenever you crash, which in turn makes the stages feel longer than they’re supposed to be. That plus the more sluggish feel of it all messes with the pacing of what had been a driving game that felt real fast in every way. The performance issues also stand out considering this is the same hardware that ran Square’s arguably too fast Rad Racer three years prior. Granted, there’s more going on in RoadBlasters between the multiple enemies and the shooting from both your car and your foes, but still: you have to nail the driving part of a driving game, and Tengen didn’t manage to do so for the NES conversion.

The Genesis port, released in 1991, feels a lot more like the arcade original. It’s inferior in some regards — graphically, it’s much closer to the Atari System 2 than the NES conversion, but the backgrounds are still a downgrade, as are some of the effects like the explosion — and the car’s engine doesn’t sound as satisfying, but the music and sound effects leaned into the Genesis’ sound, and it works. You have some options here for difficulty and control styles, which is welcome, and the controls managed to convert in a cleverer way than in its NES cousin: you auto-accelerate, so the face buttons can be used for firing your gun and using your special items, without you needing to worry about how trying to turn left might slow you down because you’re supposed to press up to go, or being concerned that it’s too far to stretch to fire your gun with the A button while accelerating with one of the other face buttons. The sluggishness of the NES port is also not here in any way: things look a little worse than with the arcade original, but you’d only know that if you’re familiar with it, and it plays just the same even without the steering wheel and gas pedal.

Gamepad conversions of RoadBlasters certainly work — the one included in Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1 is just fine — but those were for systems with four-button, cross-button setups, not two and three in a horizontal line, as the NES and (slightly angled) Genesis had. So, workarounds like the auto-acceleration one utilized on the Genesis port helped make the game much more comfortable to play than on the NES, never mind that it also looks and feels more accurate to the arcade original, to boot.

It’s a shame that Warner Interactive hasn’t bothered to mine their Midway and Atari Games assets more than they have to this point, as there are some real gems in there: the Midway Arcade Treasures series spanned three whole volumes, with 24 titles on the first volume, 20 on volume 2, and nine on volume 3, which focused on closer-to-modern racing games released in arcades as well as ported to the N64, Playstation, and Dreamcast just a few years prior. RoadBlasters was one of the 24 in Vol. 1, and deserves a chance to shine once more. Put it on Arcade Archives, come up with a collection featuring the not-quite-50-yet Atari Games, do something besides stick it inside of Lego Dimensions so people can have the chance to play this gem in the present as something more than just a bonus goodie in an unrelated title.

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