XP Arcade: Super Hang-on
XP Arcade: Super Hang-on
Does anyone want to get me a Super Hang-on arcade cabinet and also a place to put it?
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.
I was born in 1986, while arcades were on the rise once again. I was also raised in a town where arcades had not and would not exist — my experience with arcade games in my youth was in bowling alleys, laundromats, pizza places, but until the occasional Chuck E. Cheese trip (and later, Dave & Buster’s) I never really stepped into a room that was mostly arcade machines until I was an adult — now I have a local barcade with an extensive collection of cabinets new and old, as well as pinball tables, and there’s a Round1 nearby, too, so newer machines aren’t hard to find, either.
This is all a way to say that I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a Super Hang-on arcade machine — OutRun(s), yes, but not Sega’s second entry in the series that allowed the OutRun concept to emerge in the first place. So what am I doing writing about the arcade game, then? Luckily, time and advances in technology mean that the original arcade version of Super Hang-on has been converted and updated for other formats, in a way that’s vastly superior to, say, the original 1989 conversion of the classic for the Sega Genesis. So while I would very much love to sit down on a Super Hang-on machine, at least the technology exists where a smooth, replicable-enough experience can be had on a platform that doesn’t require luck or $3,000 and more space than I have in my home for the pleasure.
Super Hang-on is the sequel to Hang-on, which itself debuted in arcades in 1985. The designer was Yu Suzuki, and is really a landmark title for a number of reasons. It was an early 16-bit arcade game, for one, and utilized the Super Scaler board, which was created for the game and then later was the home of the famed on-rails shooter, Space Harrier, also designed by Suzuki. These Super Scaler games gave the illusion of 3D spaces and movement, in much the same way Nintendo’s Mode 7 capabilities on the SNES did — the tech itself was sprite-scaling, meaning, sprites that could be resized, larger or smaller, to make it look as if they were heading into the foreground or background of what was actually a flat, 2D plane. It was pseudo 3D, a massive achievement for the time period, developed half-a-decade before the Super Famicom hit shelves in Japan and brought similar technology into homes.
Both Hang-on and Space Harrier were developed for expensive arcade cabinets, as they weren’t just machines you stood in front of. One of the two versions of Hang-on had a mini motorcycle that you sat on, with a throttle, brakes, and movement on-screen via your own body movements. Tilt the bike left, you turn left, tilt it right, you turn right, pull back on the throttle to speed up, etc. This might be a normal thing you see now, with not just motorcycle racing games, but sit-down driver’s seats for car racers, snowboards, skis, and even outside of racers you have something like a Jurassic Park game where you’re in a “jeep” that can fit multiple “passengers” while you try to avoid death by dinosaur. But in 1985, this was all new: it was an experiment, and a wildly successful one that helped guide Sega’s arcade business for years. Space Harrier’s massive and incredibly expensive cockpit cabinet probably doesn’t exist without Suzuki’s and Hang-on’s phenomenal success, and if you step into a modern arcade with modern games, well, they’re stuffed full of similarly huge cabinets that are aiming for an immersive or simulated experience like Suzuki managed with his own early, and now legendary, work.
Super Hang-on wasn’t as successful as the original — Hang-on was the highest-grossing arcade game in the United States in 1985 and in both the United States and Japan in 1986, as measured by the now-defunct Play Meter. Part of that is because Suzuki’s OutRun debuted in arcades in the fall of ‘86 and, as it featured cars and expanded gameplay that included branching paths, was even more popular, but Super Hang-on had a run of a couple years near the top of the arcade charts — it was no slouch, and with good reason. The sequel added even more to the experience, with four different tracks to choose from instead of just the one long one, and the ability to boost your bike’s speed beyond its maximum capabilities once you hit 280 km/h: it’s harder to control your bike when it’s going 324 km/h, but if you want to achieve the top scores or even make it to the next checkpoint, mastering riding and turning at that speed is vital.
Each of the four new stages were designed like that of the original Hang-on, in that they were broken up into segments — stages. The difference here is that the four were meant to represent different difficulty levels: it’s easier to complete the beginner track (located in Africa) because it has just six stages, while the expert track in Europe has 18 stages. Like with Hang-on (and OutRun), you have a limited amount of time to make it to the next stage of the race, and when you do make it to those checkpoints, you receive additional time to ride on to the next one. Managing to keep enough time stored away to make it to the next checkpoint is easier to do over six stages than 18 just because there are fewer of them, never mind that more is expected of you as a racer in terms of quality of turns, in avoiding the other bikes on the road, in making sure you don’t crash into obstacles too often early to keep from paying for that late, and so on. Being able to sneak in bursts of 324 km/h riding means you’re putting away extra seconds you might need later when the roads require braking more regularly to avoid going off-road and into a billboard, never mind that even being able to choose to go 324 km/h means you were already cruising at a standard top speed of 280 instead of going slower than that, losing precious time in the process — all of this adds up much more over the course of 10, 14, and 18 stages than it does over six.
How each track races is also a little different, in ways that similarly add up. Asia, the second-easiest course, gets its difficulty from its need for constant, lengthy turns and changes of direction. Racing in America features far more straightaways than Asia, but the other racers are both more numerous and much more aggressive in trying to bump you off — you might be able to go in a straight line more often than in Asia’s race, but if you get knocked off course and into obstacles on the side of the road more often, you’re going to lose whatever extra time you pocketed by using your top speed boost. Crash too many times in a stage, and you might not even make it to the next checkpoint in time to add additional time to the meter, regardless of how fast you were going while you were going. And, if you’re aiming for a place on the high score leaderboards, simply getting to the finish isn’t enough: you get a massive score multiplier at the end of each track, multiplied by the number of seconds you still had left. So just making it across with a couple of seconds to spare won’t cut it, when having 12, 15, 20 seconds extra or whatever means a final bonus that’s possibly even larger than whatever you scored during your entire race.
If you’ve played OutRun, you’re likely aware of how scoring works in Super Hang-on: each bit of distance you travel gives you more points, which means that as long as you’re moving, you have a running, increasing tally going. There’s nothing else to it: if you’re on the road and racing, you’re scoring, which means scoring is tied into simply being able to play. Don’t crash, and you’re scoring, and if you’re not crashing, you’re likely hitting those checkpoints, too, meaning you have more opportunity to score coming to you.
It’s simple, and addicting, too, because it’s so easy to see how you can score more. You don’t need to dodge hundreds of incoming bullets or figure out combo attacks or whatever you might need to do in other arcade genres: you just need to avoid crashing or stopping or going too slow, and the points will come, and they’ll come fast. Become a better racer, and you’ll be able to persist in each track longer, and receive larger bonuses at the end of them.
The soundtrack was composed by the team of Katsuhiro Hayashi and Koichi Namiki — Hayashi had also worked on the Master System conversion of Hang-on, while Namiki’s first-ever composition assignment in video games came in the arcade version of Super Hang-on. Like with Hiroshi Kawaguchi’s original Hang-on soundtrack, the focus here is on rock music. The music drives you forward, with the drums doing a whole lot of that heavy lifting, and what else do you need for a racing game than some music that makes you want to drive fast? Like with OutRun, you can choose which of the game’s four tracks you want to listen to while you race — they aren’t assigned to specific courses, so if you have a favorite and always want to roll with that, you can.
I’m something of a late comer to Super Hang-on, despite my praise of how fantastically it still plays even now, 35 years after its initial release. Part of that is because, for the longest time, my exposure to Super Hang-on was solely through its port to the Genesis. It’s a decent port, all things considered, but I didn’t come to that port when it first released in 1989, the year the Genesis launched in North America, but many years later, instead. It wasn’t nearly as impressive, because, unlike the high frame-rate smoothness of the arcade version, you could see and feel all of the gears turning to make the Genesis conversion work. Your bike and its turning are more sluggish, the background images and sprite-scaling not nearly as seamless as in the arcade edition of the game — it feels slow, in a way the arcade version simply does not. There were definitely reasons to play it in 1989, if you had no other option or reference points, but it’s a tougher sell in 2022 than the arcade game it was built from.
What the Genesis port does have going for it is an Original Mode that gives it a completely new spin on the Hang-on concept: rather than just racing for a high score, this is a career mode of sorts, with you starting out with a very slow, not-at-all-fun-to-drive motorcycle. You have a rival to best, your bike needs to survive without breaking in a crash, and you can upgrade parts of the motorcycle (and repair it, if necessary) after races using money earned from sponsors. The better you race — i.e., not breaking your bike, finishing faster than your rival — the more impressed sponsors will be, which means more high-end parts for your bike, and better future performance thanks to those.
None of it’s bad, but if you have other options, you’ll probably eschew the Genesis port like I do — it’s included in the Sega Genesis Mini 2, which released in October of 2022, so I have a recent non-update on my feelings about that particular version of Super Hang-on. The arcade one, though, that holds up, because the sense of speed, of white-knuckle turns where you could crash if you can’t figure out the angles, that’s all there in a way the Genesis simply couldn’t replicate. While at one point the arcade version wasn’t available for home play, the options are now far more robust. If you managed to pick it up on the Wii Virtual Console before that all shut down, good on you, but it also had a release as part of the Sega Arcade Gallery collection on the Game Boy Advance. It’s also playable within Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6, in the arcades that Kazuma Kiryu can frequent at your leisure.
The definitive at-home version is the 3DS release, however: it’s part of M2 and Sega’s extensive 3D series on the handheld, which took classic arcade and console titles and added not just 3D elements to them thanks to the portable’s technology, but also myriad options for difficulty, sound, and playstyle. The 3DS has gyroscopic sensors, so you can emulate how the monitor would have looked on the ride-on Super Hang-on game if you want to, with the screen angling itself left or right depending on where you’re turning. You can also turn that function off but keep the gyro motion controls if you prefer, or only use buttons and the analog nub for control of the bike with the standard screen presentation, or pair it with the monitor movement. Give yourself more or less time to work with at the start of a race, increase or decrease the aggressiveness of the other racers… there is endless customization in these M2 ports, and Super Hang-on is no exception to that. Scores are all tracked on separate leaderboards depending on the options you ride with, too, meaning you can always be tracking yourself against past versions of that same self, regardless of what went into making said self.
Both arcade versions of Super Hang-on are contained within this release: the sit-down mini bike as well as the stand-up, standard cabinet. The screen might be small, but between the options and the horsepower the 3DS has under its hood, this iteration of Super Hang-on plays like an absolute dream, and is a large part of the reason why I still can’t get into actually playing the Genesis port of the arcade original.
If you have an interest in arcade racers but your only experience with Super Hang-on is with the Genesis port, you need to get your hands on the 3D Super Hang-on release on the 3DS. The clock is ticking on how much longer you can get it, since the 3DS eShop will shut down in March of 2023, and if Super Hang-on has taught me anything, it’s that you need to head to your destination as fast as possible if you want to score big.
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