The emergence of home consoles had always been a problem for arcades. Why would you go to the arcade to play a game that you could play at home? Up until the end of the 90s, the simplest answer was “they’re far more powerful than any home console”. That changed with the release of the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. Arcade still boasted better graphics, but the difference was mostly negligible. Some developers saw the writing on the wall and closed down their arcade branches. The ones who survived into the new millennium were tasked with a new problem: What does the arcade offer that home systems don’t?
In early 2001, AM2’s Virtua Fighter 4 stumbled upon an unlikely solution. The game would give the player custom save cards that could be used to dress up their fighters and save their gameplay stats. Games had been using PIN systems for over a decade, but being able to carry over your data to any arcade with the machine made it feel much more personal. The idea was a huge hit and soon every game under the sun was using this system. In Japan, at least.
In the West, the idea never quite became as widespread. However, between Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution making the arcade a hip hangout spot again and the infamous anime boom of the early 2000s, a certain racing game was able to form a following like America had never seen before.
Initial D Arcade Stage (2001) – Sega Rosso
Initial D Arcade Stage v2 (2002) – Sega Rosso
Initial D Arcade Stage v3 (2003) – Sega Rosso
After Sega restructured its arcade division, a big chunk of AM3 were moved into a new branch called “Sega Rosso” headed by Kenji Sasaki. When Sasaki made Sega Rally, he wanted to create a game based on a type of racing that hadn’t really been done in video games before. It’s no surprise that this was the same guy who pushed to make a video game based on a manga about the infamous Japanese drift racing scene.
Initial D is an anime and manga franchise that tells the story of sleepy-eyed Takumi Fujiwara (“Tak” in English versions of the game), who ended up reluctantly dragged into the world of street racing thanks to his natural skills. The manga ran for 23 years, from 1995-2013, while the anime continued getting new content on and off from 1998 to 2014, followed by a set of recap films that are still being released to this day. It’s so popular that Mt. Haruna’s tourism scene consists mostly of people who want to see the real life inspiration for Mt. Akina. A video game adaption was inevitable.
The decision to localize it was a strange one. Nobody outside of Japan had any idea what Initial D was. In a way, that probably worked in the game’s favor. Eurobeat music was extremely popular in Japan during the late 90s, but Initial D was most people’s first exposure to the genre in the west. The exotic, high-energy dance music quickly drew in arcade players, while the complex mechanics and save system would keep them playing. Initial D Arcade Stage quickly formed a following of players akin to Street Fighter 2 in the early 90s (but much smaller).
In the spirit of the original series, every race in this game is one on one. The track itself is often much more of an opponent than the enemy car, because this game demands perfection when turning. Even in the story races, slightly bumping into a wall once or twice will cost you the race. That’s because any collision with the wall would not only drop your speed, but also gimp your acceleration for a good ten or twenty seconds. You absolutely need to master drifting if you want to make it through the tight corners without suffering this harsh penalty. In that sense, it captures the feel of the series perfectly.
That isn’t the only thing from the series it got right. This may hold the title of most accurate adaption of an anime into a video game ever. The story mode lets you race against ANY character who’s ever raced in the series, with the constant revisions making sure that even more recent characters would be included. Nearly any course ever seen in the series would eventually be added to the game, including little quirks from the show like the fall leaves reducing traction, being able to grab the gutter with your tire, or cut corners on a certain stage. Even the multiple drifting techniques all work exactly how they’re described in manga’s exposition. The silly glowing car wings will even appear for players who have a strong multiplayer record. They did everything in their power to make it feel as much like the show as humanly possible.
And that brings us to what really drew people in about this game: The save card system. This game came out the same year as Virtua Fighter 4, so it was a very adapter of the technology. Each save card could only hold a single car, so every player at the arcade would have a signature car with multiple upgrade paths. This really made races feel much more personal than any other racing game at the time. It was also a bit of a double-edged sword in the long run, since most arcades no longer have access to the save cards. The game feels like it’s missing an important part of itself without the save system.
Over the next few years, the game received a few updates. Version 2 and 3 were essentially the same game with more cars, tracks, and options. In the first two games, the story mode would follow the order of events from the manga pretty carefully, but version 3 shuffled it into an original story of sorts. It also rotated out the old Eurobeat in favor of new Eurobeat, so players wouldn’t have to listen to Speedy Speed Boy for a third year. The next update would be a far more controversial one…
Images from Video Games Museum.
OutRun2 (2003) – Sega AM2
OutRun2 SP (2004) – Sega AM2
OutRun2 SPDX (2007) – Sega AM2
The year was 2003 and Sega AM2 hadn’t released a new arcade racing game since the tail end of the 90s. Some wondered if Sega’s reshuffling of the arcade branches had meant the end of AM2’s racing glory days. AM2 knew that their first racing game of the new millennium had to really be something special. They needed something new. Something innovative. Something like the games that really set AM2 apart in their early days. It was time for them to go back to their roots.
OutRun 2 was the first arcade entry in the franchise in over a decade. Running on the new Sega Chihiro board, OutRun2 brought the series into the third dimension for the first time. On the surface, the game manages to capture the feel of the original OutRun games perfectly. You still weave through traffic, take split paths, and try to reach the goal on time. You can still pick your radio station, now a mix of new songs and updated versions of the classics. The game even still has the dorky ending sequences, now rendered in full 3D. It has everything you’d expect from a sequel to OutRun.
What’s new are a set of physics that would make Ridge Racer blush. Using either the brake drifting or trademark Sega “eraser” technique (quickly downshifting, then immediately upshifting again) will make your car drift. Not Initial D or Daytona-style soft drifting, mind you, but heavily exaggerated “your entire car immediately starts sliding sideways” drifting. It’s hard to find fault with these physics, since the sliding is just so damn fun to control. If you’re skilled enough not to crash, you can easily make it around two or three corners before ending your drift. Drifting is extremely easy to learn and execute, but the constant speed falloff rewards players who have enough control to end their drifts early. It’s got one of the best learning curves I’ve ever seen in a racing game.
Also new is Heart Attack mode. The girl in your passenger seat, instead of just being your arm candy, will shout out requests during the race and rank you based on your ability to do them. This basically amounts to playing a racing track full of minigames. There are things you’d expect to see in a mode like this, such a “don’t hit anything” and “drift around the entire corner”, alongside much more unusual scenarios like having to push a giant beach ball sitting on the track, avoiding a meteor shower, and trying not to get abducted by UFOs. It’s easily the most unique and entertaining part of the game.
The game would go on two receive two updates. Outrun2 SP added an all new set of courses to play (protip: you can access the original courses by pressing “view change” when selecting a mode), some new music, new cars, and even a handful of new Heart Attack scenarios like a ghost invasion. It also rebalances the difficulty by making your car less prone to crashing horribly whenever it bumps into another car and adds a slipstream system like the one in Daytona 2. The Outrun2 SPDX cab ports the game to the stronger Sega Lindburg hardware and adds the new cars and music from the console ports, along with a useless co-op mode where two players take turns driving the same car and a more traditional “race the opponent to the checkpoints” mode. This version was nothing but an excuse to release the gigantic 8 player Outrun2 SPDX cab. If you’re ever in a town with one of the bigger Gameworks arcades, you might still be able to catch a glimpse of one. It needs to be seen to be believed.
Also worth mentioning is that the Sega Chihiro board is nearly identical to the Xbox hardware, so the Xbox has a near-perfect arcade port of this game with a handful of new features. The best one is the ability to unlock every track from Daytona USA 2 and Sega Super GT for play. It’s as close to a home release as Sega Super GT has ever gotten. OutRun2 SP also got a PS2 and Windows port titled “OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast”, but there are no Sega Super GT tracks to be found.
Images from arcade muesum
The Fast and the Furious (2004) – Raw Thrills
After Midway cut their arcade branch in 2001, Eugene Jarvis (creator of the Cruisin’ series), along with a handful of other former Midway Games employees, decided that they’d make their own arcade company. Their first order of business as a new company was to take popular games they made under Midway and release “sequels” that were just different enough from the original license to avoid a lawsuit. The first of these games would be Target: Terror, a game that walked the line between between a sequel to Maximum Force and an outright parody of it. For their second game, someone at the company decided it would be a good idea to capitalize on the success of the Fast and the Furious movie franchise with an arcade game. This game had nothing at all to do with the movie and was instead an excuse to unofficially continue the popular Cruis’n franchise. It turned out to be such a hit that Raw Thrills would become known for churning out shovelware arcade games based on popular licenses.
At first glance, you wouldn’t know this game had anything to do with the Cruis’n series. The visual style has far more in common with the Rush games. However, once you start the game, you’re greeted with a familiar level select menu, cheesy voice clips, and those awkward live-action flag girls that Cruis’n loved so much. Any doubt that this is the fourth Cruis’n game is eliminated as soon as you discover the wheelie jump from Exotic is back. To Raw Thrills’ credit, they’ve never really tried to hide this. Even the Wii port of this game was re-titled “Cruis’n”.
In contrast to Cruis’n, this game tries to take itself somewhat seriously. There will be no schoolbuses taking a detour through Atlantis this time around. Instead, you’ll be playing through levels that feel like some kind of bizarre hybrid of Cruis’n and Rush’s tracks. The tracks are nowhere near as well designed as what the Rush series could come up with, but they do get a bit creative with the hidden routes such as making you ramp off another car to find them. There are also a few badly designed areas where using an enemy car as a ramp will make you land on an invisible platform that was probably supposed to be part of the game’s world boundary. This game is severely lacking in polish.
The Fast and the Furious does thankfully rework Cruis’n Exotica’s boring mileage system. Now, at the start of each game you’re given the option to choose one upgrade for your car that saves to your account, so your car gets more powerful every time you play. At the end of each race, your “earnings” are tallied up based on your rank, tricks, objects you ran into, ect. It takes a long, long time to earn enough points to unlock the hidden cars, but this is a welcome improvement over “play X times to unlock hidden cars” thing that Exotica did.
It’s hard to say whether this game is better than the three original Crusin’ games, but it’s fine for what it is. At the very least, the forced license change gave the series the breath of fresh air that it was in such desperate need of.
Mario Kart Arcade GP (2005) – Namco
Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 (2007) – Namco
After staying out of the arcade industry for nearly a decade, Nintendo made an unexpected announcement: They were collaborating with Sega and Namco to construct an all new arcade board that would house, among other games, arcade versions of popular Nintendo franchises. The board was a hybrid of the Nintendo Gamecube software and the Sega Naomi hardware dubbed “Triforce”. This was the kind of dream collaboration that only happens once in a lifetime.
The Mario Kart GP series holds the distinction of being the only Mario Kart games not developed by Nintendo themselves, but by Namco’s team. These games have a slightly different flavor than the normal entries in the series, with a slightly different track aesthetic and physics system than you’d expect form Mario Kart. The controls aren’t as tight and most of the items feel a bit awkward to use, but the game compensates by including a whopping 93 items. Of course, about 40 of those items are simple character-specific reskins of the same six items, but 50 unique items is still very impressive for a series that usually has less than 20. To make them a bit more manageable, you’re restricted to only three available items per race.
Functionally this game has twelve normal tracks and twelve tracks that are just minor variations of the normal ones. Each of the game’s six cups will make you first play through two main stages, followed by the alternate versions of those stages. For example, the first cup consists of a beach stage, a different beach stage that looks similar to the first, the first beach stage at sunset, and the second beach stage at night. It makes sense thematically, but you’ll probably get sick of looking at the beach assets by the fourth race.
The western version has one glaring problem that wasn’t present in the original. The Japanese version of this machine had a magnetic save card system similar to Initial D, but the western release strips the card readers. A large chunk of the game’s content requires playing through single-player mode to unlock, so you won’t see a lot of it unless you’re willing to play 20-80 races in a single sitting. This means that you’ll probably only see 14 of the game’s 93 items and never get to use their unlockable powered-up forms. Two of the game’s twelve tracks are also hidden behind the unlock system. Even the single-player campaign has two harder difficulties that you can’t access without first clearing easy mode. Mario Kart Arcade GP was obviously built with the assumption the player would be able to save, so not being able to access it makes it feel like a big chunk of the game is missing.
There was a “sequel” a few years later. Without access to the unlockables, the new content is just two new characters, two new cups, and a couple of new items. If you’re lucky enough to have a Japanese machine nearby that still dispenses save cards, the game’s biggest new feature is an unlockable secondary kart for each character. The secondary karts give the game a bit more variation in kart handling than the standard heavy, medium, and light distinction. It was a nice feature, but sadly another example of content that most people will never get to experience in the west.