Ultimate Guide: Wec Le Mans
A racing car zooming across the finish line and disappearing into the sunset is an image that illustrates Wec Le Mans in more ways than one. We take a look back at Konami’s arcade racer and its short-lived racing legacy
Martyn Carroll looks back at Konami’s enjoyable racing game and the numerous conversions it spawned
Being overshadowed by Out Run is a fate that befell a number of racing games in the mid-to-late Eighties. Atari’s Road Blasters, Taito’s Full Throttle and Namco’s Final Lap are just three titles that struggled to keep pace with Sega’s unstoppable blue-sky racer. Even Sega itself struggled to surpass the mighty Out Run for several years.
Probably the cruellest casualty of Out Run’s phenomenal popularity was Konami’s Wec Le Mans. Debuting in late 1986, mere weeks after Out Run, Wec didn’t deserve to be one of the year’s ‘other’ racing games. Like Out Run it was technically superb, running on twin 68000-based hardware and featuring an undulating road that dipped and veered just like the real-life course on which it was based (the Circuit De La Sarthe at Le Mans). Like Out Run it also benefited from scaled sprites that delivered a tangible sense of speed, it too was available as a fancy sit-in cab that moved to compliment the on-screen action.
Perhaps the reason why Wec struggled to steal Out Run’s racing crown was because of its simulator tendencies. It was an arcade racer, make no mistake, but as it was based on the famous 24 hour endurance event some degree of realism was expected. Unlike Out Run’s
branching route across the USA, there was just a single track that loosely mimicked the 13.6km Le Mans circuit. It took around two-and-a-half minutes to complete a lap of the circuit and there were four laps in total. Despite the relatively short racing time, the game did simulate the passage of time, with day sliding into dusk by lap two, then night falling by lap three and finally dawn breaking by lap four. During the fourth lap the sky would darken and storm clouds would gather, but this had no bearing on the racing itself.
Whether players would experience this day-to-night cycle was debatable as Wec was a challenging game. A very challenging game, in fact. The threelane track was fairly narrow which made overtaking rivals rather difficult, particularly on corners, and if you so much as clipped another racer or trackside object at speed your car would be catapulted through the air. The crash sequence was, indeed, spectacular but this was cold comfort as the amount of time lost meant that reaching the next checkpoint was suddenly in doubt. On the default ‘normal’ difficulty setting you could crash once or maybe twice – anymore and you’d struggle to reach the next checkpoint. To compound matters, the amount of traffic you encountered increased on subsequent laps (on the final lap you’d need to pass around 50 rivals), so the chances of reaching the finish line were somewhere south of slim. And as there was no continue option you couldn’t buy the chequered flag even if you wanted to.
That said, with practice would come success, and with success came exhilaration as you weaved through the pack, a whisker away from wiping out. In that regard Wec was perhaps the first game to accurately simulate the experience of racing on the edge – which is absolutely what any game based on the gruelling Le Mans 24 should do.
Wec was available in three cabinet types. The headliner was the ‘Big Spin’ variant which was modelled on the cockpit of the prototype Porsche car you raced in the game. The cab would judder up and down, lurch left and right, and even spin 180 degrees when you crashed out. It was an impressive machine but getting all shook up while playing could be quite disorientating at times. It was also expensive, costing an incredible £7,000 per unit. Also available was the smaller
‘Mini Spin’ model which was less expensive and more restrained, and finally the basic upright type which was obviously static but featured a vibrating steering wheel. All three variants displayed the game on a standard 20-inch monitor.
Wec made its European debut at the Preview
Mike [Lamb] had the rolling road up and running and nothing else when we were brought in John Mullins
1987 arcade show in London, where it lined up alongside Sega’s Out Run and Enduro Racer. Despite the strong competition, Clare Edgeley from C&VG magazine chose Wec as her favourite. “Without a doubt Konami came out the winner with its superb game,” she wrote, having test drove the Big Spin model. “I’ve never been in anything like it! The movement of the car really lifts it above the rest.” The Newsfield team also loved it. “It’s an exhilarating experience – part driving game, part fairground ride,” wrote Gary Penn.
Konami already had a successful relationship with Ocean Software so it was no surprise when the Manchester firm announced that it would be publishing the home computer versions on its Imagine label. Both 8-bit and 16-bit conversions were planned but in the end it was only released for the Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and MSX in early 1989. The versions proved to be a mixed bag. In a preview for the C64 version Zzap!64 asked, “Are we about to witness the best racing game conversion ever?”, and the 40% review that would follow answered that unequivocally. The Z80 versions fared much better, with C&VG awarding the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions 82% and 83% respectively. Sinclair User was more generous, awarding the Spectrum version 91% and calling it “absolutely brilliant”. The CPC later received an unofficial version of the game as the Plus range launch title Burnin’ Rubber was clearly based on Wec and even featured the day-to-night cycle that the official conversion lacked.
The game’s winning run was ultimately a short one, as it wasn’t released for any consoles and has never been included on a retro collection (possibly due to licensing issues). Konami did reuse the Wec hardware for the little-known 1988 coin-op Hot Chase, but it wasn’t until 1994 that it produced the closest thing to a Wec follow-up. Racin’ Force was essentially an unlicensed update of Wec, with strong simulator leanings and night driving. Expanding on the original, there were now four different courses to choose from and machines could be linked to support up to eight players. If you can’t recall Racin’ Force then it’s probably because you were too busy playing Daytona USA. For Konami, it was a case of Sega strikes again.
A small coda to the Wec story is another obscure coin-op from 1995 titled Speed King (also known as Road Rage). This futuristic racing game was set in the same world as cult adventure game Snatcher – yet Konami’s Tanaka Fumiaki claims that the game’s fully-moving cockpit was directly inspired by Wec Le Mans and its Big Spin thrills.