Ultimate Guide: Outrunners
Sega’s System 32 board was the final iteration of its ‘Super Scaler’ hardware, so it was the perfect platform to bring back the breezy blue sky vibes of the original Out Run. Join us as we race Outrunners from sea to shining sea
Martyn Carroll is on hand to explain why you should reconsider playing this forgotten entry in the Outrun series
In RG issue 54 Sega’s Yu Suzuki revealed that the main inspiration for Out Run was the American movie The Cannonball Run. In issue 86 your correspondent suggested that, appropriately, the sequel Turbo Outrun was a lot like Cannonball Run II – it featured more of what made the original so great, yet it was less than the sum of its parts and didn’t work as well second time around.
A dubious analogy, but to continue it regardless, Outrunners is the equivalent of Cannonball Fever (aka Speed Zone), the third film in the series. Both were loose sequels that arrived several years after the previous entry, and both were from a different creative team (Outrunners was developed by Sega’s AM1 team, not AM2). Crucially, both were far less popular than their predecessors and are often overlooked, even by fans.
So how could a game that was essentially ‘Outrun 3’, with such rich arcade heritage, be almost forgotten? There are several reasons.
The first was specification. Outrunners was an arcade heavyweight (a 725lb heavyweight, to be precise). For the first time in the series, this game was conceived as a multiplayer racer, so the standard cab was a twin-seat sit-down beast. There were two 26-inch monitors, two steering wheels, two sets of pedals, two cockpit seats (each with integrated subwoofer), and a hefty marquee that highlighted the race leader. For the ultimate experience, four cabs could be connected for eight-player racing. Picture that – four cabs side to side would occupy 35 square metres of prime arcade real estate. The game was also available in more compact stand-up configurations, but they were always sold as a pair so space and, of course, cost remained an issue for arcade owners.
Then there were the other racing games competing for floor space at the time. In
October 1992, six months prior to the release of Outrunners, Sega released Virtua Racing. This was its first Model 1 release and it utilised 3D polygons, whereas Outrunners was a System 32 title that made do with 2D sprites. As such Outrunners looked gorgeous, but Virtua Racing was groundbreaking. Namco’s Ridge Racer and Sega’s own Daytona USA followed, and 2D racers suddenly started to look a little rusty around the wheel arches.
Another reason for the game’s relative anonymity was the lack of home conversions. The previous Outrun games were ported to just about every system under the sun, but Outrunners received just a solitary port to the Mega Drive – and only in Japan and North America. It wasn’t great, either. “This is the
worst Mega Drive game I’ve played in ages,” commented Rik Skews in the August 1994 issue of C&VG. He awarded the game 48%, and was also critical of the original coin-op. “Sega has virtually defined the way arcade racing games should be with a string of brilliant machines like Out Run, Power Drift, Rad Racer, Virtua Racing and Daytona USA,” he wrote. “Somewhere in the middle of that lot came Outrunners, a mediocre sequel of sorts to Out Run.”
Outrunners was too much of a leap for the Mega Drive, but surely it was a prime candidate for a Saturn conversion? Between 1996 and 1998 the original Sega Ages series brought a number of the firm’s arcade hits to the Saturn including Out Run, Space Harrier, After Burner and Power Drift. In the June 1997 issue of the Japanese
Sega Magazine – where the coin-op was called “the final form of the 2D driving game” – the original development team was asked if a Saturn version was in the pipeline. They responded that it would be “easy to convert”, but there was an issue. Because the original was designed with multiplayer in mind, and any home version would most likely be limited to two players (either splitscreen, or with two consoles connected using a system link cable), the conversion would be lacking, no matter how accurate it was. Ultimately the game never appeared on the Saturn.
Earlier, in 1995, Sega authorised a version of the game for the Jaguar, as part of a settlement reached between Sega and Atari following a patent infringement brought by the latter. It would have been fascinating to see how the Jag would’ve handled the game, but none of the proposed Sega games were ever released for the machine.
Since the Mega Drive release you could be forgiven for thinking that Outrunners doesn’t exist. It wasn’t included in the Sega Ages 2500 series for the Playstation 2, or the Sega 3D Classics series for Nintendo 3DS (although Turbo Outrun was finally included there, after being ignored for years). It has not featured in the more recent Sega Ages releases for Nintendo Switch – but with later releases like G-LOC and Virtua Racing already appearing, there’s a chance it may be announced in the future.
It’s telling that Yu Suzuki would return to the series in 2003 with Outrun 2, an undeniably excellent update with a title that effectively put the previous sequels in the shade. Although Suzuki was not involved in Outrunners, the developers at AM1 clearly approached their follow-up with the same aim: to bring back the pure racing pleasure of the original. Suzuki’s own Turbo Outrun replaced the popular branching road system from the original with a continuous 16-stage slog across the USA. Outrunners reintroduced the forks in the road and increased the number of distinct stages to 21 (presented as a ‘world tour’), and doubled the number of goals to ten. It also removed Turbo Outrun’s boost button, pursuing cops, bad weather and other superfluities – plus the annoying Cpu-controlled rival was obviously replaced by (potentially even more annoying) human challengers.
Harking back to the Cannonball Run theme, players could choose one of eight different vehicles, each of which had its own driving characteristics and pair of wacky racers. The game also brought back Outrun’s radio which could now be changed in-game and featured a number of new tunes along with remixes of old favourites like Splash Wave and – possibly the best piece of videogame music ever written – Magical Sound Shower.
Outrunners looked back, but it also introduced some elements that would be carried forward to Outrun 2. It added drifting to the series, albeit in its simplest form, and featured far more undulating roads with huge hills and dips. Above all, it’s just a very fast, very fun racer that every Outrun fan should definitely seek out. You can give Cannonball Fever a miss, though.
“OUTRUNNERS WAS SURELY A PRIME CANDIDATE FOR A SATURN CONVERSION”