Looking Back at OutRun
As someone who wasn’t there for the original context of the game, who was born after it came out, who didn’t actually see it in her arcades and never really played it on its original cabinet, considering all that, I still think that OutRun is absolutely incredible and feels much more like the experience, or at least the core fantasy, of driving a car, compared to a lot of games released since about driving cars.
OutRun is a game in which you drive a car — the specifics are not important, because the copyright for which fast red car it is changes periodically, all that matters is that it’s red and it’s fast. Anyway, you have a time limit, which I guess is the thing you need to “OutRun”, since you’re not actually racing anyone, driving linearly and as fast as you can to the next checkpoint, which will extend your time limit, while dodging traffic of much slower cars and steering around curves of varying sharpness. If you hit an offroad obstacle or another car, you can speed down, spin out, or suffer a horrendous crash. You’ll always respawn shortly after, though you’ll lose a lot of time accelerating back up to top speed again. By the way, if your time runs out or if you reach the finish line at the end of several checkpoints, your play is over. That’s pretty much it.
OutRun’s great triumph is that it doesn’t emulate how driving a car is like, but rather, how we feel it’s like. Perhaps to a big car fan or to someone who actually does drive at the incredible and most likely inaccurate high speeds OutRun says your car drives in, they might argue about the game having some disconnect of their deeper knowledge as to how would a sports car handle, but as a regular driver, OutRun feels like the driving experience and fantasy translated into a high speed game beautifully.
One good example of how OutRun does it is that your car only has two gears: High and Low Gear. The concept of gears and shifting gears is always a hurdle for those who are still learning cars and driving cars for the first time, and to convey the feeling of gear shifting to all audiences, they turned the usual 5 acceleration gears of a car into only 2, still conveying what gears are in driving a real car, while trimming the fat that would take away the focus from the high speed driving and that would otherwise confuse inexperienced drivers. Low Gear accelerates well on low speeds but has a low top speed ceiling, while High Gear accelerates poorly on low speeds but allows you to go double the top speed of Low Gear, so the key is knowing when to shift gears and anticipate when you’ll need to slow down a bit and when to accelerate, as there is also a certain sweet spot to shifting from Low to High gear that is a bit below the Low Gear speed ceiling — if you shift too close to Low Gear’s top speed, your car’s engine will scream a bit and keep you at that speed for a second or two as you’ve overworked it.
Another example is the inclusion and application of regular car traffic — traffic is what makes OutRun what it is. Many call OutRun the first driving game with other vehicles who run at varying speeds, which might not be completely true, but it doesn’t matter more than just the merits of its execution and what it means in the game. Having traffic that drives at different speeds makes it so you encounter interesting situations in which two cars are too close to each other for you to drive through them, and you wait a split second for their speed difference to turn into enough spatial distance for you to cut through them, which parallels oh so familiarly with real life for anyone who ever drove through traffic in a bit of a hurry (Though not as extreme! I must disclose that I practice very safe driving, thank you!). Constantly avoiding traffic of different speeds is the main thing that makes OutRun feel like such a strong analog to real driving, and that, alongside its depiction of gear shifting, is what made me appreciate its way of presenting these things so much more after I actually had my license.
Before every checkpoint, at the end of the “level” you’re on, there’s a split in the road. Going left or right leads you to completely different levels, and the bifurcations just keep happening, leading you at the end to 5 different end levels (and endings!) The overall map (in the non-Japanese version) looks like this:
Not only this makes it so you don’t just go through the same environments every time, allowing you to just take in whatever scenario you wanna try, but also, the road on the left always leads you to a less challenging level than the one on the right. In theory, that means you can make your game as much of a challenging high speed race against the clock or as much of a more laidback, but still speedy, road trip through European environments. The reality is that the difficulty doesn’t change too much unless you’re actually messing with the time limit and traffic difficulty options — a car crash can easily cost your credit in most levels, but still, if you can do a playthrough of the game up to level 5A (easiest route) pretty easily with significant spare time, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be even able to finish a playthrough of the game up to level 5E (hardest route).
I especially like how the game requires you to drive left or right to choose the next level. First, of course, because it’s within the game’s language, and navigating some menu would completely take you out of the experience, second, obviously, because it’s grounded in the experience of driving on a freeway itself, but thirdly and even more important, even considering those two items, have you noticed that the game doesn’t stop the timer, or takes away traffic when it presents the road bifurcation? While they don’t really play with it too much — all the crossroads look the same, having traffic still there influences your choice. Sometimes the easy route has too many cars obstructing it and the harder route looks completely free, you’re running out of time, and you decide to shift suddenly to the other route so you can reach the next checkpoint quickly. Sometimes you’re so unsure that you kinda fumble and go off-road a bit before being forced into one of the paths.
Instead of feeling like OutRun was designed as a racing/driving game first and then the mechanics were worked on as the team saw fit, it feels more like Yu Suzuki and his team wanted to convey the fantasy of the freedom of high speed driving by translating the pleasant parts of their own experiences driving through a freeway first and foremost into a game, and the mechanics within the game were all in service of that.
Instead of figuring out what feels fun in a game about driving, OutRun’s team just translates what we collectively feel is fun and exciting about driving into the game.
Choosing a song in the radio before you start your “OutRun”, the sounds of the ocean as you do so, and the many different environments you see breezing through your car, not to mention the previously explained gear shifting and traffic, OutRun feels a more authentic game about driving than a lot of modern games. They didn’t have the resources to gather all the specs of a car and faithfully translate them into a virtual space, and I feel the game is better for it. Driving at the absurd high speeds of a sports car feels highly different than driving a regular car most of us do, and driving from the third-person perspective isn’t how we drive a car (and going first-person in modern games also feels off), steering feels different in a virtual space, it’s why driving safely in games like Grand Theft Auto feels so finicky and awful but in real life it doesn’t (as much?). OutRun is, in a literal sense, very different to driving, but at the same time, it feels exactly like driving, as it simplifies the experience and fantasy of it to a handful of essentials — yes, by necessity, OutRun wasn’t by any means a “minimalist game” back then, but that leads to good design and a game that still feels great even divorced from its original play scheme.
I tried OutRun with a driving wheel (not the original cabinet, just a serviceable driving wheel for the computer) and while it adds to the experience, it’s just as enjoyable, as say, on the 3DS. The 3DS version, part of the SEGA 3D Classics series of titles by M2, is the one I actually recommend the most, as it runs at 60FPS (original game weirdly runs at 30 though other SEGA games within the same Super Scaler engine ran at 60) and it looks absolutely drop dead gorgeous, especially in 3D. There are also tons of options and extras for you to customize your experience however you like, and it’s a game that feels really good on a handheld, to just play casually for a bit while you’re waiting on something. It’s a very simple game, especially by today’s standards, but I feel it’s still very enjoyable and recommendable, hence why this article.
GIFs were recorded by me, using the Cannonball fan engine for OutRun, which allows for the higher resolution you see there, as well as Time Attacking and Stage Select, useful as my controller wasn’t working so great when I tried recording these GIFs.
