extra
East and West collide spectacularly in the classic
arcade racer OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast DARRAN JONES
PUBLISHER SEGA / DEVELOPER SUMO DIGITAL / FORMAT XBOXMicrosoft made a
number of smart
decisions when it
decided to launch
its first games
console in 2001.
Arguably the most
important one was buying Bungie and
releasing Halo: Combat Evolved at
launch, a game that not only looked
graphically ahead of its time (those
grass textures!) but also reinvented
the first-person shooter (on consoles
at least). Another was Microsoft’s
decision to team up with SEGA, a
powerhouse of a games publisher
that had just exited the business of
making games consoles, the same
year as Microsoft was entering it.
Microsoft had already worked with
the Japanese giant in the past as it
had supplied its operating system,
Windows CE, for use on SEGA’s last
home console, the Dreamcast. This
sharing of technical expertise would
spill over to the Xbox era as SEGA’s
cutting-edge Chihiro arcade board
was based on the architecture of
Microsoft’s debut console. Out of the
11 non-terminal-based gamesSEGA
released on Chihiro, four made
it to Microsoft’s console:
Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller,
The House Of The
Dead III, OutRun 2 and
OutRun 2 SP. Before we
focus on those last two
games, however, let’s
quickly scoot back to
1986 so we can get a better
idea of why gamers like me
were so excited about them.
The original OutRun felt like a
revelation upon its release. Many
racers of the time typically placed
you in a conventional racing car and
required you to compete against other
racers. OutRun did no such thing, here
your only opponent was the clock.
Inspired by creator Yu Suzuki’s love of
Burt Reynolds movie The Cannonball
Run and his equal passion for Ferraris,
the legendary game developer took
his inspiration literally.
“The film crosses America,” he told
Retro Gamer in 2008, “so I made a
plan to follow the same course and
collect data as I went. But I realised,
once I arranged everything that the
scenery along the [Pan-] America
course doesn’t change very much,
so I revised my plan and decided
to collect data in Europe instead.”
Armed with a video camera and
additional equipment, Suzuki headed
to Frankfurt, hired a car and started
taking notes. The end result was a
glorious snapshot of ’80s Europe that
not only featured one of the era’s
most coveted cars, but also delivered
cutting-edge visuals, hummable
tunes and, later, a slew of great and
terrible sequels. Needless to say, all
of those great aspects of OutRun
would go on to appear in OutRun 2 and
OutRun 2 SP, and that’s where Steve
Lycett and Sumo Digital come in.A Beautiful Journey
Lycett loves and understands racing
games, having worked on them for
years. He was one of the designers
involved with the Xbox port of
OutRun 2 and found himself in the
role of producer for Coast 2 Coast.
Thecareand attention Sumo gave to
thosetwo games has led to a
close working relationship
with SEGA that
continues to
this day, with
Sonic Team
Racing being
their latest
collaboration.
“For me what
made OutRun 2
and SP work so well
is that they took
everything that was
great about the original
game and expanded on them
in a very complimentary way,” he
begins. “The ‘Beautiful Journey’
was present and correct with a
lovely, diverse and challenging
set of tracks with routes you could
choose, while the purity of having
the freedom to choose which way to
go is still one of the best elements,
too. The introduction of drifting felt
natural and built on years of SEGAPLAY NOW
ONXBOXONE
BACKWARDS
COMPATIBLELIVE
FOREVER?
Coast 2 Coast included
an excellent online mode
that catered for up to six
players. Sadly the servers
were taken down in April
2010 when Xbox Live was
discontinued for the
original Xbox.More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 101