OutRun was a great game, a true classic that came to define the mid-80s renaissance of arcade culture. As its buzz died down, though, my friends and I, arcade rats all, traded (and invented) rumors about the forthcoming sequel. One of the beautiful lies one of my pals came up with was OutRun Nights, which he swore to God he had seen in a conveniently-distant arcade in Torbay where he’d just been on holiday.
Unfortunately, none of the real sequels were remotely a good as the original, let alone as fused to the collective consciousness of children raised by the NTSC avatars of David Hasselhoff and Jan-Michel Vincent. To this day, however, I sincerely believe in the parallel Segaverse and thought it worthy of sharing, with just a few tips of the hat to modernity. Specs follow:
•OutRun Nights is a hack of the original, or should play as if it were: Sega System 16 hardware, a mess of sprites scaled like crazy over a 320×224 display.
•No stage takes place during daytime; the first is dusk, the last is dawn.
•The setting is moved from daytime SoCal to Miami by night. Your Ferrari Testarossa Convertible is traded in for a Lamborghini Countach.
•There’s no time limit. Speedruns only! But maybe you don’t want to attract too much attention, given the fancy motor. Who knows what you are up to? An achievement — Reliable Courier — is conferred upon those who complete the whole game at the lowest possible speed.
•The cabinet would have a glass table at the back.
•Replacing the Hawaii-Cali sunshine music of the oringal are languid streetlit crawlings such as Com Truise’s Video Arkade, Lazerhawk’s So Far Away and Lindstrøm’s Ra Ako Ost. Jan Hammer would play on the final stage. Then, at the end, the world collapses into irony or somesuch
UPDATE: Commenter Andrew points out a project to decompile and recreate the original arcade OutRun in C++, which has already resulted not only in a pixel-perfect port to modern systems, but a host of bug-fixes and improvements. Best of all, it looks like we might be able to use it to create OutRun Nights for real!
