Andy Kelly is my hero. He should be yours, too. If you didn’t know him from his Future Publishing days or his PR work, then you should know him from Perfect Organism, his book on Alien: Isolation that sets quite the standard for IP-themed videogaming books. Heroic enough an achievement, Andy also fell prey to the callous collapse and acquisition of crowdsource publisher Unbound and yet was still able to create and release One More Win, a self-written, self-designed fanzine about Ridge Racer Type 4. Of course it’s brilliant (ultrabrilliant, perhaps) and has rightfully received plenty of praise on social media. It’s tight and cohesive, almost working as a pack-in bonus item for some ultimate-premium special edition of the game that only exists in our dreams. But as such, it feels wholly compatible with Ridge Racer Type 4 itself. It’s a kind of unity that can’t be accidental, and underlines the particular talents Andy brought to bear in creating it.
While I read it with quite some joy, One More Win inspired plenty of guilt. There’s a sense that I could be doing this kind of thing. Particularly in the effort to bring British videogame perspectives and written celebrations into the physical realm. Personal castigations aside, what’s actually more interesting is the choice of topic. Despite my best efforts, Ridge Racer itself is at risk of slipping under the waterline of visibility, being a legacy IP that Bandai Namco seems indifferent to. It’s perhaps this threatened status in the collective memory that drives One More Win’s success. The outpouring of delight that followed its announcement seemed oddly feverish; I haven’t seen Type 4 mentioned for decades, and yet as Andy revealed it on BlueSky, the comments in support overflowed. It was extremely heartwarming for me, but I was also struck with the sense that this represented something deeper than affection for just the game itself. It felt more about the time and the culture that the game was released into.
Ridge Racer Type 4 arrived in Europe and the US in 1999, just as the PlayStation had cemented its dominance over the Saturn. Type 4 is a kind of triumphant coup-de-grace, a third blow to prove that Namco, Ridge Racer and the PlayStation can keep it coming as the likes of Sega Rally or Daytona USA would fall behind. Type 4 saw Ridge Racer weave a path around Polyphony’s Gran Turismo as proof that the arcade racer could co-exist with the console-only simulation in a way that only the PlayStation could sustain. It could be remarked that Gran Turismo was such a definitive statement of intent and capability that nobody dared to even attempt a challenge on the N64 or Saturn. Between them, the two are the substrate for a rich field of racing games. From Wipeout 2097 in 1996 to Ridge Racer Type 4 in 1999, you get three years of increasing domination - Colin McRae’s rallying titles, the Need For Speeds, Codemasters’ TOCA entries, at a push, Driver, to name a few. Contemporaneously to Type 4, Sega’s fightback brings the valiant Sega Rally 2 and, a year later, Metropolis Street Racer to the Dreamcast, with a touch of genius in the conversion of F355 Challenge as a hyper-focused simulation to try and match the PlayStation’s embarrassment of racing riches. Sega GT is perhaps the closest attempt to bring the Gran Turismo spirit to non-Sony hardware, although arguably it’s not until 2005’s Forza Motorsport that we see a genuine contender. Of course, the seeds of glory are there - Bizarre Creations’ Dreamcast debut seeds perhaps the greatest soft-sim racing series ever to grace the consoles, with its influence extending deep into contemporary favourite Forza Horizon. And yet none of these games enjoy the warm fuzz of romance that Ridge Racer Type 4 seems to bring to so many.
Type 4 serves as a figurehead of sorts within that vibrant ecosystem of racers embracing the polygonal revolution, but it does it as the mature article. It’s not the grandstanding debut of the original Ridge Racer, a miraculous herald of the new age. Type 4 is its proof of longevity, of sustainability in the home context. Yet despite PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 entries, it's perhaps the foundational association with the original PlayStation where the series draws much of its romance. Naturally this places Type 4 as the most accomplished of that set, pretty much across the board. It’s not just in Type 4’s quixotic structure (covered wonderfully in One More Win, naturally), but in its technicalities. Type 4 added gouraud shading to the texture-mapped PlayStation Ridge Racer aesthetic, a hallmark of the optimisation strategy deployed by Sony to really rinse every last lit triangle it can from the hardware. But perhaps the strongest emotions are spurred by the game’s visual design. A style aped by One More Win in admirable fashion, but also a kind of Japan-centric summation of the entire Designer’s Republic-themed PlayStation aesthetic. It deploys the sober maturity of Gran Turismo’s sans-serif Impact-fonted text, but lays it out with the DR vibe that carried Wipeout’s visual design to previously unimaginable heights of stylistic sophistication. It was always amusing to see DR pull cod-Japanese imagery into its visual language, spraying it freely across projects as diverse as PWEI covers and posters through to Warp Records’ greatest double-LP designs and beyond. In amongst that, the repurposing of Eurostyle’s ‘8’ to make the text for the Wipeout logo was perhaps the most obvious masterstroke, yet the sense of Japanese graphic design being plundered for its style instead of its content was constant. It’s fascinating to consider Ridge Racer Type 4’s visual identity as a re-contextualised reply of sorts; a re-sampling of the sampled, cast in yellow and black. I tend to think that the in-play graphics and the menu style is where Type 4 wins its fans, though I can’t deny the idea that it’s a summation across the board of the PlayStation proposition. The graphics, the speed, the broad soundtrack - all a compilation of what is now not only possible, but to be expected. A joyously vibrant report back to the audience, summing the previous five years into a race towards the millennium and a new, brave generation of PlayStation and PlayStation games on the cusp of their own maturity.
Andy remarks in One More Win that Ridge Racer Type 4 represented a pinnacle: “other Ridge Racer games followed but the series never matched these aesthetic heights again”. Naturally, I beg to differ. For me, Ridge Racer 7 elevated the Ridge Racer in-race aesthetic to the mythical, taking the ethos of Type 4 to a gleaming crescendo. While I can’t say Ridge Racer 7 has the same sense of aesthetic unity that Type 4 enjoys, I nonetheless feel the true spirit of being on the road at speed and going sideways around apexes is just as vibrant and alive in 7 as it is in 4, and in some ways it transcends it all into the near-abstract. I imagine it’s up to me to have the courage and determination and talent to put together a One More Win for the last great entry in the Ridge Racer canon. But if there’s anything that One More Win brings value to, it’s in the remembrance of a great series that lies cruelly dormant after an ill-advised failed reboot. An injustice that should be righted, and perhaps the outpouring of love for Type 4 can fan the flames at Bandai Namco to rediscover the unique Ridge Racer spirit. Ridge Racer Type 4 seems to carry more resonance for Millennials than Gen-X oldsters like me, for I will always think of Rage Racer as the game where the previously unobtainable not only came home, but adapted itself to it. Type 4 is perhaps slightly better timed to slot into the perfect summer holidays or ideal Christmases where such a game can carve out deep memories for adolescents of all ages, but particularly those born after 1980. After all, the game is so millennial, how can it not cause ripples in the generation that bears the same name? The real tragedy, of course, is that there’s a generation now that doesn’t have a Ridge Racer of its own. For them, perhaps One More Win can be a vital signpost for how a racing game can be, lest they get lost in the weeds trying to track down Ridge Racer genes in the wilds of the indie arcade racer. As much as the deliberate, low-poly retro-racers try to evoke the romance, they’ll always fall short to a certain extent. The real deal is what we need, as One More Win suitably reminds us of what we lost.
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