Ridge Raver: The Definitive Review
"This is just what I wanted to see!"
Earlier this year, I had the near-religious experience of attending Arcade Club in Bury. There’s something genuinely spiritual about climbing the internal staircase all the way to the top floor, and entering a true Valhalla for arcade gaming. It’s an astonishing collection spanning the real living years of the form, wherein all the greats line up together to not only make that unique cacophony so beloved of arcade fans, but also a catalogue of the top tier’s best and most fondly-remembered cabinets from the seventies to the nineties. But the floor below holds other treasures. For one, there’s a compact room walled with Sega Astro Cities, all running Shmup boards. A Danmaku Ame all of its own, where you can back-to-back with Progear and Armed Police Batrider to your heart’s content. Off in another corner of this floor is a two-player Sega Rally and, sitting innocuously across from it, a small sit-down Ridge Racer.
I became obsessed with it. I adored Ridge Racer from the first time I laid eyes on it, some 30 years ago. I perfected the default course on the PlayStation, and have revisited that race many times since. But this was the first time I’d ever had access to the real cab, so I set about trying to get first place. Getting used to the wheel and pedal controls took a few attempts, and the insane wooliness of the open-gated manual gearstick was too terrifying to even contemplate1, but then the idea of playing Ridge Racer in manual is total madness, it’s clearly not the game’s intention. But with some buckling down and spirited wheel-work, I was stringing together the correct drifts and gradually honing that deranged racing line until first place was easily within my grasp. Next step: claim the lap record. Now, I had achieved a kind of nirvanic synergy with the controls by this point. Ridge Racer has always been a gamepad affair for me, so finding a wondrous flow state with wheel and pedal was thrillingly novel. It was delightful to fling the nose in with supremely grandiose spins of the wheel, not to mention purposeful lifts and stamps of the accelerator to get that end out. At this point, Ridge Racer was singing so beautifully as my lap times chipped downwards towards the magic mark and then, disaster! Turns out my purposeful stamping on a 30-year-old pedal saw the pedal (rather suddenly) get somewhat upset with the punishment and withdrawing access to full throttle, putting paid to my desperate bid for glory2. Wracked with guilt, I kissed the wheel, made my apologies and went off to hammer the fucking magnificent four-seater Outrun 2 cab another floor down.
Ridge Racer has a unique place in videogaming. It occupies the rare position of bookending the beginning and the end of exotic realtime polygon gaming hardware and in doing so, defines a particular era. Many years ago, I wrote for Eurogamer about my first encounter with it. It was at the Trocadero in London, on a rare trip to the city centre. Ridge Racer appeared to me in its most deluxe Full Scale form, with an integral MX-5 that has working aircon, and it seemed to have a speaker system to match its grandeur. Its sonic footprint was colossal, which obviously drew attention, but I actually couldn’t afford the price of entry. I had the coins, but watching all the other newbies fail spectacularly, I knew it would be a waste. I was content to simply gawp. I had seen stills in Edge, but to see it in motion was utterly exhilarating. In 1994, it was witnessing the future arrive. We were only six years on from F/A-18 Interceptor, a flat-shaded, 10 FPS flight sim that allowed a generation to impress their Dads with Top Gun fantasies, and five on from Namco’s Winning Run. And yet here were fully textured-mapped polygons, rattling along at a very convincing framerate. I also had my first glimpses of Daytona USA and Virtua Racing thanks to that Trocadero visit. Never before or since has the future of home videogames been so viscerally present, nor has the leap seemed so large that it changes and entire cultural paradigm. And there Ridge Racer sat, the shouty, Gabba-blasting3 figurehead adorning the bow of this incredible new vessel soon to land on our shores.
We often credit the PlayStation for its emphatic statement that “textured triangles are fucking great so why not have 360,000 of them every fucking second?”, but we forget the CD-ROM’s role in bringing high-capacity non-linear storage to home gaming. Sure, Mega CD and import exotica can claim the pioneer accolades, but it was the PlayStation that made the CD really work. Between Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, it showed what the medium could really hold, yet Ridge Racer hilariously bucked that trend, leaving Gran Turismo to be the adult in the room and dutifully consume exorbitant storage for more noble goals. The full game of Ridge Racer fits in that paltry two megabytes of PlayStation RAM, meaning the CD could be popped out and your own choice popped in. But that never jived with me, I wanted the full Ridge Racer experience, for it had done the unthinkable. The connection between the arcade and the PlayStation was tangible, credible. Even though my first PlayStation gameplay was with Tekken4, it’s Ridge Racer that carries the most sentimentality5. There was such a gorgeously compact purity in that first arcade course, and focusing entirely on lap records for it was a superb stoner objective. I favoured the yellow Solvalou, and with friends we had refined our play to the point of nailing the drifts so precisely that you got a little rev spurt and a kick of extra velocity, ending up attempting aerial 360s off the helicopter ramp and bashing our heads against the Angel car. I never had the necessary grinding time to master the advanced course and hence complete the game’s ultimate challenge, but that felt like home content to me. I was happy occupying the same space as the default arcade and in that sense, it finally felt as if the two had merged. The PC Engine launched two years on from 1985, the year that brought us Gradius, Hang-On and Space Harrier, three games that exemplify the visual parameters that separated the 16-bit arcade’s graphical capabilities from contemporary 8-bit home machines. NEC’s absolutely splendid little marvel blew everybody’s mind by dropping a frankly stunning version of R-Type. A game at the visual cutting edge that had launched mere months before, bringing the home machine to arcade parity. Ridge Racer on the PlayStation carried the same seismic shock, but in half the time. Just one year separates the arcade and home versions, and despite some fabulous showboating from Sega’s Models 1 and 2, Sega Rally Championship on the Saturn comes a little too late to redress the failings of the Daytona USA conversion, which even the most conciliatory viewpoint has to admit falls quite some distance short of Ridge Racer’s lofty bar.
Ridge Racer became a generational herald. Ridge Racer V serves as a launch title for PlayStation 2 alongside Tekken Tag Tournament6, and yet again with Ridge Racers for the PlayStation Portable and Ridge Racers 6 and 7 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 respectively. The game’s significance as a cultural marker is in some ways more important than its status as the top arcade racer. It’s actually challenged relatively quickly in that regard. Arguably Wipeout and Wipeout 2097 start to leech some of the raw velocity and it’s not long before Burnout begins its march towards domination in the PlayStation 2 era. As an aside, it’s interesting that Burnout becomes defined by Burnout 3’s brutality and crashy violence more than Burnout 2’s more purist boost-chain time trialling. Burnout 2 has some sublime tracks for drifting enthusiasts, where the balance of boosting to drift to boost offers some delicious flowstate trajectories, not to mention Burnout 2 having a much less codified and compromised crash mode, where improvisation and luck offer far more serendipitous results than Burnout 3’s unquestioning deference to the score multiplier. It’s a sad fact that the final home console instalment of Ridge Racer is Unbounded, a desperately shameless attempt to join in with Burnout 3’s thrall of automotive carnage. As such, it seems morally debased to even consider it a true Ridge Racer game. I mean, I felt morally debased when Namco introduced boosting. I soon got over it with Ridge Racer 6, which was the game I bought with my first Xbox 360. Let’s just say that spinning 720s at full boost off those bridge jumps gave me more than enough personal braggadocio to forgive the taint.
It is a coincidence that Ridge Racer stopped being an emblematic launch title when home consoles became customised PCs (or customised tablets), but it bears some romantic resonance. For Ridge Racer 7 to be the final fanfare for that last generation of truly exotic, purpose-built gaming hardware is a fitting end to the circle. The idea that the Ridge Racers were pilot ships for the heady days of real-time rendered, texture-mapped polygons as they marched from chunky pixels with meagre lighting to near photo-real over the space of a decade, this singular and unparalleled racer demonstrates those landmark points of progress. Booting up Ridge Racer 7, I was struck with the graphical finesse and the deliberate choice to avoid direct photorealism. It seems that Ridge Racer was entirely happy leaving that chase to Gran Turismo and Forza et al, for Ridge Racer 7 has a different aesthetic. It’s slightly adjacent to Sega AM2’s ‘neo blue skies’ look, seen in Outrun 2, Sega Rally 3 or Afterburner Climax. This approaches photorealism with an exuberant stylistic filter, whereas Ridge Racer 7 has a deliberately synthetic, glossy sheen. I prefer to think of it as ‘arcade deluxe’, a baroque continuation of reduced-code 1980s professional simulation visuals, from which Namco’s early polygonal efforts drew their aspirations7. It’s a rich and intoxicating luxury. Somewhere along the midnight expressways and rollercoaster tunnels of Ridge Racer 7’s urban tracks, there resolves a point of visual drama where the confluence of rear light trails, dashing street lighting, concrete textures and raw, visceral speed abstracts into pure saturated style8. The flow state’s own abstraction, its peculiar rhythms and cadences, its accommodation of rotating viewpoints and instinctual massaging of your position towards the optimal, merge with the audiovisual into that wonderful form of intellectual music that can only spring from videogames in the thick of intense play. I’m not sure the last round of retro tributes understood that one essential vein that true Ridge Racer always celebrated, even in its least successful outings such as the Nintendo DS and Vita versions. At the same time, to see its colonisation of every platform aside Sega’s underlines a strange democracy, another validation of Ridge Racer as a mark on the bench, as a yardstick of something, its lineage defining the bounds of a magical era.
Alas, Ridge Racer now risks slipping into the virtual erasure of becoming just part of an increasingly distant past, save its depressingly cyclic resurrections in various mobile, F2P, microtransacted forms. Its significance, as I obviously believe, being criminally understated. But then, familiarity breeds contempt and for the critical body of the time, Ridge Racers 6 and 7 were perhaps too old-school for a generation obsessed with bifurcating the automotive videogame into increasingly bombastic destruction or increasingly accurate simulation. Too few cared for the purity of the arcade experience, instead looking with a slightly downward nose, towards the more child-friendly universalities of Mario Kart and Sega’s brief attempts to capture Nintendo’s karting glories. Ridge Racer shared much the same fate as Wipeout; once supreme achievements and statements of a new future, now niche old-hat. But I look forward to making a bigger deal of Ridge Racer 7. I want to put on a show with it, invite people to learn that delightful trick of engaging the drift, to find that rhythm and become lost in its sensory splendour. For it will not age, it will only mature. That ‘arcade deluxe’ visual style is more exciting now because of its deliberate artificiality, so who knows? Perhaps it’s time again to get off to a great start and give the announcer exactly what he wanted to see. Maybe in VR, or perhaps projected onto a vast screen, there’s a certainty that Ridge Racer’s conveyance of speed will alway thrill the unfamiliar. With two generations of hardware passing its last entries and new generations of gamers who never had the chance to tire of its charms, maybe we need Ridge Racer’s focused purity more than ever.
[21]
Honestly, it was like a spoon in a bucket.
As if you didn't know, Ridge Racer is all about max throttle whenever you're pressing the gas. I have no idea why the machine even had a brake pedal.
In 1994, the idea of a big, mainstream videogame having Gabba in its soundtrack was fucking wild. For the most part, actual hardcore dance music was fairly absent. Instead, you got videogame composer ‘ideas’ of dance music, which were generally awful. And yes, I even mean that embarrassingly thin version of Megablast from Xenon 2. Ridge Racer was the first game I recall having raw, uncompromised rave tunes. They had a certain Japanese sensibility, but retained a credible edge. This thrilled almost as much as the visuals.
Tekken on a Japanese import, playing in greyscale with a tiny pad. Extraordinarily stoned, I spent an entire night button-mashing each character’s arcade mode and retired with the kind of cramps in my thumb muscles that I hadn’t seen since trying to waggle a Speedking as furiously as possible to secure victory in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.
Sharing a similar, but far smaller, place is the Destruction Derby demo. Where Ridge Racer promised the arcade, Destruction Derby showed the power of polygons to simulate damage and deformation. Considering the previous best was Chase HQ, the leap felt chasmic.
There is a certain sadness that Ridge Racer and Tekken were launch stablemates for two generations but not that final third one. There’s a nobility in preserving the lineage of arcade archetypes on home machines that peters out at 360/PS3. Perhaps fittingly so.
It’s important to note that children of the 1980s were frequently shown glimpses of professional realtime simulations via TV, in the form of pilot training clips, accident reconstructions and so on. Gameshow The Krypton Factor eventually included a flight simulator as a regular round in the weekly competition. The values of the time prised high resolutions but hardware constraints meant low detail, impressing a geometric aesthetic style that defines the then cutting edge.
I am certain that Ridge Racer 7 style is informed by the same light trails of Akira’s signature motocycle battle and Golgo 13’s car sequence.