Hydro Thunder

About Hydro Thunder

Hydro Thunder (1999) is Midway's arcade powerboat racer, with boost-fuelled jumps through settings from the Arctic to a flooded New York, which became a Dreamcast launch game and began Midway's Thunder series.

Hydro Thunder in Depth

Similar in feel to Daytona USA, the game races high-tech speedboats through hazardous settings, from the cold seas of the Arctic Circle to a post-apocalyptic New York City. Blue and red boost icons, the red rarer and worth more, fill a boost tank; boosting increases speed and lets the player's boat knock rivals into the air, which the game calls the Mighty Hull. Braking while boosting performs a Hydro Jump, which with the many ramps reaches shortcuts and boosts that are otherwise out of reach.

Boats and tracks come in easy, medium, hard and bonus classes. Easy boats handle best but are slowest, hard boats are fast but difficult to control, and the four bonus boats mix qualities. Finishing in the top three on easy tracks unlocks medium ones, the top two on medium unlocks hard, and winning on hard tracks opens the bonus tracks, whose wins unlock the bonus boats. The arcade game had two bonus tracks, New York Disaster and Nile Adventure, plus a hidden Hydro Speedway; the home versions added Catacomb and Castle Von Dandy.

Making Hydro Thunder

Midway released Hydro Thunder in arcades in February 1999. Next Generation wrote that "Midway has finally created the boat-racing game that will bring this sub-genre to the forefront." It came to the Dreamcast as a launch title later that year, with graphics closest to the arcade version and "just shy of being a perfect conversion" according to Next Generation, and to the PlayStation, which added a career mode, and Nintendo 64 in early 2000. GameRankings recorded favourable reviews for the Dreamcast version and mixed ones for the others; GamePro praised its visuals and physics but noted two-player slowdown and limited replay value, and Edge called it "aggressive, surreal and compulsive" but "not Mario Kart on water". A sequel was cancelled, but the game spawned the Thunder series of Offroad Thunder and Arctic Thunder, and Microsoft released Hydro Thunder Hurricane on Xbox Live Arcade in 2010.