Scud Race
1996 · Racing · Arcade
About Scud Race
Scud Race (1996), Sega Super GT in North America, is Sega's first racing game on the Model 3 board, modelled on the BPR Global GT Series and hailed as the most gorgeous arcade driving game of its day.
Scud Race in Depth
Built in twin or deluxe cabinets that can be linked for up to eight players, the game is modelled on the BPR Global GT Series, featuring the cars of four prominent teams of the 1996 season. Every opponent car apart from the selectable ones is a Renault Alpine GTA/A610. There are four courses of varying difficulty, two of them beginner level in day and night versions, and as with Daytona USA, operators can switch on Grand Prix or Endurance modes for longer races. Its heads-up display and handling resemble Daytona's, but acceleration while drifting changes drifting strategy radically.
The 1997 update, Scud Race Plus, allowed every course to be raced in reverse and added a bizarre "Super-Beginner" course, an oval inside a giant children's playhouse with a rocking horse and bowling pins to hit, where players can race as a cat, a tank, an "AM2 crew" bus or a tin racing car. It was never marketed outside Japan, though switching the region setting gives "Sega Super GT Plus".
Making Scud Race
After Daytona USA, fans expected a sequel, and director Toshihiro Nagoshi said that with the same team many assumed one was automatic; instead, an arcade test game called Supercar evolved into Scud Race, which he felt had "a completely different look". Sega AM4 designed the cabinet. It was planned as the first Model 3 game but was pushed back for marketing reasons to follow Virtua Fighter 3, and made its world debut at the ATEI show in London on 21 January 1997 after a location test in California. A Saturn version was reported in April 1997, expected to need a proposed 64-bit upgrade cartridge, but never appeared.
Game Machine listed it as Japan's second most successful dedicated arcade game in its 1 March 1997 issue. Hyper gave it five stars, and Next Generation called it "the most gorgeous driving game ever to grace an arcade", a "visual masterpiece" with realistic speeds that players "have never ever experienced".
Scud Race Trivia
- It was renamed Super GT in North America because "scud" recalled the Scud missiles of the then-recent Gulf War.
- During testing, key members of the team raced the four real cars featured in the game.
- AM2 head Yu Suzuki, though not on the team, advised on the drift handling and sound sampling.
- A Dreamcast port was shown as a tech demo in 1998 but cancelled, and the game has never had a console release.
- Its four tracks appear as an unlockable route in the Xbox version of OutRun 2.
Sources & further reading
- Scud Race — Wikipedia
