Sega Touring Car Championship

About Sega Touring Car Championship

Sega Touring Car Championship (1996) is Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Model 2 arcade racer, inspired by German DTM footage, praised for its speed and realism but criticised for its difficulty.

Sega Touring Car Championship in Depth

Built for the Model 2 board, it was housed in a sit-down cabinet with speakers either side of the player's head and a subwoofer under the seat. It has four tracks, one of them secret and unlocked by reaching the season's final race. Critics generally praised its remarkable sense of speed and realism, but felt those same qualities made it excessively difficult; Next Generation called it "the most painstakingly realistic driving game yet", requiring extreme precision through corners and fractions of a second shaved off lap times.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi of Sega AM3 was inspired by a video of the Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft he saw while working on Manx TT Super Bike: the cars' interiors "looked just like F1 Grand Prix", the races were full of crashes, and the competing nations gave it a "nationalistic battle atmosphere". Development began in April 1996. The staff researched it through videos, magazines, books and races, some riding as passengers with championship drivers, and every engine sound was sampled from real cars. Securing the many sponsor decals took Mizuguchi to Europe and the US about three times. A techno soundtrack was chosen to match the acceleration, with tracks from Belgian and Italian artists produced through Avex Trax and four Japanese musicians picked by audition.

Making Sega Touring Car Championship

Sega AM Annex, a new internal division led by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and made up of transferred and newly hired staff, developed it, and Sega released it in arcades in 1996. Ports to the Sega Saturn, with split-screen multiplayer, and Microsoft Windows followed. Reviews were mixed.