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For me, it's Out Run.
Always was, always will be.
This year the game that changed my life forever turned 40 years old. I want to take a moment to mention what this game has meant to me, and to thank its creator Yu Suzuki.
I also have a little surprise up my sleeve for all Out Run lovers, to celebrate this anniversary. If you read (or just scroll) to the end, I promise you will not be disappointed.
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I was 10 years old when the game was released.
As you all know, there are three models: The stand-up arcade, the mini cabinet, and the deluxe sit-down cabinet with motors moving the cabinet around as you drive.
The first version I saw was the deluxe model, and I had never seen anything like it. The whole cabinet was tilting and shaking like something straight out of Star Wars, and the graphics...the graphics were impossible. They were just too great. It simply could not be done. I felt sure it was somehow illegal.
The sound effects, the music tracks, the little humorous details, the force feedback in the steering wheel that would shake violently when you crashed - absolutely everything about this game was 10/10. But the result of all such perfection combined was something even bigger.
The feeling you got when driving the car was 11/10.
I called it "The Out Run Feeling" and it came to define what greatness meant to me. Yu Suzuki had managed to forge an experience that was not just immersive - it was larger than life.
For a quarter, you could experience that perfect feeling of driving a red Ferrari Testarossa down the open highway, blue sky, palm trees whizzing by, blonde by your side, overtaking huge trucks that change lanes as you out run them. All to a soundtrack that perfectly captures the vibe.
Yu has said that Out Run is not a racing game, it is a driving game. It is about a feeling. That Out Run Feeling.
There will never be another game like it. There have been sequels, all of them good, but none of them as good. The original just nailed it, any deviation is bound to be worse.
10 year old me took all of this in and understood it completely during the first split second I beheld the game, in one pure, overwhelming moment. I became instantly obsessed. I entered a trance that has never lifted since.
I wanted to spend every waking moment playing Out Run. But I didn't have that many quarters. I also didn't have access to an Out Run machine, except for one week per year when my family went on vacation to a hotel that had "my" machine.
There was only one solution, for a young boy who could not stop thinking, dreaming about, and obsessively studying every pixel in the game - and who could already code a bit. I would implement Out Run myself, on my Commodore 64 home computer.
It did not work out. But, as you can probably guess, not for a lack of trying. I tried. Every day, and especially every night, I tried. But I could not get anything to look right. Not the way the palm trees grew from the horizon. Not the way the road turned.
The fact that I couldn't even get the car to look anything like the real thing on an 8-bit C64 with 16 colors was not the issue. I was prepared to accept that, if I could just get the road to act right and the sprites to grow correctly. That would give me that "Out Run Feeling". I just knew it would.
Turns out it didn't.
About a year later, when the official C64 version of the game came out, I had to admit that they had accomplished what I couldn't, which was to get the basic math right. Their roads turned mostly the right way. Their roadside objects grew as well as 8 bits could be expected to muster.
And it was not enough, net even nearly. I did not get That Out Run Feeling. I needed it to be closer to the arcade. Much closer.
That is not to say I didn't spend a good part of the following years playing the C64 version of the game, but it was mostly to study how the road behaved and trying to figure out the math and comparing to my own experiments.
The buy was not entirely a bust, however. The C64 version came bundled with a cassette tape containing the original arcade Out Run songs. That was playing on repeat in my room, making the purchase feel like well spent money.
As I eventually graduated from my C64 to an Amiga 500, my Out Run hopes and dreams came to center on a promised upcoming Amiga version. With a 16-bit machine, and a 4096 color palette, surely I would soon be cruising down the high way among those palm trees and gleefully crashing in the S curve. I could already hear the music playing.
Well, I could. It was playing in my Sony Walkman.
You can never imagine my face when the official Amiga 500 version turned out to be terrible. Not even Edvard Munch could have captured my emotions on that black day.
Still! 16 bits! It had to be possible. I had even heard that the original Out Run arcade machine used a chip similar to the one in my Amiga - it just seemed destined to be!
I would simply have to do it myself, which was the solution that my obsession always insisted on anyway.
Long episode (in this even longer story) short: I failed. Turns out 13 year old me was even worse at implementing Out Run on the Amiga than the hacks who wrote the official version.
But I wasn't failing entirely. The palm trees were starting to grow towards the camera in a nice way. I knew, with the certainty that only a maniac can maintain, that one day I would succeed. And an important (to me) plan began to form that would keep me motivated over the years:
That eventually I would not only recreate but even *enhance* That Out Run Feeling, by adding support for wide screen. And multi player. In my head, playing multi player Out Run on a wide screen would probably be more psychedelic than LSD.
One day. But that day was not imminent. Computers became better. I became better at coding. Every so often, I would return to my obsession and try to implement Out Run, and fail. Every time, my respect for Yu Suzuki grew even more.
Once I got my first PC I could conclude that the PC version was also not good. It was starting to seem like nobody was able to match what a small team of Japanese masters at SEGA had accomplished in only 10 months, even as home computer hardware was catching up with, and surpassing, the arcade machine.
The simple truth was that the original arcade game was perfect, a true work of genius, and it was extremely cleverly made.
The code, and the custom hardware, is a collection of hundreds of very cunning tricks - math tricks, perspective tricks, hardware tricks, you name it - that together have been honed into a symphony of perfection. If anything is a little off, everything is totally off, and "That Out Run Feeling" won't happen.
That was why none of the versions on other machines were ever any good. They were always several tricks short of a full bag. My dream of being able to lock myself in a room with a home computer and play Out Run with That Genuine Out Run Feeling 24/7 seemed more distant by the day.
Then, around the turn of the millennium, finally everything changed.
That's when MAME Out Run managed to get the real, original, honest-to-your-favorite-deity, actual arcade Out Run working on a home PC. It did so by emulating the original hardware, and then running the original code from the original ROMs on the emulation.
Finally, every trick in the bag was actually being used in exactly the way it was originally intended, and everything looked exactly right. My dream had actually come true. I was, to put it mildly, pretty thrilled. And I played a lot of Out Run.
Alexander the Great wept when there was no more land to conquer.
Was my life empty now, that my life long dream had been fulfilled? Hardly. Not only was I playing Out Run and getting That Out Run Feeling whenever I wanted, but I also had a new dream.
A few years before MAME Out Run came out, the early web had started to happen, and I was on it. And my new dream - about as realistic as Out Run on the C64 had been some 15 years earlier - had become to run Out Run in a browser.
These were the Netscape days, and it was obviously not going to work - yet. But that didn't stop me from experimenting to see how far you could get. Not very far, was the predictable answer, but as Edison would have said: Now I knew a few more ways Out Run couldn't be done!
Having already seen a couple of decades of the pace at which computers evolved, I realized that one day it might become possible, so I dreamed of the future.
The reason it seemed like an exciting idea to me was that I envisioned extending the game with something like a "world wide web of Out Run tracks".
People should not only be able to design their own courses and publish them like web pages, but also "hyperlink" the tracks to each other.
The experience for a user would be to come driving down a track designed by Alice, then come to the famous Out Run fork in the road: take left to end up on a track designed by Bob or take right to end up on a track designed by Caesar. And then keep driving forever like that on a network of roads that never ends, just like the web.
The problem with MAME Out Run was that, being a direct hardware emulator, it was very hard to modify or extend the game in such a way as I had in mind. This is due to all the game code being in original machine code targeted specifically for the arcade's micro processors.
For advanced modifications to be possible, or at least feasible, an actual rewrite of the game in a modern programming language would be required, where that new code could then easily be changed. But as we knew from history, all attempts at actually rewriting the game using new code had failed miserably.
The chances of getting any interesting modifications to the game, such as wide screen and multi player, thus looked bleak. The perfect conditions, in other words, for another Far Fetched Out Run Dream!
In 2012, that dream too came true.
That was when legendary hero Chris White released his "Cannonball" open source implementation of Out Run. A complete rewrite in C++, it was the result of painstakingly studying the original ROM code, figuring out exactly what everything did and meant, and then recreating the exact equivalent code but targeting modern hardware, using a modern programming language.
It had all the bag of tricks. It looked every bit as good as the MAME version (which looked practically as good as the real arcade) - in fact it looked even better, because now that the code could be easily modified, Cannonball had improved the game to support 60 FPS and wide screen.
The wide screen support blew me away. It was, frankly, every bit as cool and trippy as I had imagined all these years. It was the second time my Out Run Dreams had come true. I was very happy.
But I still couldn't quite let go of my old dream to get Out Run working in a browser. At some point, some fans compiled the code to WASM which technically meant it could run in a browser, but since the code wasn't browser native it didn't really lend itself to any of the ideas I had in mind.
My dream was about a browser native port, that could run anywhere a browser can run (desktops, phones, tables, TVs, etc) and that could be easily modified to extend the game in web native ways.
Time passed.
It is now a quarter of a century since my dream of playing Out Run on a home computer came true, which I had waited 15 years for at the time. It is more than a decade ago that my dream of a modified version with wide screen support came true.
But as Out Run now celebrates 40 years, my decades long dream of Out Run in a browser has still not come true. Neither has my 40 year long dream of a multi player version.
But I have learned to never give up on Out Run Dreams.
Reading all this you may well have come to the conclusion that I am simply what doctors refer to as "crazy". This may be so. But I am not alone.
Not only are there millions of Out Run fans out there, with the game generally considered as one of the best of all time. There are also many other fans with similar obsessions over the game engine, and even with similar ideas about playing Out Run in a browser, with online multi player and an infinite web of tracks.
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That is why I am so very excited and pleased to announce that in celebration of the 40th birthday of Out Run, and as a tribute to Yu Suzuki, I intend to release a web native version of arcade Out Run working in a browser.
"WebRun" is a new TypeScript implementation of Out Run, using Cannonball as a reference, that brings the original arcade experience - and more - to your browser, making it playable on practically any device.
As per usual with emulators, it will be Bring Your Own ROMs. It will be fully open source and there will be a web site where you can play the game and find other players to race against.
Extended game features include:
✅Multi Player
✅Ghost Racing
✅Ultrawide Screen Support
✅Track Editor
✅Infinite Web of User Tracks.
✅Touch Screen, Game pad, Wheel Support.
As an additional twist, I am also fulfilling yet one more Out Run Dream that I have had for about 5 years now, which is to deploy Out Run permanently to blockchain, available for everyone forever.
The Internet Computer makes this possible, so in the coming days I will announce the release of the first on-chain Out Run arcade emulator, running fully in a browser.
Hi scores, ghost runs, custom tracks, multi player lobbies and more will also run fully on-chain - permanent, permissionless, unstoppable.
Out Run Fans - Stay Tuned
We're about to finally play ultra wide, multi player, online, on-chain, Infinite Out Run!
Because Out Run Dreams Do Come True.
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Thank You Mr. Suzuki. Your master piece has inspired and motivated me my whole life, and it is a major reason I am a programmer. I hope some day to see you on the tracks playing multi player Out Run in glorious ultra wide. It's a trip.
#OutRun #OutRunMultiPlayer #OutRunInBrowser
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