The original Sega Rally was released back in 1995 and marked a new direction for Sega. They kept the bright, brash and glorious spirit that inhabited all of their best Arcade games such as Virtua Racing and Daytona USA but were now focusing on a far more direct and practical handling model.
Players weaned on the Model 2 Sit Down cabinet in Daytona USA were given a rude awakening when they set off from a standing start in Sega Rally.
The Player found themselves no longer violently switching down to second gear to initiate a drift round a corner, they were now performing that naturally when the car was over steering when transferring from a tarmac surface to Mud whilst wrestling the steering wheel to find traction. It was a revelation back in 1995 and to this day the game, either on the Sega Saturn or in an Arcade, is immensely playable and has a great deal of charm.
Fast forward to the 21 century and the driving landscape is no longer the same. The bastions of driving games such as Namco and Sega have been outclassed in every possible way by Polyphony, Turn 10, Bizarre Creations and Sim Bin. There is still room for an Arcade inspired racing game in this world as Burnout Paradise and Ridge Racers proves, but before 2007 it had been so long since Sega decided to dip its toe in, you would be forgiven to imagine none of it’s back catalogue would ever get a chance to spread their wings again.
Cue the release of Sega Rally in 2007. Developed by Sega Racing Studios in the UK, made up of many of the developers who designed the original Colin McRae Rally, who in turn were inspired by original Sega Rally, it looked like a Arcade racer fans dream. A development house who’s sole task and responsibility was to take dormant Sega racing licences and bring them kicking and screaming to the new generation of Arcades.
By all accounts they done what was asked of them and produced what has become one of the most underrated and least admired Sega racing game of all time.
The game looks fantastic with an art style that is reminiscent of classic Arcade games, with perfect palm tress placed postcard like over the track, and vistas that just caught your eye as you drifted around a hairpin. The games producer mentioned in pre-release interviews that the games artists and track designers made beautiful locations but were creating content that was too much like real life that they were banal. They had to learn to be placed and created just perfectly, to exaggerate real life and twist it so anything is possible.
One of their most inspired touches is in the Artic stages with the northern lights overhead, always twinkling beautifully where there is almost no section of the track where it is not dominant in the sky. Sega Rally is inundated with so many touches, it feels the development team completely understood the style that Sega and Namco used to create their tracks with.
Of course it is not possible to create a racing game that pays homage to past glories without bringing its own cards to the table and in that, Sega Rally has that base covered too. The control of the cars has been given even greater nuance and depth thanks to the track deformation, which has still not been bettered or even attempted since. When the car passes over a section on Mud the cars tyres carve out that area so not only is their resistance when you drive over the track, but thanks to Sega Rally’s unique circuit based locations, you will drive over the same section again. This leads to challenges whereby a section of the track that was a water splash on the opening lap, has turned into a trench with the main body of water now filling the grooves where cars have drove through it. On the final lap the entire pack has to split up throughout the track to avoid pot holes, sections covered in water and trenches calved into thick pools of Mud. With its unique simulation of rally deformation, the simple but deep control has been given time to be enjoyed since its release and has far more sensitivity and characteristics then the series has offered up to this point.
It’s even more of a shame that with all of Sega Rally’s qualities, the game was not a commercial success and the Studio was shut down in 2008. The teams quality and commitment to the franchise was unprecedented and with reports that they were in the preproduction phase of designing a new Daytona USA, it’s a genuine loss that the studio was cut down in it’s infancy.
Sega Rally is beautiful with scenery and vistas bright and colourful unlike anything now seen in modern games, has a depth to the control that goes deeper than any of it’s predecessors, pushes the technology with track deformation that has not been copied since Sega Racing Studio pioneered it and is one of the best arcade racing games ever made.
If you have not had a chance to play this underplayed classic, I urge you to do so.