Published in Arcadia Issue 41 (October, 2003). Pre-release interview with OutRun 2 Planner/Assistant Director Shin Ishikawa, and Producer Makoto Osaki.
Waiting for divine intervention
Kyasao (Arcadia): Alright, let’s go ahead and get started. During the heyday of Out Run, what were you doing?
Osaki (Sega): I was a hardcore gamer then. I was probably around high school age during Out Run era. I joined Sega in ’93, so I was probably more like the Power Drift generation. While we’re on the topic of Power Drift, my accomplishments include getting a national record in Power Drift. (laughs)
All: Whoa… (laugh)
Kyasao: The days of sharing techniques and score competitions really were Sega’s golden age.
Osaki: It sure was. That kind of skill curve was important. To tell you the truth, mechanics like Out Run’s Gear Gacha and Daytona USA’s Gear Drift weren’t deliberately added to the game.
Kyasao: Oh, really? The one where you switch from 2nd or 1st gear to 4th gear?
Osaki: That’s the one. Honestly, I didn’t even know about it until the game was released.
Kyasao: Wait, but that’s…
Osaki: It’s super cool, right? (laughs) But I worked on the game and even I didn’t know about it. It totally happened by chance.
Kyasao: Reaaally?
Osaki: It was a greater power.
Out Run was like that, and Turbo OutRun was too. The fact that you go faster on the outside track in Power Drift is also like that. Daytona USA was also like that. Around here, you can’t put these things in intentionally. So we told the programmers to make it so these sort of things come up unintentionally. (laughs)
I think that if we make the game perfectly to spec, it becomes less fun. So I think a certain amount of freedom for players to experiment and exploit is crucial. If you don’t have chance discoveries, there’s no mystique or legends surrounding the game.
It’s a very complex topic, but do you get what I’m saying? For the sake of the end result, you have to leave some things to a greater power.
Kyasao: The things that make score attacking fun, including techniques like Gear Gacha, are miraculous… right?
Deciding against cards
Kyasao: By the way, this game has no card system, right? In the age of games like Initial D and World Club Champion Football (WCCF), selling a game without a card system seems kinda…
Osaki: It takes some courage, huh? We had considered various options, but the end decision was to not use cards. For something like Initial D, using cards was a foregone conclusion.
Kyasao: What do you mean?
Osaki: The story revolves around Takumi’s growth, right? Going up against Emperor, winning against Bunta… If you could play all of that in one credit, it would be insanely long. Besides, everyone remembers the source material, right? Wanting to find out how fast Emperor and Bunta are serves to keep your motivation to continue up.
Card systems have two main uses. The first is a simple save function, similar to console games. Initial D would fall into this category. The other one is for keeping track of Vs. Data like in Virtua Fighter 4 and Sega MJ Mahjong. Right now, those are really the only two uses out there. WCCF and The Key of Avalon use paper cards, but they don’t store any data.
So, if we consider the type of game OutRun is, the most applicable card solution is… none.
Ishikawa (Sega): If we decided to use cards anyways, it would be something like coloring your Ferrari or putting weird stickers on it… Ferrari would definitely not like that.
All: Jeez, that’d be bad. (laugh)
Osaki: Even if we made it so you could change the order of the courses you play, the second stage would need to have difficulty befitting a second stage. But even so, if we made it like choosing Akina or Myougi in Initial D, OutRun would end after the first stage. I think that if we made it so you needed to continue to play the second stage, people would get pretty mad.
Ishikawa: Even though we’ve made new characters for the game, they don’t have the appeal or memorability of something like Initial D’s Takahashi brothers or Takumi.
Kyasao: For sure, Initial D has great characters.
Osaki: Indeed. So much so that some girls play the game just for the card designs. But it’d be hard with OutRun’s fairly blank-slate characters.
Shimoda (Arcadia): Well, what if Jacky Bryant was in the game?
Osaki: We considered something like that too. And have the girl be Sarah or Aoi or Vanessa. Though we thought Vanessa wasn’t really the type to just ride quietly in the passenger seat.
Kyasao: If Jacky’s there, I’d feel like I don’t need to be there (laughs)
Osaki: Right? So there’s no reason to include something like that either.
If we make it so if you don’t have a card you can’t play the game, we’re narrowing the audience. If you’re a player, it takes some guts to play enough to buy a card. Like, you buy the card once, and then feel like you need to play the game until the very end. We were worried about that for Initial D. For WCCF, soccer is popular enough now that feelings like “I wanna get Trezeguet!” are enough to get people to spend money. It’s nice because soccer is a subject where we don’t have to worry about that.
Other than that, we had a plan to include a system like in Initial D where you could upgrade your car. But that system was only in Initial D because it fits an Initial D game. In the source material, they’re constantly getting better. So it makes sense.
But, in a game like OutRun, it doesn’t fit.
Ishikawa: Beyond that, we explored all sorts of possibilities, but in the end, we’re not going to go ahead with a plan we can’t find appeal in.
Osaki: That’s a frank way of putting it. But yes, that’s no good. So we went all in on a pure experience. You clear the A course, and then think that such-and-such looks easy so you decide to do such-and-such next, and in the end you try to master every course. You try out Time Attack too. You look at the internet rankings to see how fast you are. You can have fun without a card. There’s other enjoyable ways to play.
Kyasao: This is the real way games ought to be, huh.
Osaki: I briefly wondered if in a way, I was trying to escape from modernization. But if I tack things on to the game without reason, that’s inconsiderate to our players.
Kyasao: I seeee. You’re saying it’s not a good thing to unconditionally add a card system to a game. If something has been included in the game, it’s because it’s something that contributes meaning to the game.
Osaki: So, OutRun 2 does not have cards.
Kyasao: Thank you for your time.