Rad Racer retrospective: The silver Star | NES Works

Squaresoft returns with its second game, and its second game to feature 3D tech. This one's a little different than The 3-D Adventures of WorldRunner, though, even if what we saw in American worked the same. Ah, the rabbit hole of Japan-only Famicom add-ons!
Rad Racer marks the beginning of many things, from the Famicom 3-D System to the career of mad RPG genius Akitoshi Kawazu, but it also brings us to the end of an era. Pour one out for pixellated box art, friends.
Video Works is funded through Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its KZbin debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.

[@duffman18]

I can't get enough of this channel. You cover so many games nobody else does because you're literally covering all of them. And the history and context you have to research and put in the video is just a level above the vast majority of gaming channels. I've learned so many new things about games and the developers and little bits of trivia around each game that I've never heard before, even when you do popular and already very thoroughly reviewed games, you always have something new to tell us I really need to buy your books. And the arcade grip thing you sell, cos I wanna play Pacman and stuff on my switch properly with the vertical screen. But last time I checked, I couldn't find the books or the grip for sale in the UK. I'll just keep being a patron for now. But this project is important and necessary. Games need to be preserved, they are art. It is the same as people collecting and preserving rare paintings. Maybe that sounds a bit silly, but it's not, and 100 years from now we'll have these videos and these books and the lesser known games will be preserved, and by then everybody will agree that all games are a form of art

[@JeremyParish]

Thanks!

[@absolutezeronow7928]

I just bought NES Works 1985 last month. Was definitely worth the purchase.

[@duffman18]

@@absolutezeronow7928 I'll have to see about importing it. I hope the postage fees aren't too much. I think I was hoping it'd be on amazon or something lol

[@bluekewne]

Rad Racer holds a close place in my heart as it was my grandma's favorite - we would play it all the time. She passed away in 2004, but I occasionally dust this game off to remember our time together.

[@micrmay1000]

I find myself enjoying games like Rad Racer and Outrun more and more the older I get. There's just something about A-B driving games that soothes my soul.

[@saturncrush]

This hands down one of the games that deserves an updated sequel.

[@KesorodaBlk]

There's a game on the PlayStation 4 that plays similar to Rad Racer. Horizon Chase Turbo.

[@thestripedmenace]

@@KesorodaBlk HCT is more inspired by 16-bit Euro racers like Top Gear and Lotus Turbo Challenge, though - to the point that the Brazilian team behind it got the original composer for those games to work with them on the console/PC releases of it :)

[@Projectwolfie21]

It's Square, so be careful what you wish for when it comes to this kind of thing.

[@geekgo4]

They could just have Noctis drive his car in this style.

[@saturncrush]

Just imagine in the modern take if it was sort of like Einhänder, in addition to an element where the changing the music changes the spec and attributes of the car.

[@siskavard]

I remember Rad Racer being absolutely mind-blowing to play as a kid, it's really hard now to imagine why but... I do remember being extremely shocked by how cool it was.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

Well, everyone did. It was RAD.

[@Jayce_Alexander]

I don't find it hard to imagine why. Smooth scrolling, great sense of speed, good controls. It was arguably the best home version of Outrun available at the time, even though it wasn't actually Outrun. :P

[@jhoughjr1]

it was just a great game.

[@mattiasjohansson1727]

My theory is that since Rad Racer, Kid Icarus and Metroid all are using MMC1 mappers, the silver package was a short lived attempt to distinguish MMC1 games from regular ones, before the aesthetics was dropped altogether.

[@dumpnchase]

I too had the injury on my hand from Rad Racer. But it was worth it. Lol

[@rootbeer_666]

This was the only NES game my mom liked. She and my dad, who had an Atari 2600 and played regularly even after I was born in ‘81, derided games for the NES saying “they all looked the same”. Boggled the mind. I never actually owned it, instead borrowing it semi-regularly from my cousin, and somehow managed to get all the way to level 5 in Rad Racer, the nighttime Los Angeles stage with the Countach as the rival car. There is a level select cheat that involves the blocks on the tachometer on the title screen: pressing A or B-I forget which-will fill in a pair of blocks, with each pair representing a level, up to 8. You can also watch the game’s ending by filling the tachometer eight times-64 button presses. I forget what you had to do in order to access this cheat though, I don’t think you simply pressed buttons and skipped levels right off the bat. I got some serious, visceral nostalgia from this video, surprisingly more so than videos for games I was closer to, like Metroid. Huh.

[@Michaelpatrickwarren]

So glad to see appreciation of this game. Was my favorite on the nes.

[@DSMTheEditor]

Man, how did I not know Jeremy was doing all these retrospectives on KZbin until now? I'm down the rabbit hole from the beginning of Game Boy Works now.

[@therush757]

For Christmas ‘88 I got a NES and this game. Good times.

[@jasongarrett768]

Still hunting for a Rad Racer/Highway Star reference in Final Fantasy XIV. It still awes me that so much of the core FF team (and the extended series family with Saga) was accounted for with this game.

[@citizenmono]

Rad Racer was not only my first racing game, but the only racing game I played period until MarioKart 64, at least 6 years after I first played Rad Racer. But since I was very young and I guess we must have gotten it second hand with only the cartridge, I had no idea about 3D mode, didn't remember it was a Square game, and definitely had no idea about the all star team that worked on it! I am glad I remembered correctly that it was a good game, though, whenever I see an NES games I played as a kid I worry it'll get panned as terrible, lol. Thanks for putting so much work into this series.

[@jessragan6714]

Dang, Nintendo had 3D glasses too? I remember Sega had similar technology, but... Another thing I remember is that in an issue of Nintendo Power, some kid wrote in to say that "Rad Racer really out-runs the competition, if you get my drift." Yes, very subtle swipe at Sega there.

[@n64thstreet]

Speaking from first-hand experience, I can handily say that both Square games are the best uses for those glasses. Nintendo's 3D Hot Rally is a less good Outrun clone, and 4 of the 5 other titles the glasses support are essentially Space Harrier clones, but Nasir's work translated the smoothest to shutter shades for sure. The Nintendo glasses are interchangeable with the Sega ones, for what that's worth since it's the same technology that neither invented.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

Hell, I used a pair from a National Geographic magazine from 2008 when I tried the 3D.

[@SamuelMcConnell]

Nary a word about the Power Glove!

[@JeremyParish]

That's apocryphal!

[@vaguerant]

"Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal." Guy should have taken Fred Savage's advice.

[@Fracassi1]

I was sure he would say something about the Power Glove when speaking of thumb stress.

[@DanielSong39]

Excellent game. One of the top 3 racing games in the NES, along with R.C. Pro-Am and Excitebike.

[@colophongames]

So I just started playing this a few days ago and was loving it, but got stuck around level 5. I watched this video and learned how to push up to Turbo, and guess what, the same pain came after my hands. Luckily I beat the last stage today and will take a bit of a break before I attempt Rad Racer II.

[@johnsimon8457]

5:46 you can see how they’re getting around the sprites per scanline limit by showing part of the opponent car every frame but always displaying *your* car. I wonder why Rare’s Slalom looks so much smoother than any of these other games? Another thing, I’m trying to reconcile “Yeah this is okay, but I wouldn’t play this for more than an hour.” with “This is a two million seller, outsold Megaman 2, way outsold Final Fantasy and all of the castlevania games” Even in the 80’s there’s ‘enthusiast’ games which don’t necessarily overlap with the mainstream titles as far as sales.

[@KuraIthys]

Technical limitations and tricks can always raise a lot of questions. These days sometimes people actually answer those questions by decompiling the game or modding it. Sometimes this answers actual technical questions... Sometimes it doesn't. An example of the latter is the modded version of Gradius III on SNES. Yes, the modded version runs with no slowdown whatsoever. Which is great and all, but is this some kind of optimisation wizardry? Not particularly. - it's simply a modification to make it run on the SA-1 instead. Since that's basically the same CPU but running 3 or 4 times as fast... Yeah. When it comes to sprite handling... There's technical limitations of the graphics hardware, and then there's CPU performance limitations. Like, the NES can do 8 sprites per scanline and 64 sprites total. But that doesn't mean the CPU can update the position of 64 objects fast enough to actually show 64 simultaneous sprites. Plus the design of the graphics chip can influence what you can do. A C64 only has 8 hardware sprites, but the way they are implemented in hardware means if you can feed in new data at the appropriate time you can get more than that. (32 has been demonstrated in some games) The Atari 8 bit microcomputers meanwhile have only 8 hardware sprites, 4 of which are only 2 pixels wide. (and all are monochrome - though you can pair sets of two sprites to create 3 colour sprites) However, while a sprite may only be 2 or 8 pixels wide, it's 192 pixels tall. This means to make vertical movement happen you have to rewrite a fairly large chunk of memory each frame unless you can be more clever about updates. Conversely though, it also means you can simply draw a ton of graphics vertically, and the only thing you have to worry about during the actual frame update is the horizontal scrolling register. Now all of a sudden that 8 sprites can seem like dozens with relatively little extra work, so long as you remember that they cannot overlap on a single line. But, the question also remains... Can you multiplex sprites on a single line? Well, given the Atari's design... Yes you can. Obviously alternating frames is easy. But if you're fast enough, and precise enough, you can draw the same sprite hardware register on a single scanline by moving the position mid-line. This is an extremely difficult trick to pull off in terms of timing... But it IS possible. The hardware doesn't cause problems with it. Try this kind of trick on a SNES though, and you'd realise that the hardware isn't updating all the internal states of the sprites consistently; Try to draw the same hardware sprite by altering it's position on a single scanline, and chances are you'll just get some weird corruption. As for Rare... It's said a big part of what got them so cosy with Nintendo in the SNES and N64 eras is that they somehow reverse engineered the NES, with NO documentation or tools based solely on an imported Famicom they got hold of before the NES officially launched... And in spite of having no official information at all, they ended up understanding the hardware better than Nintendo themselves did. Rare is one of those developers that knew every quirk, every foible. Every minuscule detail of how the NES worked. Few companies knew the hardware that well. So unsurprisingly, few could match them in terms of technical accomplishment. Frequently not even Nintendo themselves...

[@bobbyunavailable]

This is a great one to add to NES Mini Classic.

[@baardbi]

I really appreciate your quality content. Why on earth don't you have more subscribers? Anyway I love the Works videos and I'm looking forward to many more to come.

[@n64thstreet]

This isn't meant as a "correction" really but the non-F1 cars are actually unique for each course. It's all the same car on each course, but always a different one and the manual itself literally describes them as the company the car was based on. One is a Citroën, literally the only time I ever saw that name pre-Gran Turismo, but the real gold nugget is that the final one is a Testarossa. It's also the only car that's referred to specifically by its model and not just the make.

[@jonothanthrace1530]

I almost choked on my water when you got to the line about "sculpted asses"

[@twerlertsperglesperblenerb9826]

stupid sexy Slalom...

[@RedLP5000S]

I love Rad Racer! I spent many many hours playing it bitd.

[@404cp]

It's Rad Racer! RRRAAAADDDDDDDDD RACERR! wait, wrong game.

[@SmashBrosOdyssey64]

Remember that one? RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD RACER1

[@MrJWTH]

404cp Look our it’s a giant enemy crab.

[@SmashBrosOdyssey64]

@@MrJWTH From an actual battle in Japanese history

[@lilwyvern4]

Another lesser-known legacy of Rad Racer: one of its songs was co-opted into Stinkoman 20X6's theme. Challenge and fighting and fighting the challenge tonight~

[@Coinspinner2]

I played this game at a friend's house and never knew about pressing up on the dpad. No wonder I never got anywhere.

[@LadyBrightcynder]

"Basic stunts and sculpted asses." - Jeremy Parish, 2020

[@JeremyParish]

They're welcome to put that quote on the box if they ever do a reissue

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

Jeremy Parish on Rad Racer: "A plain old racing game."

[@shane1489]

LOVED Mach Rider and Rad Racer!! LOVEDEDED

[@Larry]

Did Square ever do any other racing games? They seemed to have abandoned the concept entirely, even the driving degments in Final Fantaxy XV are on rails. But then again Capcom tried it the once then never touched it again.

[@cj694x2]

They did make a very early PS2 racing game, Driving Emotion Type-S. I've never played it, but I believe it was meant to be a racing sim, similar to Gran Turismo. Then there's Chocobo Racing for the PS1

[@thestripedmenace]

Yup! They later did Racing Lagoon on the PS1, in Japan only - back in the days they were trying to translate their JRPG know-how into other genres with games like Einhander (a shmup with Final Fantasy-caliber storytelling), Parasite Eve (a licensed JRPG/survival horror hybrid), Tobal (a 3D fighter/monster collecting/dungeon crawler hybrid) and Ehrgeiz (a wrestling game with RPG mechanics and cameo appearances by the FFVII cast)

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

@@cj694x2 And Chocobo Racing has Jack from 3D Worldrunner in it!

[@katt-the-pig]

I used to own this game. It took me years before I got good enough to beat it, but beat it, I did! Would've liked to have also owned Rad Racer II, but never got around to finding a copy. And unfortunately, no longer have my copy of Rad Racer 1 anymore, either. It got sold with a whole bunch of other NES games.

[@julescab]

I still play it to this day along outrun, excellent episode, great ending...

[@MissAshley42]

Few things pucker a sphincter harder than crashing in Rad Racer.

[@Fluoride_Jones]

Perfect timing! I just picked up a used cartridge on Sunday for $4.00! I also grabbed "Tiger Heli" for $6.00! Last time I went to the pawnshop, I got "3-D World Runner" (love that game) and "Rad Racer II." :))

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

That boost mechanic is the same deal as another Sega racer, Hang-On. Don't remember Outrun having that but it's been a while

[@abraveastronaut]

Sounds like Rad Racer was indeed pretty rad.

[@billny33]

Thank you for reminding me that I have to hold up in that game. I knew I was forgetting something.

[@dotdecorandmore7480]

Awesome video, but one thing... According to both the Japanese and North American instruction manuals, none of the opposing racers are palette swap clones of the player's car. The opposing cars are: Stage 1: Volkswagen Beetle Stage 2: Chevy Corvette Stage 3: Citroën (BX4TC) Stage 4: Mercedes Benz (not sure what model, but my guess is it's a 560 SL, which, in those days, was top line) Stage 5: Lamborghini (Countach) Stage 6: Lotus (Espirit) Stage 7: Porsche (911) Stage 8: Ferrari Testarossa

[@RockSoup]

The NES Advantage was the best way to play this game. Shifting gears with that joystick felt so dang good.

[@DanielSong39]

Rad Racer was Square's best selling game for the NES, selling ~2 million copies.

[@FloatingSunfish]

Can't wait for the next episode! Everyone, be sure to lend Jeremy your ears!

[@duffman18]

Join us and become a patron, you can then see videos weeks early

[@absolutezeronow7928]

Really liked playing Rad Racer when I was younger but yeah, it was intense. Looking forward to the greatness of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out next time (another game I loved as a kid).

[@MaidenHell1977]

Great great episode!!! Loved every second of it!

[@JaceyMitchell]

I love Rad Racer. I love old arcade games, and Outrun is one of my favorites (along with Chase HQ, which it has a lot in common with). It's hard at first, but once you get into the groove of the game it becomes oddly relaxing, and I always like to say it feels more like a driving game than a racing game because of it. Even though Rad Racer isn't quite at Outrun's level (and how could it, considering how advanced that hardware was for its time) it still lets you get into a similar groove that's just really pleasant once it clicks. And the sense of speed Rad Racer manages to pull off is pretty impressive considering the hardware, and in my opinion it's easily the best 8-bit Outrun clone out there. I think it even edges out Outrun's (quite excellent) Master System port by the slimmest of margins.

[@magus2342]

I sank more hours into this game than I want to remember. Never got really far into it, but it was a lot of fun!

[@Damaniel3]

It's definitely one of the more brutal games on the system. By the 4th course or so, you pretty much have to play flawlessly to make any progress.

[@magus2342]

@@Damaniel3 And that's about as far as I could get!

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

I'm not going to lie, I've been waiting for this one as I know basically NOTHING about Rad Racer. I've seen it around, but I've never been massively into racing games. Now, Astro Fang Super Machine however...

[@cyrixinstead4592]

Now, Astro Fang Super Machine however... awesome game, second best racer on the Fami after Taito Grand Prix, both well worth a play.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

I love that game, especially it's AMAZING song at the start, and it's nonsense plot about space vampires possessing cars or whatever it is.

[@Bloxed]

Rad Racer is hard to master but you're rad once you have become a master. But it's sad to see the Black Box / Silver Box style go away with a third-party game rather than first-party but it's still cool to see the first non-black box / Silver Box First Party game is a great way to start off the new trend... Great video!

[@deadpoinsettia]

Dude....your videos are fantastic. That is all, good day.

[@chamchamtrigger]

Damn you. You just had to mention Outrun. Now I'll be playing that game for the next 5 hours.

[@Hwi1son]

I literally hunted down 3D glasses not too long ago so I could play rad Racer in 3D.

[@Pichuscute]

I love this game. Bought it last year on Famicom and played the shit out of it. Never liked 2D racers much before this game, but man is this one good.

[@Dark.Shingo]

Now you got me thinking I can play this again, but configuring the emulator so the bumpers in the gamepad are up and down... that might work...

[@JeremyParish]

Let me know how it goes!

[@Dark.Shingo]

@@JeremyParish Well, it is more comfortable, but at the end it doesn't help you much. I noticed that while it helps to maintain a high speed and recover faster (since it takes away the pressure from your thumb) after breaking in the curves, the real challenge are the other cars, since bumping in them at certain angles sends you flying to any of the sides and crashing with a sign.

[@northdakotagamer]

The dry humor in this episode killed me

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

I love Rad Racer! Thanks to Nasir Gebelli the hills are just so much smoother and better than OutRuns, despite being on inferior hardware. So I just play Rad Racer and listen to OutRuns' ost for the ultimate combination. PS: They are not racing games, just driving games.

[@Technosphile]

Oh snap. Big episode coming up next. Take your time with that one.

[@Pablo121k]

My older brother loves this game!

[@kabutops87]

Ive never been able to finish this one. That last race where the opposing cars crash you out if you so much as brush there sides always crushes my hopes to beat it. I prefer the sequal, i can at least beat that one and the music is better.

[@ds3930]

I have the original 3D glasses that came with Rad Racer. They are flat plastic, not cardboard. I loved the game.

[@cowardlylion42]

You mentioned a half dozen races but I’m positive there were eight. Never managed to beat the last race though. Athens, I think.

[@cosbyje4200]

I have purchased 3 copies of Rad Racer 2 and none of them work. I love the first one and 30 years later still want to dabble in the second one.

[@jonnyeh]

So rad!

[@RogerPyoko]

And somehow in all that, you managed to avoid the one Rad Racer song that Homestar Runner made famous.

[@WhoIsSirChasm]

Challenge and fighting and fighting and challenge tonight~

[@jamesmoss3424]

Rad racers look good for me to play. 😀👍🎮

[@bloodeagle6458]

But why is there music sometimes and no music other times???

[@DanielSong39]

Most of the silver box games were very good.

[@otakubullfrog1665]

Little did you know back then that you weren't supposed to play Rad Racer with the D-pad at all, but rather with the Power Glove, because it's so bad.

[@JeremyParish]

Courageous of Nintendo to publish a game that could only be played with a third-party peripheral two years later

[@JeremyPeeples]

Surprised a ROM hasn't taken out the up-hold feature

[@natemendsen1629]

I like to think the famicon 3d version ended in the farlands

[@Riz2336]

Personally I like rad racer, I've beaten both of them but yeah man I hear ya they are tough

[@maximuscesar]

I always thought F1-Race was older than Rad Racer

[@maximuscesar]

Wow, now that I looked into it F1-Race actually never came out on the NES. It was a Famicom exclusive.

[@its_all_jazz]

5:58 My Life In Gaming episode used to show the Famicom 3D System is here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hKWUh6WLbtOtsLM

[@17madman39]

Can you link the outro music please?

[@lordmanimani-]

A big takeaway I have is that it was a mistake to localize "Highway Star" as "Highway Go Go" and not "Rad Racer" in JoJo Part 4.

[@lancewwu]

My thumb hurts just watching this 😉

[@elmosexwhistle]

YAY NES WORKS! YAY NES WORKS! YAY...

[@DieFischbude]

Finally!!!

[@zhelldog]

You press up to boost??? After 30 years I find out you PRESS UP TO BOOST????

[@Cameront9]

up to boost, down to select music.

[@donnierussellii4659]

The Atari 2600's Enduro (1983) may not look as good, but I'd rather play it over this one.

[@elvistwatty]

And ...uh...megaman? Choose enough Haha

[@abhirao8582]

*Waits for the day when this series will eventually cover Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest*

[@duffman18]

@@residentgrigo4701 because of the nature of this project, i.e. the fact it'll probably take at least a decade to finish just say the whole NES/Famicom library, let alone doing other consoles at the same time, he occasionally jumps forward and reviews a big popular game out of order in the release date, so that the channel can get some more viewers because they're popular games, and so to get it out of the way in case the project for whatever reason is stopped and never completed.

[@MAYOFORCE]

I'm waiting for Mega Man

[@JeremyParish]

Mega Man is a tax day special. Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior are much, much further out. Many years away. @duffman18 Sorry, you're way off on that. The only reason I ever jump out of chronological sequence is when I get a Patreon request (i.e. Batman), and I've even tried to discourage that. If I were particularly concerned about raising sub/view numbers, I wouldn't have spent six months covering Virtual Boy.

[@7thangelad586]

Rad Rager.

[@JeremyParish]

That was the sequel.

[@hazy33]

Short for Radiation Racer.

[@azhrie139]

Algorithm Gods!

[@schneidercurt]

Road blasters

[@freemygrandma8752]

Blisters

[@JomasterTheSecond]

_[Holds begloved fist aloft]_ It's so bad.