So, in 1988 and 1989, everyone has got used to the concept of driving a fast car on a long journey racing against time. Where to go next, once the conceptual scenery has all become a bit familiar (especially if you don’t have a Batmobile to drive)? Chase HQ, originally by Japanese arcade-specialists Taito, offers an answer through one of those brilliant pieces of thinking that seems obvious in retrospect, and becomes decisive to a new subgenre. It was implied in the very name of OutRun that you were on the run, even if what you were running away from was never explicit. Chase HQ takes this and says hang on a minute, instead of trying to come up with new reasons to run away, what if you weren’t the one on the run at all? What if you were the one doing the chasing?
And so, with even more nods to America than OutRun, Chase HQ has you as a police detective in a flashy sports car, taking radio calls from someone called Nancy and chasing down criminals in equally flashy sports cars. Presumably due to licencing issues, the cars aren’t actually named in the home version, so you just get told that e.g. Ralph the Idaho Slasher is in a white British sports car, which makes it sound like Nancy is reading off the ethnicity section on his Lotus’s census entry. No matter. The point is that you get to take part in a car chase, pumping adrenaline and imperilling fellow road users.
At first, this plays out pretty much the same as OutRun and other predecessors. You get a countdown, you dodge other cars and try not to crash or get too distracted by why the cars look like they’re 1:4 scale models thanks to the giant, not especially detailed roads. You have the same basic two-gear system as OutRun plus some impressively overpowered turbo boosts to rocket you into the distance. There are some record-scratch sudden scenery transitions, and sections where you plough through what appear to be unavoidable cabbages on the road. The way the car bumps up against the inside of tunnels is rather fun. So far, so ok. What really matters is what happens when you catch up with the criminals.
At that point, everything flips. Instead of going as fast as you can and trying to avoid other cars, you are trying to ram the criminals’ car and stay close behind them. A new countdown clock means you can’t afford to let them get away again. With perfect arcade logic, as you keep bashing into their car, said car produces first smoke and then flames but continues driving at the same speed. Your car, meanwhile, is altogether unaffected by the 300km/h collisions. A damage bar on the screen chalks up each hit until you’ve got them and it’s arresting time. Even in a rather haphazard-feeling home conversion, the conceptual panache and gloriously silly spectacle wins through. It gives a whole new life to the game of driving really fast on public roads.
