First, a recap of the last time I wrote about Yu Suzuki and Sega. After joining Sega from university in 1983, Suzuki was the lead designer for Hang-On, a checkpoint motorbike-racing arcade game with both cool design and an unbeatable gimmick: a motorbike form factor which players sat on and leaned to each side as the controller. The following year, Epyx scored a #1 in the UK charts with Super Cycle, a Commodore 64 checkpoint motorbike-racing game which bore quite a resemblance to Hang-On. Assuming that Epyx took direct inspiration from Sega, they were not the only ones to do so. 

  • Hang-On (Sega, 1985, Arcade)
  • Super Cycle (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Hang-On (Sega, 1985, Arcade)
  • Super Cycle (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)

In Kent, in early 1987, Martin Webb programmed a Commodore 64 game called Max Torque. This was, you guessed it, a checkpoint motorbike-racing game. It was the latest in a series of games made by Martin Webb, then seventeen years old, under the direction of his father Dennis Webb, who also worked on graphics for their games. Most of those games had been for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and sold by mail order, but the Webbs had recently upgraded to a Commodore 64 and started looking for deals with publishers. Max Torque was picked up by local software company Bubble Bus.

Max Torque was reasonably technically proficient and had some individual ideas like a character select screen (with each character wearing different coloured outfits and one, obviously, called Max Torque). Its inspirations were very obvious, though, right down to the map screen at each game over showing your progress in just the same way as in Hang-On. Computer & Video Games’s review of Max Torque got to the point: “Verooom! Let me at it. This must be the closest anyone has got to putting that ace arcade game Hang On onto computer”. Max Torque reviewed reasonably well but didn’t make the charts.

  • Max Torque (Bubble Bus, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Max Torque (Bubble Bus, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Max Torque (Bubble Bus, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Max Torque (Bubble Bus, 1987, Commodore 64)

By the time Max Torque came out, Sega and Yu Suzuki had moved on in the world of checkpoint racing games. First of all, to another type of motorbike. Suzuki had considered several for Hang-On before being inspired by the racer Freddie Spencer to go with road racing bikes. After his success he returned to one of the alternatives. For Enduro Racer, Sega retained a lot from the Hang-On formula, but they took it off-road on dirt bikes and added some improbable leaps and tricks. Crucially, they also added roads which went up and down as well as left and right.

  • Enduro Racer (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Enduro Racer (Sega, 1986, Arcade)

Unlike Hang-On, Enduro Racer got an official home computer conversion, published by Activision. The version for the ZX Spectrum was made by Giga Games, and programmed by Ian Morrison and Alan Laird. They were from Ayrshire, were around twenty years old, and had worked previously with Platinum Productions. Platinum had made several Spectrum conversions of American C64 games for U.S. Gold before branching out a little to create the Spectrum version of Ocean’s #1 hit Rambo: First Blood Part II.

Morrison and Laird got their start on racing games with the open-ended Nightmare Rally, a #7 hit for Ocean in September 1986. ZX Computing described that one as “A top notch rally game from Ocean with detours into other dimensions”. Having made a 3D racing game with some big jumps and tricks, the duo fitted the bill for making Enduro Racer, and did a good job of it. “At last someone’s come up with a very realistic arcade conversion — you feel as though you’re actually sat on a bike, hurtling along a race track at over a hundred miles an hour” wrote Crash. Morrison and Laird’s conversion became a UK #2 hit in May 1987.

  • Nightmare Rally (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Nightmare Rally (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Enduro Racer (Activision, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Enduro Racer (Activision, 1987, ZX Spectrum)

Enduro Racer got enough advance hype that Sinclair User reported on Activision signing up to make a home computer version before the arcade original had even made it to the UK. In that article they described Enduro Racer as “a dazzling ride through a fast and v. humpy landscape”, before referencing the nausea it might prompt. However, excitement over that game would be completely outdone by the racing game that Sega made next.

This time, Yu Suzuki changed direction from two wheels to four. Inspired by the film Cannonball Run, he planned to go to the USA and drive the route shown, for research purposes. Then, depending on who you believe, either Sega president Hayao Nakayama ruled this too dangerous, or someone told Suzuki that the American landscape was too samey to be worth it. He ended up heading to Europe instead, in April 1986. Suzuki and colleagues set off from Frankfurt in a BMW 520, crossing through many different countries and recording video as they went.

On 30 April, they were in Monaco, and it was there that they saw the dream car that they would put in the game, and which would end up becoming a big part of its identity: a Ferrari Testarossa. On returning to Japan, they tracked one of the very limited number of Testarossas in the country to use as a detailed reference. The game was made by a team of ten people, and they set out to recreate those driving experiences in springtime Europe. “I wanted to make stages where you could smell the fresh fragrance of new leaves and flowers, like in the green meadows of Switzerland”, Suzuki later told Retro Gamer. They named their paean to the driving experience Out Run.

  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)

The idea was to put driving experience to the forefront, and a lot of decisions followed from there. Putting the beach stage up front as the most beautiful of all, and keeping it easy and breezy. Setting up gears in the most simplified way possible, Hi/Lo, introducing the need to switch but letting you quickly forget about it if you drive well enough. Adding branching paths, so you could enjoy new scenery each play. Giving you the sight of two people in your convertible car, having them interact if you crash badly enough. And making music, fantastic music by Hiroshi Miyauchi, so central to the experience that the first thing you do is choose a tune for your ride: “Magical Sound Shower”, “Passing Breeze” or “Splash Wave”.

On Out Run‘s release later in 1986, in a standard arcade machine form and a special one with a hydraulic moving car, it was an enormous hit in arcades. British magazines already started writing about it at that point. Clare Edgeley in Sinclair User described the thrill of Out Run’s low-slung viewpoint when it came to cresting a hill: “The danger lies in not knowing and you have to take evasive action when the danger is almost on top of you. It’s an unusual view and one that works brilliantly.”

  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)

Edgeley also had something to say about the occupants of Out Run’s car. “It has you as the driver of a smart little Ferrari. Yup, there’s even a blonde in the passenger seat for company. Why is it they always use blondes to portray glamour? Besides I’d rather have had a really hunky bloke.” I’ve theorised before that perhaps the driver could be the one on the right hand side, the blonde woman. Ferrari did make a few right hand drive Testarossas, and having the driver on that side is standard in Japan (and the UK). The arcade Out Run even has one ending that plays on that possibility, with the woman being the one presented with a cup. Although the music select screen with a hand on the radio dial does clearly show a steering wheel on the left hand side of the car.

  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)

Other Out Run endings are weird about women in various ways, not least the one where a genie conjures a whole group of women to surround the male character. It also has to be said that while that Sinclair User review is an example of the mainstream games press of four decades ago happily printing a woman writing critically about sexist tropes in video games, others took different approaches. From the Out Run feature in Computer & Video Games, for instance: “The blonde is a bit of a back seat driver – she wags her finger at you accusingly if you skid or spin off the road. Ahh, shaddup you stupid broad!”

As a high profile and celebrated arcade game, it was inevitable that there would be a home computer version of Out Run. U.S. Gold won the rights, paying a huge amount for them — either £200,000 or £250,000 according to different sources. As U.S. Gold boss Geoff Brown recounted for Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean’s history of the company: “I thought […] I’ve got tons of money, I can just fly out to Japan. So I went to see Sega, met with the president there, and I managed to get an exclusive on Sega’s coin-ops, which gave me Out Run”. Like Gauntlet for 1986, the plan was for Out Run to be U.S Gold’s big game for Christmas 1987.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Amstrad CPC)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Commodore 64)

To achieve that, U.S. Gold needed a team they could trust to get conversions of Out Run made quickly. The success of the home versions of Enduro Racer, added to an established relationship from the Platinum Production days, made Ian Morrison and Alan Laird obvious candidates. Now working for Croydon-based Probe Software, they took on the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions. Morrison did most of the 3D engine code for the Spectrum, with Laird taking on the rest of the programming, and they converted the Spectrum version to Amstrad with assistance from John Bankier. Laird later remembered spending about six months on Out Run, but while also attending university.

Per Morrison, “the Spectrum version of Out Run was a result of tight code and the experience I had gained programming other racing games. We had to do lots of optimisation and had to make the graphics smaller than we would have liked. It was all a trade off of size against frame rate. The publisher wanted big graphics for effect – we wanted small graphics for speed. I think they won in the end.” The problem was magnified by the scale of the game they were making, with many more stages than Enduro Racer resulting in a need for “nine times more graphics in order to simulate the arcade machine” as they told Sinclair User shortly after the game’s release.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, ZX Spectrum)

The Spectrum version indeed looks a bit more impressive in screenshots than it feels to actually play. Although Sinclair User ran a preview which included a screenshot with an even larger lorry than made it into the final version. As Laird later told Reassembler, “The large graphics were one of the first victims to storage space […] the largest graphics are only on screen for a fraction of a second as you zoom by something and they take up the most space, so naturally they got dropped pretty quickly.”

After a flight from Scotland and a brief panic about a broken micro tape containing the game’s code, Laird and Morrison managed to get Out Run finished just in time for Christmas. Response from critics was not enthusiastic. “The gameplay is very slow, and the graphics and sound are generally disappointing” wrote one Crash reviewer. “The traffic on the road is jerky and badly animated, and the road itself isn’t exactly the paragon of smoothness” wrote another. 

Your Sinclair’s reviewer found that “everything moves at a pretty sedate pace, and when you get to the bit with the stone tunnels, the whole thing slows down to the speed of a Commodore owner’s brain waves. This doesn’t actually affect the gameplay too badly, but you’re constantly aware that you’re playing around with five and a half-year old technology”. Jim Douglas in Sinclair User covered the same issue in a slightly more generous way, comparing making Out Run for the Spectrum to raising the Titanic and concluding that “a tall order falls short of expectations though not by much”.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, ZX Spectrum)

The Amstrad version was not greeted even that generously. Alan Laird explained that while “Amstrad users also hated getting Spectrum rewrites since they didn’t take full advantage of the graphics flexibility”, under some tough constraints that was exactly what they got with Out Run. “It’s a nightmare to load and a nightmare to play” wrote Computer & Video Games. “The sound is appalling. When you skid it sounds like a strained seagull […] If you are really determined to get a copy for your Amstrad, please, please, please ask for a demonstration before you play it.”

Amstrad Action were similarly scathing. “Graphically it’s very disappointing with slow scrolling and poor animation […] As far as arcade conversions go this is probably one of the worst ever. Every good point that it had in the arcades has been destroyed by bad programming.” Their review also mentioned U.S. Gold’s weak answer for the game lacking the all-important music: supplying an audio cassette of the soundtrack for players to put on their stereo while they played.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Amstrad CPC)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Amstrad CPC)

Probe Software didn’t handle the conversions for every format. When Martin and David Webb made Max Torque, they had already been taking inspiration from Out Run. Bohdan Buciek wrote in Commodore User’s Max Torque review that “Most vehicles either have lots of gears or no gears at all. The motorbikes in Max Torque have exactly two gears. They are either examples of advanced Japanese design, or the programmer knows nothing about motoring.” This missed the obviously correct third option, which is that Max Torque’s Hi/Lo gears were based on Out Run.

From there, it was a logical move for the Webbs to use Max Torque as a template for a Commodore 64 car game that took after Out Run more closely. That’s what they started doing around Max Torque’s release, making their new game’s main car a Porsche so that it wasn’t too obvious a rip-off. They started shopping an early version around, and ended up showing it off to U.S. Gold, unaware that U.S. Gold had just secured the rights to Out Run itself. They were in the right place at the right time. As Martin Webb later told it to Eurogamer, “Within an hour the lawyers and my dad had made a contract and that’s how I landed my first conversion. The upfront fee was about £20,000.”

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Commodore 64)

In the same interview, Martin Webb explained that “the first bits I did were the intro screen, the car radio screen […] and the high score screen.” With those required elements done, he could work out how much memory was left to work with. He then had to make the same decision over graphics as his Spectrum counter-parts, and came up with a compromise of bigger, but lower detail sprites which could move faster. The result was a version which often looks unimpressive in screenshots but moves much quicker and more smoothly than the others. 

There was even a sneaky extra nod to the emphasis on speed in the speedometer. In the other home versions, and the arcade original, the car’s speed tops out at 293 km/h. It’s a number iconic enough that you can buy socks with it on. In This is Spinal Tap style, though, Martin Webb made his version go one faster. It goes up to 294 km/h. It didn’t help the reviews much, mind. “Although very fast, the graphics are a touch on the blocky side” wrote Dan Gilbert in Zzap! 64. Meanwhile, Gary Penn in Commodore User complained that “they couldn’t even be bothered to give the girl in the car the right colour hair for heaven’s sake […] Other than the title, this conversion has little in common with its arcade counterpoint”.

  • Out Run (Sega, 1986, Arcade)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Commodore 64)

Reviews also mentioned one element missing from the Commodore 64 version that did make it to the Spectrum and Amstrad – the branching paths. “The big disappointment is that there are only five courses to tackle – and no intersections” wrote Julian Rignall in Zzap! 64. “With this lost, Out Run becomes just another race game”. The branching was one thing to fall by the wayside during a fraught development process. Martin Webb found being asked to add all the routes “a mammoth task”, and he Webb had to play the arcade game a lot just to see what he was working from, videoing as he went, like Yu Suzuki in Europe. 

Martin’s relationship with his father was already under strain from previous games, and the large amounts of money at stake with Out Run didn’t help. Martin was already a self-described perfectionist, and his father, who was running the business and relying on his seventeen-year-old son for income, put a lot more pressure on him. Among the graphics Dennis Webb designed for Out Run was the Testarossa, and he put the pair’s initials on the licence plate, with his own first. The resulting D and M align roughly with the car’s occupants. Dennis and Martin; driver and passenger. Their relationship, and Martin Webb’s career in game development, did not last long past the end of making Out Run.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1987, Commodore 64)

The mostly bad reviews proved less important than the fact that the game was Out Run, and made it out just before Christmas. It soon hit the top of the combined formats chart, and the few available charts from the period afterwards suggest it stayed there for at least a month, probably more. U.S. Gold also didn’t stop there with it. In Alan Laird’s interview on the Spectrum version, he noted that “towards the end of the project I was pretty much the only person on the Spectrum version as Ian [Morrison] started working on the ST version”. Months into 1988, U.S. Gold released a version of Out Run for the Atari ST, eventually followed by one for the Commodore Amiga.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988, Atari ST)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988/1989, Amiga)

Those more advanced, and more expensive, computers had both first come out in 1985. They weren’t yet taking over for most Brits playing games, but things were slowly starting to change, with the Atari ST in the lead of the two for now. Out Run isn’t the first game I’ve covered to have had versions on one or both of those formats, but there is a notable chart reason to mention it — when the ST version came out, it got to #1 on the individual formats chart. As The Guardian reported, “Gallup researchers think it is the first time the leading title has not been a Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64 game.”

The Atari ST version looks much closer to the arcade original than the 8-bit machines could manage, although its cardboard-cutout scenery suggests that Probe didn’t yet manage to make the most of the available machinery. Still, ST Action magazine wrote that “apart from the inconvenience of a lengthy loading time and momentary breaks between stages, this first-class conversion will save ST users a fortune in the arcades.” This was at a time, though, when boosting big name games may have felt more of a necessity to ST magazines than those for the 8-bit computers.

The Amiga version, meanwhile, was to the ST version what the Amstrad version had been to the Spectrum one: a deeply compromised port. When it eventually came out, Gordon Houghton wrote in his review for Zzap! (no longer just 64) that “U.S. Gold have merely created a pretty unthrilling racing game which captures little of the feel of the original”.

  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988, Atari ST)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988, Atari ST)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988, Atari ST)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988/1989, Amiga)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988/1989, Amiga)
  • Out Run (U.S. Gold, 1988/1989, Amiga)

Out Run reviewed much worse than Gauntlet, but that was perhaps less to do with the developers of its ports than the nature of the game. Many of Gauntlet’s specific gameplay ideas could translate to the confines of 8-bit computers, even if they had to look a bit different along the way. As good as Out Run’s gameplay was, though, much more of its appeal was based on pure vibes, and that’s a lot more difficult to recreate. There’s a decent chance that the fact I like the Commodore 64 version so much more than the Spectrum and Amstrad ones is mostly because it has a better version of “Magical Sound Shower”. 

In an letters page in ACE magazine’s April 1988 issue, a pair of readers wrote in to complain about the Spectrum version of Out Run (“where is the RED car?”) and in its response the magazine wrote that “We’ve yet to find anyone who’s been satisfied with Out Run”, which rather sums things up. A couple of weeks of extraordinary sales, however, had been enough to make it the UK’s best selling computer game of 1987. Players’ hopes that their chosen computers would be able to recreate the latest arcade games remained a powerful force, however unrealistic those hopes might be.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 19 December 1987, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 16 January 1988, The Guardian

Sources: