There’s a quote in a review in Sinclair User of the arcade version of OutRun which has stuck with me. Claire Edgeley writes that 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.” It’s the typical kind of humour you get in British magazines. It’s also a woman calling out a trope relating to women in video games. In 1987. Like so many apparently new things in games, the idea that people haven’t been questioning their exclusionary conventions all along turns out to be evident nonsense. A look at the back of the OutRun box confirms how deep its particular depersonalising of women as accessory went, too – “You’re cool, the engine’s hot, the blonde’s gorgeous”.
It matters all the more because OutRun, like Elite, is a game whose influence stretches obviously into future. This is not just a conversion of any arcade game but one of the definitive arcade games. It finds a way to take the straightforward get-to-the-next-stage appeal of older, simpler arcade experiences and put that at the centre of something with more complicated developments. Its vision of driving a fast car from checkpoint to checkpoint, dazzling with its style and scenery while being coolly unconcerned with any kind of race or backstory, would live on. It makes sense that OutRun was the first game on a newer, more expensive 16-bit computer to reach the UK #1 spot, because getting closer to the arcade experience, driving away on an endless road under the bright blue sky, must have been a powerful motivator for players.
As well as making it to a deleted scene in Donnie Darko, Out Run’s influence even extended to giving rise to its own genre of music (sort of), though while the ST version has an unsurprisingly superior audio experience than the Spectrum games we’ve looked at, its music doesn’t stand out even as much as that of the Commodore 64 version I played as a child. You can’t even choose between radio stations, the function which was the first thing presented on the C64 one.
The visuals are a bit more impressive than that in the context of everything else I’ve looked at so far. The landscape is brighter and more colourful; the car is more detailed; the road ahead crests and dips impressively. The sensation of weight and speed is enjoyable, even if it can’t match up to that provided by a moving seat at a dedicated arcade machine. The looks are not that much of a revelation, though. Roadside furniture repeats and looks jaggedly fake, and it’s all obvious that it is still a limited imitation of something else. It’s still enough for the underlying experience and feeling though, which is strong enough to survive translation.
The journey OutRun took to get here was not just from the arcade to the home, of course. It was published in the UK by US Gold, a company ostensibly dedicated to bringing over American games. However, OutRun is Sega through and through, even if Yu Suzuki’s vision was of driving in America (and Europe) rather than Japan. And Probe, programmers of the home version, were based in Croydon. So it was Brits pretending to be Americans, remaking a Japanese game with American aspirations, but the game doesn’t explicitly say where it is set. Maybe the palm trees are Okinawa? Cornwall? Picking that apart offers some alternative reads on the car’s inhabitants since there is, at least on the ST version, insufficient graphical detail to see a steering wheel. In Japan, and in the UK, we drive on the left hand side of the road and, leaving aside any other prejudices, the common assumption would be that the driver is the person on the right hand side. The blonde woman. Perhaps the bloke could already be the one there for company.
