Sega Rally Championship is indelibly associated with the worst week of my life. A school trip to a remote Welsh location accompanied by several bullies and soon-to-be-bullies ended with one of them burning my trainers and then my finger with a hot poker. It started, near enough, with a stop at a motorway service station and a two-player go on a Sega Rally arcade machine. I won; my opponent asked me to tell others that he won. I didn’t; he put me in a headlock and ran me into a concrete pillar.
Might I have just played along in the spirit of self-preservation? My sense of fairness and competitive nature may have made that a non-starter for anything, but it was even more certainly no-go for this kind of game. This was my territory, and I’d been training on it since Pitstop II, through Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and all. To this day I don’t have a driving licence, but still love the challenge of stepping up to a good driving game, and Sega Rally made a first impression dazzling enough to be very proud of winning, whatever the consequences.
Sega Rally’s challenge is a slightly new one for Super Chart Island. It has most in common with Lotus 2 but is slightly more rooted in reality, featuring a trio of real cars and a loose attempt to replicate rally racing as an actual sport carried out by powered up road cars on whatever road, track, or remote Welsh path is available. Gestures to reality don’t go as far as taking out timed checkpoints, since it is an arcade racer, but as thrilling as barely making it to one of those can be, they are relatively deprioritised. What Kenji Sasaki and co at Sega were most interested in was setting it apart from other arcade racers like Ridge Racer (which he previously worked on) in a more fundamental way of how the car controls, and what it’s driving on was what they chose.
Like Lotus 2, its tracks are finely constructed stories in themselves with all kinds of obstacles including the occasional other car. The main motif in this story, though, is the changing surface beneath your wheels, from mud to gravel to tarmac. Brake on tarmac and you can come to a quick stop; brake on mud and you are more likely to be beginning an epic power slide, your car almost at a right angle to the way you need to go but eking out every available bit of friction and momentum.
Rally driving lends itself particularly well to a semi-realistic game version because its long course stages are too much for drivers to memorise unaided and so they have a co-driver reading out each upcoming corner. This is a gift for arcade games and Sega Rally delivers with its voice samples and big colourful arrows. Even easing into the racing seat for the first time, somewhat literally at an arcade or metaphorically with a Sega Saturn, you get fair warning of what’s coming up and a chance to react accordingly.
Sega Rally’s super responsive handling makes that reaction an enjoyable constant. That’s the thing that I’ve always enjoyed about driving games: the balance between calculation and instinct, the way that you take a flow of information and translate it into constant movements and adjustments and adjustments to adjustments. When it goes right and translates into a smooth line that saves a fraction of a second it feels like pulling off a consistent string of magic tricks. Much of that description applies to any kind of action game, of course, with just a different place on the axes of complexity and constancy, but driving games tend to be ones I revel in and Sega Rally hits the spot even better.
Nudging to the side with each contact on the ground throughout several jumps to end up on in place for a corner; using a changing surface to pull off a uniquely staggered drift — it’s full of grand feeling moments. There are only four different tracks in the game because being compact makes sense for an arcade game, but they are alive enough with possibility that no more seem necessary. Mastering that is something too satisfying to keep in, whatever the consequences.
