Super Cycle – “Leather style”

Yu Suzuki wanted to be a teacher. Then he got his first computers, a Zilog Z8 followed by an NEC PC-8000, and studied Electronic Science at Okayama University of Science. He decided that he wanted to work with computers and started applying for system engineer jobs. Since one of the things he liked to do on those computers was to play games, he also applied to Sega, and was impressed enough by them to decide to join when offered the job. According to colleague Satoshi Mifune, Suzuki would often later say that the first thing he had done after joining Sega was to design a prototype of a hydraulic-powered moving seat. They didn’t end up using it immediately, but it would prove an influential experience.

The first game he worked on, together with Yoshiki Kawasaki and Rieko Kodama, was Champion Boxing, which Sega released in 1984. The small team gave him the chance to learn a lot about all parts of the process of making a game. He was quickly promoted and moved on to a much more ambitious arcade project. Suzuki wanted to make a game in 3D, and he loved motorbike racing, in particular the American GP500 rider Freddie Spencer. He set about coming up with a way to let the player experience riding like Spencer, and the result was the game Hang-On.

Suzuki helped specify the arcade board that would provide the sprite-resizing ‘super scaler’ effect that would allow Hang-On and subsequent games to provide the illusion of three dimensions. He also drew on his experience of off-road bike riding to design Hang-On’s handling, giving its bike the kind of drift that would not in reality be possible on the road bikes it portrayed. He and the team tried out various unconventional control approaches, rejecting a torsion bar idea at the prototype stage, and rejecting a gyroscope one for cost reasons. They settled on a bike that you could ride and lean to either side to control. Suzuki was keen to get it sounding realistic, at one point wondering if they could provide a small real engine in the cabinet before giving up and going for music instead.

The spectacle of Hang-On’s bike had a very clear appeal, despite some raising concerns at its initial Japanese unveiling that potential players would be too shy to want to straddle a bike in front of other people. Hang-On was also available in a more conventional arcade form (although still with handlebars for controls) and was a strong game in any format, smartly offsetting any element of realism with other types of spectacle like the way your bike explodes after crashes. I certainly much enjoyed playing for this post without any of the extra trappings. It soon had people queuing up to play, and took off in the US as well as in Japan. One extra benefit for Sega was that something like Hang-On was much more difficult to produce a copy of than standard arcade games, at a time when counterfeits were running wild, especially in Europe.

In the UK, even as the then-strengthening yen contributed to arcades having to pay more than £5,000 for the deluxe version of Hang-On, it was a big success too. Computer Gamer reported that it “looks like being the first UK game to be fitted out for £1 coins”, encouraging people to line up many plays at a time since it would cost 50p for two. A West End arcade reported Hang-On as its second most successful game of 1986. One arcade manufacturer said after Sega had released a couple more games along similar lines that “the market for the very expensive simulator type games is there if the game has the play appeal” and added that the games were leading to “not only income on the new equipment but on the other equipment in the arcades as a result of it pulling people in”.

No one was going to recreate the feel of leaning a motorbike-shaped controller for home computers. More so than Dragon’s Lair, though, other aspects of the look and feel of Hang-On as a game were appealing in ways that could realistically be recreated. Hang-On‘s spread at British arcades and players’ desire for getting its experience at home must have contributed to the third-time-round success of Speed King in summer 1986. And Speed King wasn’t even particularly similar beyond the basic idea of a 3D effect, into-the-screen motorbike racing game. Come September, its run at the top of the UK charts was ended by another game which went much closer still.

American developer and publisher Epyx was not new to the world of racing games. In 1983 they had released Pitstop, developed by Action Graphics, the same company who would go on to make Winter Games for them. Pitstop combined a fairly old-school car racing game with the novelty of pitstops where you had to control the crew doing the refuelling and tyre changing. The following year, Epyx made a sequel to Pitstop in-house, handled by Stephen Landrum and by Dennis Caswell, whose productive 1984 also included making Impossible Mission.

Caswell and Landrum had both previously worked for the company Starpath, which had been bought out by Epyx on getting into financial difficulties. The first game Stephen Landrum wrote at Starpath was an Atari 2600 space shooter called Communist Mutants From Space – a name devised by an advertising agency rather than Landrum. On joining Epyx, Landrum said in a 1993 interview, he did “a fair bit of firefighting” — he would “join a project that was in trouble, and bring it to a close”. Pitstop II was a Landrum project from the beginning, though, with Caswell as the one coming in late on to handle the pitstops and title screen.

Pitstop II was mostly only a sequel in name and in having interactive pitstops. It moved away from the first game to a much more developed and advanced take on racing, with a far stronger 3D effect and sense of speed. It split the difference neatly between the then-common modes of actually racing opponents and having them as transitory obstacles, by having you race against one specific car in splitscreen, whether handled by the computer or another human player. Pitstop II reached #9 in the UK combined formats chart on its release here in 1985, and gained a reputation as the pinnacle of Commodore 64 racing games, as shown by the references to it in British reviews of Speed King.

Epyx didn’t release any more Pitstop sequels, and instead in 1986 released a motorbike game called Super Cycle. Landrum, again the main developer, explained the reasoning to Commodore Magazine in 1989. “We chose to write the program because Pitstop I and II had sold very well, and we wanted to generate a follow-up product that looked a bit different. Motorcycles were the perfect vehicles for the game. They’re more exciting to ride than automobiles, open to the elements, and definitely more dangerous to operate.”

He re-used code from Pitstop II for the display of the road, making some tweaks along the way, and redid the vehicle handling from scratch for the bikes. Working with graphics artist Michael Kodaka, he treated the impression of speed as his top priority, and they succeeded in making that stronger still, helped by a greater range of scenery and things whizzing towards you along the way. Talking about the graphics of the game in the same interview, Landrum said that “there’s an interesting story about the San Francisco track. It went out over the water to make Michael’s graphics of the city look right. After examining the positions of the local landmarks in the picture, it made sense for the cycle to be somewhere over the San Francisco Bay.”

That bit of the game does indeed have a recognisable version of San Francisco off in the distance. Despite that interesting story about why they decided to have players race on a road going out over the water near a city, though, a more straightforward potential explanation does rather present itself. That simpler explanation is this: there is a bit that looks just like that in Hang-On. Even if in both cases you can ride your bike onto the ‘water’. Likewise, there is also a bit at a similar point in both games where you race in the desert, and an emphasis on assorted hazards at the side of the road throughout. 

Super Cycle also ditched Pitstop II’s competitor-based approach to racing in favour of checkpoint countdowns like those in Hang-On. It seems unlikely that Epyx took the decision to make a game that resembled a highly popular recent arcade game without that game coming into their thinking. The artwork for the British release on U.S. Gold features a rider in the foreground whose helmet design is clearly based on Freddie Spencer’s, even as it doesn’t look quite like the similarly inspired Hang-On rider.

The likely reasons that Landrum didn’t mention any influence go beyond pride. When he gave that interview, it was just one year since the end of an American legal battle on the subject of an Epyx game’s resemblance to an existing title. They had needed an appeal court’s decision to overturn a verdict that the game they published in the US as World Karate Championship (originally International Karate in the UK) was an illegal copy of Data East’s Karate Champ. It’s hardly surprising if Epyx staff were keen to avoid any possibility of contributing to a repeat.

Super Cycle does things which Hang-On doesn’t. It has gear changes, with its three gears and big light-up selection indicator striking an excellent balance between realism and letting you focus on the road ahead. British magazines certainly noticed the resemblance between the two games, though. ”Arcade goers immediately will recognise Super Cycle as an excellent copy of the arcade sensation, Hang-On”, wrote Francis Jago in Your Computer. Mike Pattenden in Commodore User described it as “a crafty rip-off of Sega’s Hang-On coin-op game”. 

Critics were also very positive about Super Cycle. It “is set to become racing fanatics’ latest craze game” wrote Computer & Video Games. Zzap! 64’s three reviewers all had positive things to say. “There have been a great deal of racing games infiltrating the market recently, and it’s good to see one from the top end of the pile” wrote Richard Eddy, adding that “all the little extras are great too — especially being able to have a purple bike with a pink and lime leather jacket”. “All the little details are beautifully done” said Paul Sumner. “For sheer exhilaration and excitement, go for Super Cycle — it’s unbeatable.”

Mike Pattenden in Commodore User was the least glowing, calling it “only as good as Speed King” but he took time to note that “the arrival of a new Epyx game is something of an occasion” and that they had ”produced one of the best ever racing games in Pitstop II”. This was another repeated theme. C&VG approvingly said that “the graphics on this game are of Pitstop II quality” and Your Computer concluded that “games from Epyx can be relied on to be excellent and Super Cycle is no exception”. The game’s success wasn’t just because it was perfectly timed for fans of Hang-On, but because Epyx, and Stephen Landrum specifically, were the right people to do a great job with it.

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Sources:

• Yu Suzuki, YSNet, 2022
• Yu Suzuki: Game Works [Chapter 2] – Hang-On, Reassembler, 2025, translation from Yu Suzuki Game Works Vol. 1, Yu Suzuki & Akira Nagae, Aspect, 2001
• Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection, Shmupulations, 2018
• The arcade pioneer: the story of Yu Suzuki, Retro Gamer No. 150, December 2015
• SG-1000, Scott Marley, Retro Gamer No. 163, January 2017
• Out Ran: Meeting Yu Suzuki, Sega’s original outsider, Martin Robinson, Eurogamer, 2015
• The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games, Ken Horowitz, McFarland & Company, 2018
• Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade, Alan Meades, The MIT Press, 2022
• 1986 Top Ten Coin-ops, Sinclair User No. 59, February 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Coin-op connection,  Mike Roberts & Steve Phipps, Computer Gamer No. 6, September 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
• All about Epyx, John Jermain, Commodore Magazine Vol. 10 No. 8, August 1989, accessed via the Internet Archive
• An Interview with Stephen Landrum: Starpath Game Designer, James Hague, Atari 2600 Connection No. 14, January/February 1993, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Dennis Caswell interview, Mayhem64, 2006
• From Automated Simulations to Epyx, Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2013
• Software Shortlist – Super Cycle, Francis Jago, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 10, October 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Scene – Super Cycle, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 37, October 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Software reviews – Super Cycle, Computer & Video Games No. 60, October 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Zzap! Test – Super Cycle, Zzap! 64 No. 18, October 1986, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64

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