Cool Riders for Arcade is just a beautiful, captivating mess

12.12.2023 - 00:43 / destructoid.com

On paper, 1995’s Cool Riders sounds great. It was the follow-up to 1993’s Outrunners, which itself was a multiplayer follow-up to 1986’s Out Run. Only this time, it’s on motorized bikes. Then you see it, and you realize Cool Riders is one of the least cool games to exist.

Let me back up a sec here. Cool Riders is absolutely one of the best retro games I’ve been introduced to this year. It’s a year where I feel something finally snapped in my head, and I’ve come to legitimately enjoy a lot of kusoge. But the thing about Cool Riders is that it certainly looks like kusoge, but it doesn’t play like it. 

It’s sort of a Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game situation. While the game’s graphics give you that whiff of kusoge, the mere fact that it’s built on the bones of a better game means that it’s still enjoyable. Better than enjoyable, actually, Cool Riders is a riot.

By 1995, following some tentative hesitation, Sega was well into its conversion to 3D arcade games. Cool Riders is a bit of a strange latecomer. It was one of the last games to use Sega’s Super Scaler effect, pairing it with your typical raster effect to create 3D visuals. To put this into perspective, that year would have it competing against Sega Rally Championship for floor space. It was also the only game to be produced on the Sega H1 Board, which meant that the MAME community had quite a struggle getting it emulated properly.

The strangest part of Cool Riders, however, is the game itself. I’d love to see what the development pitch was like. It looks like something that was thrown together, but when you really dig into it, you realize that the whole thing was deliberate. A whole bunch of digitized actors and photo manipulation to create something that looks like an unholy union of Katamari Damacy and early ‘00s animutation.

It’s a bizarre maelstrom of ideas, with drivers that include a lady on a Vespa, a cowboy, and a devoted father. It’s obvious that the developers at Sega AM1 weren’t taking this very seriously, but how such a mish-mash of ideas came together, I’d like to know.

Seriously, I would like to know what the development of Cool Riders was like. There’s precious little behind-the-scenes information I could find. Not that it’s usually easy to find background information on ‘80s and ‘90s arcade games unless they’ve made a massive impact, but I’ve never been this curious before.

What separates Cool Riders from Outrunners and, well, most games at the time is its use of digitized photography. That wasn’t entirely rare at the time, with Mortal Kombat famously utilizing this approach. But games like that and Pit-Fighter were earnestly trying to look good. Futuristic, even. The art in Cool Riders obviously isn’t trying to achieve that.