This classic arcade cabinet made everyone want a Ferrari and a road with no speed limits – remembering Outrun at 40

For a glorious few years in the mid-1980s, Sega’s Super Scaler tech hurled video games at your face with enough force to rearrange your eyeballs. Hang-On made rival motorcycling games look pathetic, until Sega’s own Enduro Racer stole its thunder. Space Harrier then gave us the dazzling space shooter we never knew we needed. But OutRun was the real star. Nothing beat parking your backside in that glorious sit-down cab. Shame you couldn’t drive it home from the arcade afterwards though.

Still, thoughtful of Sega to let you have a nice sit-down while you played.

Alas, not every version of OutRun was this fancy. Many cabinets were more traditional stand-up affairs – though even they still had pedals, a gearstick and a steering wheel with force feedback, which left you in no doubt when you’d made a serious error. But the sit-down version added hydraulics that threw you about as you blasted along – a far more immersive experience that felt like you’d been handed the keys to a shiny red sports car. 

So this racing game was all about the realism, then?

Not really – because the handling bore no resemblance to driving an actual shiny red sports car. Traffic all headed the same way at ludicrous speeds, and road forks instantly whisked you between wildly different locations with little concern for geography or physics. But OutRun was never about reality – it was about the fantasy of tearing along an open road… which was for the best when you hit the scenery at 180mph and merely flipped the car, rather than becoming a cautionary tale about speeding.

But did OutRun crash and burn anyway? It’s not like we’re drowning in sequels.

In fact it became the top-earning arcade cab of its day, netting $100m by the end of 1987. But it took years for Sega to find top gear again, repeatedly failing with spinoffs that failed to capture the magic of the original. That’s perhaps why the company took a sharp left turn with OutRun 2, which in 2003 updated the concept for modern hardware, adding ludicrous drifting to create a grin-inducing new arcade racer. Alas, Sega then ran out of road again, as there’s never been an OutRun 3.

Main photo from Arcade Decades by Numskull

The long road to OutRun 2

OutRun was – is – a stone-cold classic. What followed… wasn’t. Sega took the scenic route to a follow-up worthy of the OutRun name. Here’s that bumpy journey in full: