I discovered Cool Riders through my love of raster racing games and Sega’s Super Scaler tech. However, by appearance, I classified it as kusoge (crap game) on my Destructoid column. That was a mistake, but in my defense, a weekly deadline meant I usually needed to jump in with both feet and would sometimes discover I actually liked a game.

Cool Riders is more accurately classified as bakage (stupid game), a distinction I wasn’t aware of at the time. Outwardly, it looks terrible. 3D racing games were becoming the hot thing at arcades (in terms of racing games), and this was still 2D. If you don’t look too closely, it looks like a bunch of thrown-together digitized sprites trying hard to look cool. Like Pit Fighter; exactly like Pit Fighter. But upon closer inspection, you realize that it isn’t just some ill-advised, thrown-together racing game. It knows exactly what it is. I still do not know what chaotic ritual conjured this game, but it is fascinating.

A LITTLE GOOD

I suppose the best place to begin with Cool Riders is to explain that it is, apparently, built off of 1993’s OutRunners, which is, of course, a sequel to OutRun. It was built on arcade hardware that Sega only used once. The person who converted it to be compatible with MAME suggests that a lot of assets were carried over from OutRunners, but I would never guess.

Its link to Outrunners is obvious. It’s a raster racer using Super Scaler to stretch and enlarge sprites to make scenery look like it’s coming at you and give it a feeling of depth and speed. It uses the OutRun formula of having you race against time to reach a checkpoint, always trying to keep spare seconds in your bank so you can reach the end. At the end of each area, the road forks, in this case into three directions, letting you choose where you travel to next. Finally, you’re also sharing the track with an opponent, trying to beat them to the checkpoint. If you’re playing with a friend, the one who wins a segment gets to choose the next track.

Now that I look at it, there’s a banner before the character select screen that reads OutRiders. I wonder if that was the original name before someone looked at it and said, “There’s no way in fuck that you’re linking this directly to OutRun.”

GRANDPA IS STILL ALIVE

That’s kind of where the similarities end. From the outset, you choose your racer, and I’m going to name them off for you, just so you get a sense of how ridiculous this is.

• Max – The most normal character. He rides a Harley Davidson-like motorcycle and wears leathers. I think he’s a cyborg or an android. Or maybe a Frankenstein’s Monster.
• John Doe – I think this guy is supposed to be a link to Hang-On. He’s just a guy on a crotch-rocket. This might be for people who think they ought to be playing a normal motorcycle racing game. He even comes shaded by a bikini lady on the character select screen.
• Chris – Chris is an underdressed young woman on a drag bike. She wears a bikini top and jeans cut-off into short shorts. Like, imagine you’re travelling on a drag bike – a bike made to go extremely fast in a straight line – and a junebug hits your bare shoulder. Ow.
• Gloria – This is some Secret Service lady or maybe a gun-loving politician. She rides on a Vespa and is flanked by shadowy dudes in pin-stripe suits and bowler hats. Wait, maybe she’s, like, a mob boss. I don’t know, from certain angles, she looks like Hilary Clinton who would have been first lady in 1995, so maybe that was the intention. Anyway, she rides a pink Vespa-style scooter with big exhaust pipes.
• David and Sharlie – This looks like an Evel Knievel-style stuntman and his new bride. Or maybe, like, a really bad Elvis impersonator. He pulls out a guitar when you select them and holds it like he has never seen one before while his new wife grovels at his feet. They ride a motorcycle/sidecar combination called “Love Machine.” Real newlywed vibes here. When they lose, people throw newspapers at them for some reason.
• Dr. Vincent – One of my favorite riders, Dr. Vincent is this older fellow with a big white beard and a bowtie. He rides on a really old-fashioned moped that he actually pedals.
• Garcia – Another of my favorites. He’s a cowboy who rides on a dirt bike that, for some reason, has its forks extended to an absurd extent. Serious suspension, guy. He’s just fun and shoots off his gun whenever he catches mad air.
• Big Boss – Not that Big Boss. This guy is so wholesome. He looks like a big gruff biker dude and rides on an absolute hog of a tricycle. However, he also has these two kids who are obviously the center of his world. On the character select, they’re all eating ice cream, and when you crash and they fall off the bike, they’ll run back to it, hand-in-hand. Absolute super-dad right there.

HERE COMES QUEEN OF HURRICANES

The first fork you hit in the road dictates where your journey will take you overall. Left and right go West and East across the world, while straight takes you through the United States. Either way, you get a pretty surreal representation of these places. It’s like if Cruis’n USA had any self-awareness. The screen is a constant stream of information, and before you have a chance to chuckle at the basketballs lining the streets of Chicago, you’re being picked up and carried by a hawk.

I can’t even really guess how many individual locations there are in Cool Riders. I’m not even sure if I’ve seen them all, and I’ve played this game a lot. Flyers for it advertise “50 different courses,” which I think is a lie. I think there are 50 different possible stops in all the routes through the game, but some route feature the same tracks as others. For example, you can go through Niagara Falls if you take the route West, but you can also go there if you take the route straight through America. Maybe they’re different Niagara tracks; I don’t really know. Things just come flying at you so quickly that it’s hard to focus on when and where the road curves.

Backing up for a second, the flyer also says that it has “Realistic and adrenalin-pumping excitement,” which tells me the marketing person never even saw this game. That, or they thought they couldn’t sell a game by just saying, “Check this out; it’s fucked up.” That’s not even the funniest part. In another flyer, it says, “Race through 48 states from New York to The Artic[sic].” I don’t know how to say this without potentially offending the marketing person, but the US education system is really letting us down.

SIGHTSEEING AT MACH 1

There’s Dracula in Transylvania, giant octopi in Oceania, and you jump over the White House in Washington. It’s frequently surprising. Try driving through Atlanta. It’s rural, despite “Atlanta” referring to a city, and a short ways in, you find that it’s on fire. Drive a bit more, you’ll discover that it’s on fire because aliens are attacking it.

And all this is done in a graphical style that uses photomanipulated digitized sprites that give it a look like turn-of-the-millenium animutation. Or, I assume photomanipulation is used, I can’t imagine that they created a dirt bike on stilts just for this game. At the start of the race, Garcia actually has his foot on a stool to keep the bike upright. It’s those small details that make the game so fantastic. It’s complete madness. Visual poetry. Ocular cocaine. I’m not sure I can possibly overstate how much I love it.

The goal is to complete five(ish) stages and reach the end. It takes about three-and-a-half minutes if you manage to reach the end. That may not seem like a lot of value for your quarters, but it really doesn’t feel that short. You’re clocked at nearly 300km/h and, unlike a lot of games, it actually feels that fast. It’s playing a game on fast-forward. When you finish, it feels like you’ve been hit in the face with nitrous oxide; you may need to stagger away from the cabinet.

THE FAT IS IN THE FRYER

I talk about this a lot in my original article on Destructoid, but I really want to find out what the hell development for this game was like. It seems like something that people couldn’t make intentionally. I don’t know how you can get so many like-minded people into a room and have them focus for long enough to get a game out the door. I’m making it my mission to 1: get Sega to finally port the game out of arcades and 2: find someone who knows the story of its development.

Unfortunately, there is no credits in Cool Riders. The Cutting Room Floor lists two hidden credits, but they’re for composers Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Keisuke Tsukahara but nobody else. That just adds to the mystery, because the staff behind OutRunners is known. Time to check with my sources.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack is offensively good.

Anyway, I absolutely love Cool Riders. It is one of my favourite games that I’ve discovered in recent years. As someone who already loves OutRun, a derivative that is just so damned weird is irresistible. Someone made this game for me. Specifically me. I am certain of it.

9/10

This review was conducted using MAME and a ROM version of the game. Sega, seriously, if you release this on modern platforms, I will buy this for myself and push it on everyone I know.