ISSUE NO. 11
If you’ve read the last 10 issues of my Forgotten Gems column, you’ve probably noticed a pattern. I pick a game that may either spark some recognition and you’ll go “oh, yeah – what happened to it?” – or you’ve never heard of the game I’m profiling and you google what year I was born so that you can rest easy that it’s not you, it’s me. Inevitably, the column turns gloomy. An awesome-sounding sequel was planned, but never made. Or, somehow, an entire series of games is no longer accessible to play.
Not today, friends! Today’s Forgotten Gems has a happy ending. As of March 7, 2024, three classic SNES racers are back on the track, broadly available to play on Xbox One, Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Courtesy of Brazilian studio QUByte and retro experts Piko, of Evercade fame, the Top Racer Collection includes the original trio of Top Racer games – Top Racer, Top Racer 2, Top Racer 3000, and an altered version of the original game featuring four new rides that recall other classic racing games, called Top Racer: Crossroads.
But I've Never Heard of Top Racer
If you’re an old-school SNES fan and you’re scratching your head right now because you’ve never heard the name Top Racer before, once again, it’s not you. In 1992, Japanese publisher Kemco -- sometimes referred to by its less sexy corporate name, Kotobuki System -- launched a game with two names: Top Racer, in Japan, and Top Gear in the US and Europe.
Developed by Gremlin Graphics, the team behind the Lotus Turbo Challenge racing games, Top Gear became a surprise hit, selling more than a quarter million units in the west alone (as disclosed by court documents that I’ll get to in a minute). Top Gear predates Nintendo’s own Mario Kart by a few months, but like the SNES mega-hit, it hooked players with impressive Mode 7 graphics and a focus on split-screen multiplayer.
Whether you’re playing alone, with (this is the way), or against a friend, Top Gear – er, Top Racer, let’s just stick with that – displays a horizontally split screen by default. The idea is that you’ll always be able to keep an eye on your biggest rival, but the default setup was no doubt also a way to simplify the overall design and keep technical ambitions in check. Unlike the admittedly smoother-running Mario Kart and F-Zero, Top Racer actually simulates verticality and adds quite a bit of excitement by obscuring the path ahead when you drive up and down hills.
Most of Top Racer is a test of your reflexes. Scan ahead or look at the track mini-map and start turning early or easing up on the gas pedal, all by using the SNES controller’s exclusively digital controls, of course. It's all still very playable -- and fun -- today. But the designers added a few more strategic elements that ensured players would remember Top Racer for many years to come. For one, your car can actually run out of gas if you don’t refuel during longer races – an unusual addition to an arcade racer. But there are two more things that tipped Top Racer into “gem” territory. The first is its nitro system. You get three nitros you can use at any time, to be used strategically to catch up with a slightly faster opponent or to recover after a crash. It’s a commonplace and unremarkable feature today, many Burnouts, Midnight Clubs, and Need for Speeds later, but it added a wonderful new element of strategy, especially in the fierce two-player races against my friends. But Top Racer’s most memorable element, by far, is its music.
Top Racer’s most memorable element is the music.
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When you first start Top Racer and hear the title track, you’ll instantly get it. Composer Barry Leitch might have recycled some of his own tunes from the Lotus Turbo Challenge games, but it’s impossible to forget his heavenly synth arpeggios and glide bass lines even after spending just a few minutes on the track.
"It really was a case of do whatever we can to do get music into the game ASAP. The clock was ticking, and the job needed doing. That’s how the pieces from Lotus 1 & 2 ended up in there. There simply wasn't enough time to write new music, simply take what we had already and jazz it up a bit", said Leitch, in a 2015 interview with Game Developer.
Despite the time pressure placed on the composer, the end result is unforgettable. Hit play on the video embedded above, and you'll understand. I used to just let the game idle on the title screen to put an extra spring in my step for the day. Top Racer has such an iconic sound that Aquiris, another Brazilian studio, enlisted Leitch to score its own homage to the series, 2015's mobile gem, Horizon Chase, as well as its two sequels. A far cry from most racing game soundtracks today, there’s just something intangible, something soothing about Leitch’s tunes that makes racing more enjoyable.
With the success of Top Gear under their belt and selling well in the US, Kemco quickly commissioned a sequel. Top Gear 2 didn’t stray too far from the course set by the original, but added a full-screen single-player display setup, reward economy, day/night and weather effects, and an upgrade system. Fans were ready for more. With the sequel likewise passing the 200k sales milestone in the west, Kemco filed a trademark application for the name. The idea was that Top Gear 2 would be the last game to be called Top Racer in Japan – Kemco had its sights set on a global, recognizable brand name for the ages. And space. Of course, space.
Top Gear 3000 would leave our planet behind with 48 trans-galactic tracks – and an upgrade system with cosmetic changes. And F-Zero style charging strips. And bigger hills and jumps. And branching paths. And a four-player split-screen mode – an oddity on the Super NES as it required an additional multitap splitter to plug in more controllers. Kemco was going all-in, even shelling out extra cash to have the cartridge souped up with a DSP-4 chip. Though Top Gear 3000 is largely forgotten today, it’s notable for being the only commercially available game with the DSP-4 chip.
Kemco even signed on as an early supporter for Nintendo’s forthcoming Ultra 64 console – later redubbed Nintendo 64, bringing on Boss Game Studios to create a polygonal rally racer with realistic physics, known as Top Gear Rally.
Kemco Grinds the BBC's Gears
Who knows what the catalyst was, but three years after Kemco’s trademark filing and with their fourth game on the way, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) took note that a video game series was using the same name as its TV program, Top Gear, first broadcast in 1977. It filed a Notice of Opposition, citing its ownership of the trademark in the field of entertainment motoring and licensed goods. While the burden of proof hinged upon the BBC's past usage of the brand in licensing and whether developer Gremlin Graphics was aware of the other Top Gear, the filing shows clearly that the British TV company was waking up to the world of interactive entertainment -- and possibly looking to go bigger with Top Gear in the future.
To make a long story short, both parties said they had never heard of the "other Top Gear" – don’t scoff, the Top Gear TV show we all know and love didn’t actually happen until it got rebooted by Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Wilman in 2002 – and the registrar’s office ruled in 1999 that Kemco could not register the trademark and ordered a payment of £1,000 to the BBC to offset legal filing costs. That was it. Both companies went back to top-gearing it up in their respective markets, and Kemco used the brand name until 2003 worldwide.
Top Racer / Top Gear: Complete Playlist
Here is every release in the long-running Top Racer racing game series, originally localized as Top Gear in the west. We included the updated Top Gear Rally PC port, Boss Rally, for visibility.
But with the success of the BBC’s rebooted Top Gear TV show and a more aggressive pursuit of becoming a cross-media brand (see: Forza's later inclusion of the BBC Top Gear), Kemco probably felt that it, let’s just say, would like to avoid any Imperial entanglements.
Kemco probably felt that it, let’s just say, would like to avoid any Imperial entanglements
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The last Top Gear-branded game, Top Gear: RPM Tuning, quietly launched as just RPM Tuning in the UK. Meanwhile, the BBC kept its end up with casual mobile time-wasters like Top Gear: Donut Dash.
So, it’s back to the name Kemco coined for the first game’s debut in Japan on March 27, 1992: Top Racer. But a great racer by any other name is still a great racer. And despite the pixelated visuals, letterboxing, and digital control limitations, the 16-bit Top Racers still make for a great time -- especially when you team up with a friend. And in addition to different display options (such as zoom modes, CRT-style scan-lines), 2024's Top Racer Collection wisely included a sound test mode for unlimited jukebox fun -- if the tens of thousands of different covers of the title track on YouTube weren't enough to fill your tank.
Where Can You Play it Now
I had toyed with the idea of writing this article last year, with the recommendation to play Horizon Chase Turbo, the closest thing to a widely available Top Racer game at the time. It’s wonderful that the legal wranglings over the series’ name didn’t have more serious consequences. While Piko made the first Top Racer available via one of its Evercade collections a few years ago, the Top Racer Collection is an even bigger step for preservation, ensuring that both console and PC owners can finally revisit these early 3D racers. QUByte even added an online mode and leaderboards and a new custom version of the original Top Racer featuring the four cars below to sweeten the deal.
If you’re looking for a way to relive the glory days of 16-bit racing, you’ve got a few top choices now.
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As for the future of the series, the original (now defunct) team behind Top Gear Rally released a rebranded version called Boss Rally for PC in 1999, but Snowblind’s overlooked Top Gear: Overdrive (yes, from the makers of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance!) and Saffire’s intriguing Top Gear Rally 2 haven’t resurfaced in over 20 years. If Top Racer can shed the “Gear” name and return for an encore, perhaps there’s hope.
Meanwhile, in addition to being able to play Top Racer 1 through 3000 in a great new collection, the legacy of all these games lives on in other racing game series. The programmers of the original Top Racer – the tiny team of Ritchie Brannan, Simon Blake, and Ash Bennett – have moved on, but seem to have kept one foot on the rumble strip. Since Top Racer, Brannan worked on DiRT: Rally, GRID, and Colin McRae, and Bennett became studio technical director at Sumo Digital and worked on the Forza Horizon series and Team Sonic Racing.
Peer Schneider is a co-founder of IGN Entertainment and first fell in love with racing games when he played Pole Position at a local arcade. He can still hear the muffled words “prepare to qualify” in his head when he closes his eyes.
