Type 4 was brutally fast and employed a new texturing technique called gouraud shading, which meant the game suddenly looked grittier and more hard-nosed. It was the year Eminem became a thing, and for some reason we remember spending hours throwing ourselves around the game's eight tracks (eight!) to the sound of, "Hi! My name is! Who! My name is!" Which is a shame, because as we discovered when we got bored of Marshall, Type 4 had a mesmerizing soundtrack of its own.
RIDGE RACER UNBOUNDED CARS SERIES
We lost touch with the Ridge Racer series for a little while after that - although Namco kept the engine running with several more PlayStation installments - and then something drew us back for Ridge Racer Type 4. The first time we saw someone do this at an arcade in a shopping mall left us shellshocked, our parents having to drag us away slack-jawed and agog.
The rollercoaster analogy proved apt, too, because the programming was so generous that with a bit of practice you could even turn the wrong way and drift round in a complete loop to rejoin the race track. Corners become rollercoasters, and you want to ride them until you throw up. Essentially you're just tweaking the angle. While other racing games lose face when they appear to take control away from you, Ridge Racer's success is predicated upon making sure you flow round the corner. The rush was intoxicating, even by contemporary arcade standards. The idea was based on a real-life phenomenon, but Namco took it to delicious extremes, allowing you more speed and giving you more assistance than you'd find if you pulled the same stunt on a winding mountain road in the real-life Japanese countryside.
By letting go of the accelerator or dabbing the brake while turning, you could throw the back of your car into a drift, maintaining outrageous speed through tight corners. The key to its success was what it felt like to go round the nine corners that made up that one track. You can play through the whole of Ridge Racer in less than 10 minutes. It takes months to get through everything. One track! (The console version added an unlockable mirror version, but still.) To put that in context, Gran Turismo 6 on PlayStation 3 has 41 tracks in 86 distinct configurations. Built for the arcade but wildly successful on console as well, it has one track.
The original Ridge Racer is a strange game to consider in a modern context. The last serious attempt at a pure Ridge Racer game (excluding 2012's fun but tangential Unbounded) was Ridge Racer for Vita in 2011. And while the evolution of western franchises is still evident in modern games like Forza Horizon, Burnout and Need for Speed, Ridge Racer has disappeared from view. The Saturn had Daytona USA and SEGA Rally, the Dreamcast had Metropolis Street Racer, Xbox had Project Gotham Racing, and PlayStation? PlayStation had Ridge Racer, Namco's take on Japanese drift racing. Great consoles used to be synonymous with great arcade racing games.
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