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Opinion: are arcade racing machines dead?

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Opinion: are arcade racing machines dead? | Top Gear

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They've been endangered for years, but one might save them all. Yes folks, it's Fast & Furious to the rescue!

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Opinion: are arcade racing machines dead?

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They've been endangered for years, but one might save them all. Yes folks, it's Fast & Furious to the rescue!

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
They've been endangered for years, but one might save them all. Yes folks, it's Fast & Furious to the rescue!

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Opinion: are arcade racing machines dead?

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Opinion: are arcade racing machines dead?

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Opinion: are arcade racing machines dead?

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They've been endangered for years, but one might save them all. Yes folks, it's Fast & Furious to the rescue!

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You may have noticed I have a particular fondness for 1990s arcade racing games.

To me they represent the golden age of arcade gaming – the era of Daytona USA, Ridge Racer and Sega Rally – where smooth and colourful 3D graphics blew away whatever pixel-pushing 16-bit console you had parked under the telly. In fact, the technology that powered Daytona USA and Sega Rally in particular was adapted from cutting edge military tech developed by Lockheed Martin.

It might not have occurred to us at the time, but for many of us in our thirties and forties, the first time we gripped a steering wheel wasn’t in our driving instructor’s Vauxhall Corsa, but in the plastic bucket seat of an arcade machine, having just thumbed the last of our pocket money into the coin slot.

In fact, now that I think about it, that might be the reason I failed my first driving test for speeding.

The problem is, pretty soon the console under the telly had been swapped for one that was capable of high definition graphics. And you could buy a force feedback steering wheel and pedals and plug them in at home to play as many hours of Gran Turismo as you liked. The arcade no longer offered a unique gaming experience, which suddenly made the exchange rate of one pound per minute and 30 seconds or so of powersliding fun seem a little on the steep side.

Arcades seemed doomed and for a dark period in the 2000s, most new driving arcade games were stripped back versions of console games like Race Driver: GRID and Need For Speed: Carbon, which you could already play at home. For a while, I thought the true arcade racing game was a thing of the past.

But like a lapsed churchgoer who has just seen the image of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in their slice of morning toast, my faith has been suddenly and emphatically renewed. It’s entirely down to the existence of a single arcade machine, one so bombastic and ludicrous it demands to be experienced. That machine is Fast & Furious Arcade.

Towering above everything else in the bowling alley, which is where it can usually be found, Fast & Furious Arcade’s unique feature is that each machine essentially has two 65in 4k TVs vertically stacked, allowing for a sense of scale that’s impossible at home unless you want to risk being found dead underneath a toppled flatscreen.

The content of the game, meanwhile, is like Vin Diesel’s most vivid cheese dream. My particular favourite is the ‘mission’ where you careen through the Swiss Alps, avoid getting flattened by a giant rolling satellite dish, and then stop a missile by ramming said ICBM, mid-launch, with your 1970 Dodge Charger. If that’s not worth a couple of quid, I don’t know what is.

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You may have noticed I have a particular fondness for 1990s arcade racing games.

To me they represent the golden age of arcade gaming – the era of Daytona USA, Ridge Racer and Sega Rally – where smooth and colourful 3D graphics blew away whatever pixel-pushing 16-bit console you had parked under the telly. In fact, the technology that powered Daytona USA and Sega Rally in particular was adapted from cutting edge military tech developed by Lockheed Martin.

It might not have occurred to us at the time, but for many of us in our thirties and forties, the first time we gripped a steering wheel wasn’t in our driving instructor’s Vauxhall Corsa, but in the plastic bucket seat of an arcade machine, having just thumbed the last of our pocket money into the coin slot.

In fact, now that I think about it, that might be the reason I failed my first driving test for speeding.

The problem is, pretty soon the console under the telly had been swapped for one that was capable of high definition graphics. And you could buy a force feedback steering wheel and pedals and plug them in at home to play as many hours of Gran Turismo as you liked. The arcade no longer offered a unique gaming experience, which suddenly made the exchange rate of one pound per minute and 30 seconds or so of powersliding fun seem a little on the steep side.

Arcades seemed doomed and for a dark period in the 2000s, most new driving arcade games were stripped back versions of console games like Race Driver: GRID and Need For Speed: Carbon, which you could already play at home. For a while, I thought the true arcade racing game was a thing of the past.

But like a lapsed churchgoer who has just seen the image of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in their slice of morning toast, my faith has been suddenly and emphatically renewed. It’s entirely down to the existence of a single arcade machine, one so bombastic and ludicrous it demands to be experienced. That machine is Fast & Furious Arcade.

Towering above everything else in the bowling alley, which is where it can usually be found, Fast & Furious Arcade’s unique feature is that each machine essentially has two 65in 4k TVs vertically stacked, allowing for a sense of scale that’s impossible at home unless you want to risk being found dead underneath a toppled flatscreen.

The content of the game, meanwhile, is like Vin Diesel’s most vivid cheese dream. My particular favourite is the ‘mission’ where you careen through the Swiss Alps, avoid getting flattened by a giant rolling satellite dish, and then stop a missile by ramming said ICBM, mid-launch, with your 1970 Dodge Charger. If that’s not worth a couple of quid, I don’t know what is.

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They've been endangered for years, but one might save them all. Yes folks, it's Fast & Furious to the rescue!