Anime geeks in Milan have developed a 'bold, weird' new racing game

You’re probably more accustomed to exacting two-wheeled racing sims from Italian studio Milestone than anime-infused, futuristic arcade car races. It’s been at the helm of the MotoGP series since 2013, but its earliest release as Graffiti Games in 1995 was a rip-roaring racer named, er, Screamer.

This 2026 spiritual sequel does share some DNA with that debut. The exaggerated drifts and pure arcade thrills are a constant, but what’s really striking about Screamer 2026 is all the ways it’s different. Not just to the original game, but to any other racer.

“One way to go could have been to make it in a nostalgic, lo-fi way,” says development & creative director Michele Caletti. “But that would be a very limited scope, only for those who remember Screamer [1995].

“ We wanted to make a game that stands out, that feels and looks memorable and with a strong identity in a world where racing games look too much like a copy of each other. [There are] too few ideas being thrown into new titles.”

This is not a problem Screamer has. While the rest of the genre squabbles about who can build the most accurate Nordschleife, here’s a game that’s narrative-led, melds dystopian storytelling with character-led gameplay, and makes you drift your car with twin-stick controls.

“We started with very bold premises,” says Caletti. “But years on, I think we delivered on those premises.”

The development team are all anime geeks, he tells us. Having grown up with that visual palette, they realised it almost never appears in racing games. Channeling that artistic inspiration into Screamer allowed the team to “pour some very specific taste into the game”. It also gave them a way into a story.

There are too few ideas being thrown into new titles

What’s unusual about this game isn’t that it has a story – see F1’s Braking Point, TOCA: Race Driver’s soap opera, JDM’s comic panels – but that the story and gameplay are so intertwined. Team races get you thinking about strategy, and about each racer’s strengths, in their head and their machinery. Most noticeable is the way its characters are written, in an idiosyncratic style that feels like a declaration of war against cliches.

“It’s always the same tropes,” says Caletti. “A youngster with an older master… Someone who’s had a bad crash and wants this youngster to fulfil his broken dreams. Or some illegal street racing underdogs.”

Screamer’s racers purposefully don’t look like racers, Caletti tells us. They’re drawn from a wider spectrum of archetypes than you’d ordinarily find in a game – particularly an arcade racing game – and each feature sharply drawn motivations and connections with one another. That gives the team race events an additional interesting wrinkle.

It probably helps Milestone to take such a confident approach to this game that its last four-wheeled arcade racer series, Hot Wheels: Unleashed, was such a hit. “Without Hot Wheels, there could be no Screamer,” Caletti says.

“We learned you have to impress people in the first seconds or minutes…  but there's an even bigger lesson from Hot Wheels. You have to create a driving system and put it under test. Hot Wheels is smooth, but obviously it was not born this way.” There’s no one source of truth in an arcade racing game, because it’s not simulating reality. So the developer has to create their own reality.

All of which is very philosophical, but that speaks to the kind of thought and care that Caletti’s team have poured into Screamer. Whether it creates the kind of reality players want to inhabit long-term remains to be seen, but what’s immediately clear is that this game won’t go down as just another arcade racer. In an era when we fear the AI-sloppification of every creative expression, it’s just what we need: something idiosyncratic, bold, autered, and a bit weird.

Screamer is out on 26 March for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.