Celebrating one of the rarest Nineties arcade games you've probably never heard of

It’s hard to overstate the effect that Daytona USA had when it landed like a dinosaur killing meteorite in arcades in 1993. Its liquid smooth textured graphics, powered by hardware known as Model 2, set a new standard for video game visuals, but what you might not realise is that, eventually, Sega shared that technology with other companies.

So in 1996 we got the lesser known Super GT 24h made by Jaleco on the same hardware foundation.

Jaleco’s effort did introduce some new ideas over and above the Daytona format, most notably a transition between day and night. On the game’s longest course, completing sections of the lap shifted the time of day, creating the atmosphere of a round-the-clock enduro in the four or so minutes it would take to complete a race.

It’s hardly the progressive day-night cycles and accurate sun position of modern sims, but for the time it was surprisingly effective. What’s more, Sega offered hardware support to Jaleco during development, so there’s a decent chance it helped inspire Sega’s own official Le Mans 24 arcade game in 1997.

As for the cars, Super GT 24h offered a fictional selection inspired by real world GT racers. Not a bad plan, but the results did look like someone had tried to explain the shape of the Ferrari F40, the McLaren F1 and the Porsche 911 GT2 down a particularly crackly telephone line.

Even in period, Super GT 24h was not a common game and, because arcade hardware has a tendency to expire, these days it’s rarer than a steak tartare. And while, yes, there was technically a port of the game for the Sega Saturn console, simply called GT24, not only was the driving a pale imitation of the arcade version, graphically it was like trying to replicate the Sistine Chapel on an Etch-a-Sketch.