Remember this Nineties gaming classic where you raced along Tokyo highways?

Tokyo Highway Battle

PlayStation/Saturn, 1996

It took a while for the Shutokou Battle series to make it to the West, where it tends to release under the title Tokyo Xtreme Racer.

While lucky Japanese players had been gorging themselves on races along Tokyo’s elevated expressways since the Super Nintendo era, it was Shutokou Battle: Drift King on PlayStation, better known over here as Tokyo Highway Battle, that introduced Western audiences to the concept for the first time.

Tokyo Highway Battle was a selection of one-on-one contests on three different routes around Tokyo. The true challenge wasn’t so much your actual opponent, though – it was the fact that you were also scything through commuter traffic at the same time.

Combine that with a physics model which, while not realistic by modern standards, definitely conferred the weight of the car. The probability of you colliding embarrassingly with the rear of a Yokohama Advan-branded lorry was extremely high.

There’s clearly something timelessly appealing about this particular formula, though, because developer Genki resurrected the series in 2025 with a rebooted Tokyo Xtreme Racer that was warmly received by fans, many of them having waited patiently for nearly two decades for this classic to return.

But even if you flat out refuse to track down a copy of this game and blow the dust off your PlayStation, you should at the very least seek out the intro movie on YouTube. It’s a glorious glimpse into ’90s Japanese car culture, and features the legendary ‘Drift King’ Keiichi Tsuchiya nonchalantly barbecuing a set of rear tyres in a Nissan Silvia S14 at Tsukuba race circuit.

Admittedly, that isn’t in Tokyo, it isn’t a highway and he isn’t battling anyone, but we’ll forgive all this because his only safety equipment is a pair of sunglasses and some extremely fetching neon pink racing gloves.