Friday Flashback – Sega Rally Championship

Here’s a little feature concerning older games which I hope to regularly update in weeks to come. Good, bad or ugly – if I find an old game interesting, you can bet it’ll end up here at some point. First up, Sega Rally Championship.

Manufacturer: Sega
Hardware: Sega Model 2A
Year: 1995

Sometimes, I forget that Sega Rally is over a decade old. I remember when the game was new and fresh, and in just about every arcade that you could visit. What finally made me accept the game’s age was a recent issue of the UK magazine Retro Gamer, which placed the game at #1 in its list of the top 25 racing games. Of course, a large part of the reason for this lack of perceived age could well be due to the enduring appeal that allowed it to claim the top spot – even now, it’s possible find a Sega Rally machine in the wild (and it was less than two years ago that I last did so myself). That’s pretty stunning when you think about it, because Sega Rally was released into an arcade market which was already saturated with quality racing games.

Update on Sega Rally Arcade – not cancelled

(Click on the images to enlarge)

Despite the closure of the Sega studio in charge of creating racing titles for consoles, this title is still on track and is going through testing. To prove it, here are some photos from a testing unit setup just today. Also to further clear it up, this will be Sega Rally 3 and the testing units all have Super Challenge written on the marquees.  Let’s hope that this game tests well so it will see a general release.

Edit: This has not been confirmed by Sega, our tipster would like to point out he doesn’t work for them. It was just the way it was written that it sounded like it was someone that worked for Sega, our mistake.

[Discuss on the Forum]

Sega Rally Arcade cancelled already? UPDATE: No it is not

Just a little over a month ago we had received a tip that Sega was testing a new racer in a UK arcade that happened to be Sega Rally, a racer that appeared on the various game consoles. It was a strange occurrence since the game was not shown at ATEI the month before that and there has been no mention of the game since. Now comes word that Sega has closed the doors on it’s UK studio responsible for developing racing games, including Sega Rally. Keep in mind that this is not the closure of Sega Amusements UK – just a studio that has been primarily responsible for console developments. Who knows what will happen with the game at this point – obviously the arcade version had been coming along OK since it was already setup for a test and we have heard that Sega is developing “a technical racer” which was surprising considering that they released RaceTV a short time ago. We will keep an eye on the situation and see if the closure of this studio will mean anything for further coin-op games from Sega.

[Via Gamesindustry.biz] [Discuss on the Forum]