Forgotten Gaming- Sega Rally

Name- Sega Rally Championship
Platform- Sega Saturn (from Arcade)
Developer- Sega
Released- December 1995

Three tracks. Two cars.

And yet with only those will you find a game that almost qualifies as a religious experience.

The original Sega Rally Championship hit the arcades in 1995. Building on the foundations of Sega’s past 3D racers, Virtua Racing and Daytona USA, Sega Rally delivered an authentic racing experience to many a gamer, with its textured polygonal graphics, pumping soundtrack and fluid clip. When the news broke out that a Sega Saturn port was in the works, many were skeptical. The Saturn was not known for its 3D prowess, as lackluster ports of Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter proved. Would a port of Sega Rally even be worth it?

For the Saturn, this looks incredible. Oh and that blue banner reads 'Checkpoint.' You can make it out, right?

Turns out the Saturn port of Sega Rally became one of the closest arcade-to-console conversions the Saturn would receive. Sega Rally became a showpiece for the console, showing off how competent its 3D capabilities were and promised that future arcade conversions could be just as close. At one point the game would be included as a pack-in with the console, or at least represented in the pack-in demo disc. Of course all of this greatness would be rendered moot if the game itself wasn’t fun and solid, but Sega Rally was and remains a hallmark of the arcade scene, and one of the overall finest video games of the 1990s.

Everyone’s first experience with Sega Rally is the same. You innocently start up the championship mode, noticing that you only have two cars to choose from: a Lancia Delta and Toyota Celica. You can choose between models with manual or automatic transmission, but that is it. Two cars. There’s not even an option for a different paint job. Oh well, so you pick one and start racing. The first track, Desert, loads fast and the cars’ high acceleration immediately has you going over 100. All of the track’s turns are announced ahead of time, and you’ll pass a few opponent cars, but mostly you’ll be bumping into the walls. You complete a lap, expecting at least two more to go, but the race suddenly ends. That was it, just the one lap, complete in just over a minute, and on to the next course you go. What a strangely quick-moving game, this is.

Barely two minutes in and more than halfway through the game.

You continue to the second course, Forest, and another exhilarating minute later it too is all over. On to course three, Mountain, where even more fun is had until it too, is over after just one lap. Your total time for all three courses is shown on the screen… and the game ends. That’s it, you’re done. You just beat Sega Rally in under four minutes.

However, you probably placed horribly against the opponent cars, and you barely scraped past the time limits. But you’ve seen almost all of what the game offers. How can that be? How could this game, hailed as one of the greatest arcade and Saturn games of all time, be so loved with such little content?! Confused and aghast, you search the other modes the game offers. Practice mode, time attack, multiplayer race, but it’s all still the same two cars and three courses! You go into time attack (or practice, the modes are very similar) to try to squeeze out any replay value you can. You pick your car and return to the Desert stage.

Now that your best times have been saved, the game suddenly starts to mean a lot more than it did before. Racing on the same course over and over this time familiarizes you more with the curves and how to handle each one. You’ll swear that the game is going easier on you by making the car easier to handle, when in reality it’s you actually getting better at the game. Your checkpoint and lap times continually flash on the screen, showing you by the millisecond how much faster or slower you’re going based on your best times, and it’s a triumph to beat your time even by .01. This game that once felt lacking in content, now feels deep and richer than ever before.

And all this came from just one course and one car! Don’t forget, there are two other courses for you to master, and a whole other car with its own handling to learn also! Suddenly you want to stay far away from the championship arcade mode, as you know you are not yet worthy of putting all these courses and times together, with CPU opponents added in to the mix. As you continue to practice the Forest and Mountain courses, you may begin to question why you play games in the first place, as all you’re doing now is going around in circles and beating your own times, millisecond by millisecond. But what accomplishment you feel from this! There are no achievements, no online anything, nothing but you, the track and the timer. And it’s here that the gamer in you begins to blossom. This is video gaming at its finest. It doesn’t matter how crispy the primitive graphics are, that there’s no storyline whatsoever, or that the game still only has two cars and three tracks. Sega Rally is a test of precision that grooms you into a perfectionist, whether you wanted to be one or not. All for the bragging rights of having the top spot on an offline leaderboard, which is always in danger of irreversible deletion when the Saturn’s internal battery dies.

Behold, Lakeside! A track you may never even be good enough to see.

After days, weeks, months of dedication, you feel you are ready to take on the championship mode and aim for first place against the CPU cars. You try, you fail, and you try again. Eventually, you win. You’ve done it! But what’s this that just flashed on the screen? “Try Extra Stage”?! Without warning the game loads a special, hidden fourth stage, Lakeside. This surprise course is even tougher than the ‘expert’ Mountain stage, and with no checkpoints to give you extra time, more likely than not you won’t even be able to complete a full lap. Try and try again you will, and your prize for winning Lakeside reveals itself: a Lancia Stratos. So I stand corrected. make that four tracks and three cars.

With your bragging rights and Sega Rally mastery, what will you walk away from at the very end? Honestly, nothing. As it is for any video game, the fun is not had in the destination but in the journey. (Speaking of that, any gamer that hasn't played Journey (PS3) is no gamer at all.) Unlike MMOs that have you leveling up to infinity with no real end (until they kill the servers), Sega Rally represents what a true game is at its core and shows how much you can have with so little. Many Saturn games operate on this principle of maximizing minimalism, largely because the console couldn't handle much more. Look at Daytona USA, NiGHTS, Virtua Fighter, Panzer Dragoon... all games and series that honestly don't have much flash and abundance. But what they do have is hidden depth and complexity wrapped up in that signature Sega style. They are games that rely on continuous replay to get your score that one point higher, or time one millisecond lower. It's all for your personal satisfaction and little else, but then again, isn't that why we play video games in the first place?

The reason we game, and replay you shall. Over and over again.