Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Out Run

Here's the one and only thing you need to know about Out Run: it is the very last word in decrepit high speed badassery. The Ferrari Testarossa is the manliest vehicle we have ever seen/will ever see, short of acquiring a Sherman tank to cruise down to the grocery store in. You're damn right it received its own video game.

Testarossa? Testes-rossa would be more appropriate. That's the level of mantasticness we're talking about. Granted, there may be a couple of nonentities driving it, but we all know who the true protagonist is here. It's the one with wheels on.

Hastening back to the real topic at hand, Out Run is an arcade racer from 1986. Developed and published by Sega, it made its way onto the Master System and Genesis/Mega Drive the following year. Presumably because the chunky ol' arcade cabinet version was too damn magnificent for this Earth, and had to be stopped before its brilliance shattered the planet in two. Look at the ‘effing thing, we'd happily live in it.

Needless to say, the games of the mid-Eighties had no need for convoluted, Da Vinci Code-esque plotting. Plots? Nuts to them. Your objective is simple: drive as quickly and haphazardly as a drunken celebrity (panty-flashing on disembarking optional) to the next checkpoint, rinse and repeat. A timer is constantly ticking down, and will end your game if you don't make it to the next area. More time remaining means a higher bonus, and also helps mitigate your chances of disaster should you rear-end any of the traffic passing by.

It is much akin to the previous year's Hang-On (and the later Super Hang-On, which was much the same but much more... superer), another arcade racer from Sega. Here, too, you can choose the soundtrack to your speed spree from a list of songs, which was quite an innovation. Sadly, though, Hang-On was a motorbike racer, and its outrageous lack of Ferrari Testarossa means it doesn't warrant any further detail.

Out Run also incorporated branching paths, left or right turns in the stages which would take you through entirely different areas. The scenery was never the same from one to the next, and it was a huge boon to replayability. Not to mention the cash-hungry owners of the arcades, who were loving your cash-pumping action as they mopped the piss from the carpet of their foul smelling games-dungeons.

In summation, then, this classic slice of high-octane driving was a great success, and is fondly remembered by many. Let's feel a little of that warm, glowing, warming nostalgia-glow with a little gameplay: