We meet Sega legend Yu Suzuki to discuss one of the most iconic racing games ever

Yu Suzuki joined Sega in 1983, his first assignment was Champion Boxing on the SG-1000. From there, Suzuki’s progress began to gain momentum. By the end of 1985 he had already established himself at the vanguard of coin-op development, having masterminded a couple of major successes for Sega in the form of Hang-On and Space Harrier.

But Suzuki’s journey towards becoming a legendary videogame producer was about to shift to a higher gear, and it was the following year’s OutRun driving game that turned Suzuki into an internationally renowned programming superstar.

Before a brief diversion to code the thrilling sci-fiblast of Space Harrier in time for a December 1985 release, Suzuki’s attention was first centred on the racing genre. The result of Suzuki’s initial drive was Hang-On (which appeared in Japan’s arcades in July 1985), a high-speed bike racing game where players literally felt as though they had to hang on to the coin-op cabinet’s handlebars. Part of Suzuki’s motivation for Hang-On’s production was a desire to see to it that Sega overturn Namco as Japan’s leading manufacturer of racing games, and while Hang- On was a superb title – and one which radically altered Sega’s image – he accepted that his first racing game alone hadn’t been sufficient for Sega to overtake its main rival, the developer of Pole Position. Namco was still synonymous with driving games; Sega was being lapped. Suzuki wasn’t fond of repetition, so instead of producing another bike racing game he opted to create the car driving game that would become OutRun.

Well, that’s one side of the story. The other, less weighty but equally important reason for Yu Suzuki’s determination to create OutRun came from a Burt Reynolds flick, as he confesses to us: “The main impetus behind OutRun’s creation was my love of a film called The Cannonball Run. I thought it would be good to make a game like that. The film crosses America, so I made a plan to follow the same course and collect data as I went.

Yu Suzuki, OutRun's creator

But I realised, once I’d arranged everything, that the scenery along the [pan-America] course actually doesn’t change very much, so I revised my plan and decided to collect data in Europe instead…”

Although Cannonball Run clearly had a great influence on Suzuki’s work with OutRun, the game also bears what must have been a coincidental similarity to the euphoric scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (also a 1986-vintage production) in which Ferris, the sassy Sloane at his side, speeds off in a rosso corsa Ferrari 250GT. Regardless, Suzuki’s attention had been diverted away from America, towards Europe.

Suzuki’s maverick approach to game development would, during the Nineties, become accepted practice (12 years later, for example, fellow Sega-man Yuji Naka would take his Sonic Adventure team to South America purely for research purposes), but in the mid-Eighties Suzuki was already doing things the interesting way, literally journeying around the world just to make sure that his game would be the real deal. Suzuki’s plans culminated in a European research adventure.

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