…continued
“Yes, that’s correct,” he nods, to our relief. “I wanted to make stages where you could smell the fresh fragrance of new leaves and flowers, like in the green meadows of Switzerland, so I’m happy that you were able to sense that.” For such a cohesive, finely crafted game, it’s surprising to hear that the team behind OutRun was very much a randomly assembled group of individuals from within Sega. “The team consisted of four programmers, five graphics designers and one sound creator,” Suzuki says, “and we had the [coin-op] cabinet made by commissioning another team. The game development team was made up of people who happened to be available at the time, so I wasn’t able to assemble the team according to my wishes. I wrote all of the important planning and programming parts myself; I don’t think anything was really influenced by the development staff. I recall the bulk of development work taking between eight and ten months to complete. However, during those eight to ten months I was almost living at Sega,” he laughs.

Although the other programmers and graphics designers working on OutRun appear, according to Suzuki, to have had scant influence on shaping the game, one man – Hiroshi Kawaguchi (the artist formerly known as Hiroshi Miyauchi) – had a tremendous effect on what has become one of the most highly regarded aspects of OutRun’s production: its music. Kawaguchi joined Sega as a programmer in 1984, coding alongside Yuji Naka on the SG-1000 game Girl’s Garden while writing music purely as a hobby outside of work. Suzuki heard some of Kawaguchi’s tunes and was so impressed that he commissioned him to produce the soundtrack for Hang-On, after which Kawaguchi quit his role as a programmer and became a full-time in-house composer at Sega.

Yu Suzuki, himself a guitarist, had specific requests of Kawaguchi for his OutRun assignment: “During the planning stage I explained in detail to the sound engineer what type of tunes were needed. I told him that basically I wanted eight-beat rock rhythms at a tempo of 150bpm.

I remember selecting a number of tunes to be used as points of reference. In those days we couldn’t use samplers or PCM sound sources, so the timbre of the tunes was a synthesizer creation, which led to us having some difficulty when attempting to trim data quantities for playback of the tunes. I remember wanting some guitars and voices in the soundtrack, but it was impossible to achieve with the technology of the time, so I ultimately had to give up.”

The final soundtrack represents one of the finest, enduring examples of Japanese videogame music. OutRun offers players a choice of three tunes – Passing Breeze, Magical Sound Shower and Splash Wave – via a mock car-stereo screen before the action begins. It’s a concise collection of aurally luxurious numbers, each upbeat and catchy to the point where players would anticipate every subsequent bar. Somehow these tunes fit OutRun’s graphics perfectly, and they even seem to be in tune with the feel of the Testarossa’s acceleration and handling. This is explained in part by Yu Suzuki’s balanced commitment to OutRun’s sonic, visual and responsive aspects – “I couldn’t think of the game and music as detached, separate things,” he tells us – but there’s also the fact that Hiroshi Kawaguchi, after working with Suzuki to deliver the excellent Hang-On music, was beginning to understand Suzuki’s wishes and his way of thinking. We ask Yu Suzuki to reveal his favourite OutRun cut and he responds without any hesitation: “Magical Sound Shower.”

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