Safari Race (SG1000)

 Back in 2018, I reviewed the SG-1000 racing game GP World, and recognised it as a predecessor to SEGA's more well-known racing games Hang On and Outrun. In trying out Safari Race, I've found an even earlier part of the family tree. As well as being a very early into-the-screen time-attack racing game, you can see the DNA in a few of the specific features shared between it, GP World and Outrun.

 

The most obvious is the gears: Outrun has two gears, that work just like you'd expect in a racing game, as does GP World. Safari Race kind of has two gears, but implemented in a way emblematic of most of the changes made between it and its antecendents: it's slightly more complucated and strange than it needs to be. In Safari Race, you press up to accelerate when your speed is less than eighty kilometers per hour, and somewhat counter-intuitively, down to accelerate when your speed goes above that level. So rather than switching fears in the way you might expect, low gear and high gear have different acceleration controls. (The two buttons on the SG-1000 controller are mapped to braking and making a weird noise for no obvious reason, respectively).

 

Like GP World, Safari Race also has the quirk of your time limit being measured by a clock that counts upwards towards the limit, rather than starting at the limit and counting down to zero. Safari Race is actually more complicated than its antecendants, too, as the time limit is only one of three possible lose coniditons in the game! You can also get a game over by crashing four times (represented by four spare tyres, as that is the only repair you need, whether you've crashed into a rock, a car, or an elephant), or by running out of fuel. Fuel is used up at a drastically increased rate the faster you go, though of course you can't possibly get to the end of each stage within the time limit if you don't go as fast as possible as often as possible, so there are fuel pumps dotted around the stages.

 

There's a couple of weird quirks regarding the fuel pumps. For a start, just like the various obstacles, their appearance seems to be procedurally generated, and since you use them by stopping in front of them (a painfully slow process), sometimes a pump will be unusable because a rock spawned in the place where you're supposed to stop. Also, whatever bit of code decides how often they should appear seems to space them out based on how much time has passed, rather than how much distance you've travelled. I guess this makes sense from a game balance perspective, if you try to think of the game taking place in an actual world, it paints a very strange picture of that world.

 

Safari Race is one of those games that's not particularly fun to play, but it is interesting to have a look at, and compare to where the ideas presented in it would later go. It's an especially interesting example of the phenomena, because of how later iterations of the concept simplified the formula, rather than complicating it, a decision that was entirely to the later games' benefit. So, it's a historical curiosity and not much more, then.