BY GARNET HERTZ OUTRUN
BUILDING THE UN-SIMULATION
OF A DRIVING VIDEO GAME.
I consumed many hours as a teenager in arcades playing classic
video games, and spent a small fortune in quarters mastering a few
of them. One of those games was OutRun, a driving game released
by Sega in 1986, which featured a red Ferrari Testarossa racing
down a freeway that snaked through a variety of landscapes.
At the time of its release, this game had
a number of interesting features: a steering
wheel controller that actually shook when you
hit the ditch, user-selectable “chiptune”-ish
soundtracks, multiple different endings, and
a graphics processor that created an immersive sense of speed — or at least immersive
enough to convince a 14-year-old to spend his
paper-route money.
Twenty years later, I came across this game
at the Beach Boardwalk arcade in Santa Cruz,
Calif. It wasn’t in the standard upright “fridge
format”; this was an 800-pound, car-shaped,
sit-down cabinet with fiberglass wheels,
working taillights, dashboard, and a powerful
hydraulic system that shook the entire cabinet from side to side when you veered into
the ditch.
The cabinet was as big as a golf cart, and it
got me thinking: “What would it be like if this
Photography by Four Eyes Photography, Art Center College of Design
50 Make: makezine.com/26
