Radio Control My Soul

Growing up there was one game I was absolutely obsessed with: Rock n’ Roll Racing. That game, developed by Silicon and Synapse (who eventually renamed themselves into Blizzard Entertainment), featured fast, fluid racing alongside vehicular combat, all presented with great music from an isometric perspective. It was kind of a silly game, and it was hard to elaborate upon why I liked the game so much beyond, “it’s just fun.” But it was. It was damn fun, and every couple of years I’d break the game out again and try to play through it again, seeing how far I could get and if, this time, I could eventually beat the full, galactic circuit.

We’re not talking about that game, at least not yet. But to get to Rock n’ Roll Racing we need to trace back through its lineage to the games that came before and acted as the precursors to the game I heartily enjoyed. To get through it all we have to go back to an NES title, R.C. Pro-Am, which isn’t at all related to Rock n’ Roll Racing. It’s a different series, on a different console, by a different company. And yet, when you go back and look at it, the genetics of the game are quite clear. This was the game that really defined a certain kind of racing title, and it came to us not from Blizzard (or whatever you wanted to call them) but from Rare.

Rare had their own interesting history, starting out under the name Ultimate Play the Game, developing titles for the ZX Spectrum. But by the mid 1980s they’d moved on from that home computer system, realizing that the NES was going to take the world by storm, and they started work reverse engineering the hardware of the NES so they could develop games for it. From there they became one of the strongest third-party developers for the console that wasn’t based in Japan, and they eventually went on to have a grand relationship with Nintendo for a number of years (right up until Microsoft bought the company and Rare stopped developing for Nintendo consoles altogether).

Although Slalom was their first game for Nintendo, and Wizards and Warriors helped show what the company was capable of, it was really R.C. Pro-Am that put the company on the map. It was so good, in fact, that Nintendo snatched it up to publish it first party, slapping their name, and seal of approval, right on the front of the box. That game would go on to be Rare’s first big hit, and cement their legacy on the NES and beyond. And all of that for a game about racing remote controlled cars.

The game itself is simple enough, but in that very specific Rare way. You are one of four (or, in the later Genesis release, Championship Pro-Am, six) remote controlled vehicles on a track, and, as in any racing game, your job is to go around the track as fast as you can. The tracks are curvy and interesting, and they have a variety of bonuses and traps to work around. You can hit speed boosters that increase your speed temporarily, or catch water puddles that slow you down and oil slicks that send you spinning, all of which can make the difference between first place (and a special trophy along with more points) and last (where you game over and have to use one of your limited continues).

But as you’re going around the course, there’s more to pay attention to than just boosts and traps. The tracks are also littered with bonuses, from upgrades to your vehicles, protective roll cages that make you temporarily invincible, and missiles to collect. See, R.C. Pro-Am isn’t just a racing game, it’s a vehicular combat game as well. As you move around the track you’ll find yourself, at times, stuck behind other vehicles. The only way to get ahead is to shoot them, breaking their cars and sending them back while you get ahead. And with the way the opponent cars can rubber band back up to fight you, those missiles are going to become more and more important the further into the game you get.

Early on R.C. Pro-Am is a fun, simple experience, but as you move through the tracks the game gets harder and harder until, as you’d expect, it finds that Rare level of difficulty. The game is meant to grind you down and beat you, making you work for every new track you get to and as you try to set higher and higher scores. Technically R.C. Pro-Am is an endless, arcade-style racer, but in reality there’s just 24 tracks that loop endlessly past a certain point, with no real end game beyond seeing how high you can get and how long you can last before the computers (which are absolutely maxed on their stats at that point) grind you down and kick you out of the game.

But that doesn’t really ruin the fun. There’s something simple and enjoyable about the construction of R.C. Pro-Am. Its tracks are curvy, but in a predictable way, with a mini-map in the corner showing the full layout along with the placement of the other cars. If you are good you can keep one eye on the track, the other on where you’re going, and get into a kind of zen about the map as you make your way around the track. It’s an experience that keeps you moving, focused on multiple inputs at once as you try to glide ahead of everything with the smoothest movement possible.

Due to the limited screen real estate on the NES, you really do have to anticipate corners and turns before they come up. That is made harder by the fact that the cars in R.C. Pro-Am are fairly slippy in their controls. You skid more than turn, and there’s a real sense that you have to drift your way around the track. It’s precise, but in a way that feels very different from many other racers. Rare made cars that feel different, and you have to learn how to control them, especially as the game progresses and the computer racers get more and more ruthless, if you want to get, and stay, ahead.

Playing through this game, I couldn’t help but notice all the ways this game felt like Rock n’ Roll Racing. This was the clear, spiritual successor for that later game, from the way the tracks are constructed, the traps and bonuses on those tracks, and the layout of the whole game. Blizzard clearly looked at this game and said, “yeah, we can do that… and better…” and then went to work making a version of it called RPM Racing. Yeah, Rock n’ Roll Racing was actually their second, and far more successful, attempt at improving upon Rare’s R.C. Pro-Am experience, and it’s the one that everyone fondly remembers. It was pure refinement of all that worked here, in R.C. Pro-Am, and if Rare had continued development on this series, instead of moving on to other titles after a few entries, it’s easy to think that Rare could have made something as addictively good as Rock n’ Roll Racing without even trying.

But alas, Rare stopped their series in the 8-bit era, after just three games, with two on the NES and one on the Game Boy. And then along came Battletoads, which sent the company down a different path that eventually led to Donkey Kong Country and a complete reinvention of the company’s focus after that. Which is a pity from a certain perspective because Rare was really good at making weird games that reinvented genres. There had been plenty of racing games before R.C. Pro-Am, but there wasn’t anything at the time that played like Rare’s racing title. And there are so many other games like this that Rare made before shifting their focus onto other avenues.

R.C. Pro-Am showed Rare at their early best, looking at a genre and having their own moment of saying, “yea, we can do that… and better…” That’s the Rare we lost, and while they continued to make great games for quite some time, R.C. Pro-Am was the start of a special era when Rare really experimented and was willing to throw all kinds of stuff at the wall to see what stuck. R.C. Pro-Am certainly stuck, and it completely redefined the genre for a whole console generation.