My 5 favourite '90s arcade racing games

In simple terms, by the mid-nineties, arcade racing games were some cool beans. Polygons were working nicely for fighting games and shooters but they were really working for racing games. And racing games had that low bar of entry which meant that even your mum could manage a lap or two of multiplayer Daytona. And that made them right little coin munchers.

Remember walking along a seafront arcade? What were the attention-grabbing machines that littered the entrances? Racing games for the most part, with their super peak fidelity and high frames per second, again for the most part.

So mine will be a personal list, and I’ll start with some familiar old ground…

An entry perhaps beyond the per functionary, but Sega Rally’s Euro cool, Martini iced facade was the last word in 90s media classicism. It’ll outlive Reservoir Dogs, and so it should. Nothing looked so rich and shifted so smooth as when Sega Rally parked up at your local arcade in 1995.

The cabinet had that familiar Victorian engineering quality that encouraged vigour and the monitors were mountainous with resolution. Daytona had been an absolute triumph already in the arcade for Sega and had all the bluster, but Sega Rally brought a sharp style.

Daytona was lager; Sega Rally was champagne.

The cabinet might have encouraged, but the handling required a righteous sympathy to a tail as happy as a Labrador. But by golly it was balanced. On your over-correcting route to managing your first decent slide, your errors could always be felt as your own and not design. By the time I had shovelled a few quid into the first machine that I played, I came away aware that this machine was unparalleled.

Utterly distinct and as deep in its control as its facade was wide with appeal. Nothing could get close to the charisma, but for a stupendous effort in converting the game to the Saturn, and a notable hand at Euro cool a couple of years later from Konami…