Feel the Rush! Atari's San Francisco Rush! - A 1UP classic from April 29, 2009

In the late 90's the US arcade scene was tapering off. San Francisco Rush by Atari was created as a rival to anything Sega had and especially to counter the popular Cruis'n USA series by Midway. The 1996 title showed that Atari was behind the curve. However even their worst Rush showing was better than the best Cruis'n game.

Atari did an accurate representation of San Francisco to race around in. The hilly city was a good setting for an arcade racer. All Atari had to do was polish out some corners and lengthen a few streets to make it perfect. They developed a series of tracks around the city, exploiting obvious as well as hidden shortcuts with their model. They also introduced a series of cars which handled differently and had their own strengths and weaknesses. The Volkswagen-inspired cars said a lot about the still lingering hippy vibe from San Francisco. Rarely did the cars mesh so well with the theme of the game. Rush was a blast to play as cars made fantastic jumps at top speed clearing entire blocks in one go. Not many racing games ever featured cars that could leave the ground. With a few rare exceptions none of the Sega racers featured any jumps, let alone those on the scale of Rush. Expert players could "thread the needle" through a series of jumps and shortcuts that would frighten even the most seasoned racing veterans. Those that took a jump just a little bit off would end up crashing miserably and lose their spot in the race. As imaginative and arcade-like as the game was it felt like it was lacking something.

I believe the graphics were the biggest detractor to the Rush series. The tracks and cars seemed very simplistic, details were sparse and the city of San Francisco felt lifeless. AM2 was memorable for their racing games but the sum of their parts were more than great cars and tracks. None of the Rush games carried the same level of atmosphere that Sega had poured into their games. Filters to convey motion, realistic lighting effects, models made up of millions of polygons, landscape and textures which were weren't flat and generic. Atari touted the latest 3DFX technology but it wasn't enough to make Rush appear more than a very pretty computer game in the arcade. However this was also a sign of the times.

Only Japan seemingly had enough of an arcade market to keep on developing dedicated cabinets and hardware for every title. In the US corners had to be cut which meant that the tech that went into arcade titles was very scaled back and based on systems not much nicer than the PC's available in homes. All of the atmosphere and technology from the Sega games couldn't be reproduced with such limited resources. This did not stop the Rush series from taking a foothold and keeping Atari going. The 1997 follow-up Rush the Rock Alcatraz edition did well as did the last in the series, 1999's San Francisco Rush 2049. All of these games eventually found their way to the consoles where a generation that didn't have an arcade scene could see what they were missing out on. There were some arcade titles that never made the transition to the home, not because the technology wasn't there but because of the interesting ways the game was presented. On the next blog we'll look at one of the more obscure and odd titles in the driving genre.

Did you ever play the Rush games? Did you have a favorite late '90s arcade racer? Let me know in the comments section please. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!