Back in 2008, RetroGamer magazine ran an interview with Yu Suzuki discussing the development of OutRun.
The article can be read online here.
It's interesting to read about the features that didn't make it into the final game:
Personally, I'm pleased the checkpoint events didn't make it, as they'd have potentially spoilt the flow of the gameplay. The changeable characters make sense, as the player sprites are drawn separately from the car sprite and have a table of offset co-ordinates. This also allows the car sprite to be horizontally flipped (it wouldn't look good if the players swapped seats, as per the Amiga port). There's no mention of the dual direction traffic that I uncovered in the game code though... :)
In other news, I've returned to working on the Master CPU decompilation at the moment. There's still a heck of a lot of code to plough through, but it's relatively trivial compared with the previous Slave CPU work.
One subtlety that I noticed whilst working on the code is that the position of the shadows in the game change dependent on which direction the car is facing (in practical terms it's set by the x position of the tilemap backdrop). This attention to detail is somewhat outstanding - I'd never even noticed this previously...
The article can be read online here.
It's interesting to read about the features that didn't make it into the final game:
“Because of budget and development time limitations, some of the contents I’d planned had to be squeezed or cut. I’d made preparations for eight individual characters and I wanted to include various events at each checkpoint, which would have made the player experience a story; something like the Cannonball Run film. I also wanted to give players a choice of supercars to drive, so that they could enjoy differences in car performance.”
Personally, I'm pleased the checkpoint events didn't make it, as they'd have potentially spoilt the flow of the gameplay. The changeable characters make sense, as the player sprites are drawn separately from the car sprite and have a table of offset co-ordinates. This also allows the car sprite to be horizontally flipped (it wouldn't look good if the players swapped seats, as per the Amiga port). There's no mention of the dual direction traffic that I uncovered in the game code though... :)
In other news, I've returned to working on the Master CPU decompilation at the moment. There's still a heck of a lot of code to plough through, but it's relatively trivial compared with the previous Slave CPU work.
One subtlety that I noticed whilst working on the code is that the position of the shadows in the game change dependent on which direction the car is facing (in practical terms it's set by the x position of the tilemap backdrop). This attention to detail is somewhat outstanding - I'd never even noticed this previously...
2 comments:
Do you know of an updated link or archived copy of this retro gamer feature? Thanks.
I've updated the link. Thanks for letting me know. :)
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