30 years of the Sega Saturn: Sega Rally Championship

On May 11, 2025, the Sega Saturn will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of May, I’ll be covering the console and its history, its games, and what made it the most successful Sega console in Japan but a disappointment outside of it. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ridge Racer is inexorably tied to the Sega Saturn, despite not appearing on the console. In fact, it’s the lack of Ridge Racer which stands out: the Saturn had Sega’s own arcade racer, Daytona USA, available in a hurry, but it didn’t quite live up to what Namco did with Ridge Racer in its ported form. The difference has been exaggerated over the years, yes, but Ridge Racer at least looked the part in its Playstation form in a way that drew people to the console, and helped pull eyeballs from the Sega’s 32-bit successor to the Genesis. Sega was known for their arcade games, especially their racing games, but if Playstation had them matched there, well… why buy a Saturn then? Or so was the idea, one buoyed by the lack of available software otherwise for far too long.

There’s another reason that you can’t sever the tie between Ridge Racer and the Saturn, though, and it’s Sega Rally Championship. And that’s because the director of Sega Rally Championship, Kenji Sasaki, worked on Ridge Racer prior to his joining and the internal studio, Sega AM Research & Development No. 3, full-time. While full credits for the original Ridge Racer are seemingly unavailable — more than a handful of people, which is all that seems to be out there, made the game, you know — Sasaki has been credited as a “Graphic Designer” on the arcade game. Given the attention paid to the quality of the title’s graphics, it should be no surprise, then, that Sega Rally Championship managed to impress with its visuals — in a way the Saturn’s version of Daytona USA did not — even before it was anywhere near being a completed product.

As UK gaming magazine Maximum described it in their October 1995 issue:

Sasaki was both director and an artist on Sega Rally Championship, so this isn’t just some projection that he had previously done art and graphics and therefore Sega Rally looked good because of his presence. And why a rally game? Mostly because it hadn’t been done like this before. As Sasaki told Edge in a 2009 retrospective, “We were determined to develop an arcade racing game with a difference. But with Ridge Racer and Daytona USA on the market we had to find another take on the genre. We were after something in vogue in terms of motorsport racing and as we were keen on great engine sounds, cool cars and great sensations – the obvious choice was rally.”

It’s not that there weren’t any rally games out there before Sega took a swing at the genre. Namco’s Rally X was already 15 years old by the time that Sega Rally Championship released in arcades, for instance, and Visco were multiple games into their own rally series before 1996’s Neo Drift Out: New Technology landed on the Neo Geo with a new perspective. But at the point in time where AM3 was figuring out what to do next, rally games had been lapped repeatedly by a variety of other racers that were considered the genre’s standard bearers, in no small part because of how stylish a Formula 1 or “grand touring” racing car were in comparison to a rally car. Sasaki, once again, with Edge: “At the time there were two taboos in Japan with regard to rally games. The first one was the box-shaped car. Nobody wanted to make games based on the everyday car. All racing games were based around stylish F1 or GT vehicles. The second was rally itself. Again, people were uneasy to the idea of a game based on this sport.”

The taboo was no more post-Sega Rally Championship. Rally games ended up becoming central to racing after Sega’s classic hit, in the same way that kart games began to appear more and more after Nintendo’s success with Super Mario Kart, as futuristic “anti-gravity” racers became normal following the success of F-Zero and WipeOut — alternatives to games where you raced an F-1 car or a gran turismo vehicle against a bunch of others cars were no longer the only game in town, numbers-wise. Colin McRae Rally showed up in 1998, kicking off the long-running series, and Codemasters was not shy about crediting Sega Rally Championship for the shape and feel of that game. Nor were they shy about developing a whole bunch of rally games over the years:

What specifically drew the developers of Colin McRae Rally to Sega Rally Championship was also what wowed everyone else: the way the game handled driving on different surfaces. If you’re not big into racing games, you might be raising an eyebrow or furrowing your brow at this moment at the idea of a car behaving and handling differently depending on the surfaces it was driving on, but that was never emphasized to the degree it is now until AM3 made it a core part of the Sega Rally Championship experience. Codemaster’s Guy Wilday told Edge in 2010 that, “Everyone who played it loved the way the cars behaved on the different surfaces, especially the fact that you could slide the car realistically on the loose gravel. The car handling remains excellent to this day and it’s still an arcade machine I enjoy playing, given the chance.”

That handling makes Sega Rally Championship ridiculously difficult to master, since it asks a whole lot of the player. Not only do you have to deal with changing gears and tight turns because of the shape of the track you’re on, but you also have to consider how those turns and your speed need to be managed because of the surface those turns are occurring on. It’s an additional layer that, in the present, feels pretty obvious for inclusion in a racing game, but these ideas did not just spring out of the head of Nolan Bushnell, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus. It took time to get to the point where these kinds of considerations could be added, which is why, sure, Rally-X existed back in 1980, but it was a maze game featuring a car more than a “rally” racer, and yeah, Super Mario Kart had you driving over different surfaces a few years prior, but the effects were all more cartoonish than realistic. Sega Rally Championship was the most notable effort to make these different surfaces not just a part of the experience, but the mastery of them required for even basic levels of success.

And that’s because of how Sega Rally Championship is structured. You will race on three courses, one lap each, in an attempt to make your way to the front of the line before you’ve run out of either time or courses with which to progress. You start in last place, 15 out of 15, and will attempt to make your way to the first place before the three laps/courses are up. It’s tough, and impossible if you don’t get a handle on, well, the handling.

The three courses are Desert, Forest, and Mountain. There’s a fourth course that unlocks if you manage to finish in first by the time Mountain ends, as well: Lakeside, which, when played on the Saturn, can then be selected in the non-arcade modes at will. Those modes are “Time Attack” and split-screen multiplayer. You get your choice of just two cars: a Toyota Celica GT-Four patterned after French rally driver Didier Auriol’s own, and the Lancia Delta HF Integrale driven by Finnish rally driver Juha Kankkunen. There’s a secret third car, too, if you can finish in first in Lakeside: Italian rally driver Sandro Munari’s Lancia Stratos F. You can choose to drive them in either manual or automatic transmission, but you know the drill by now: if you want to excel as much as possible in a game like this where handling is king, then mastering manual is the way to go. And yes, while we’re on the subject of things that make a racing game feel Right, you can switch from a chase-cam view to a first-person one in Sega Rally Championship, if that’s more your thing.

An odd quirk of Sega Rally Championship is that Sega didn’t have the license for these cars. They also didn’t use them without permission: as the box art says, the cars do appear courtesy of Toyota and Lancia. Instead, per, Maximum, they had a gentleman’s agreement on the use of the vehicles: “Although Sega Rally Championship features realistic sponsorship texture-mapping on the cars, no specific deal was struck up at all. AM3 contacted the Fiat team when researching coin-op Sega Rally and came to an informal agreement which allowed them to use official logos and suchlike in the game. The Fiat team were also instrumental in AM3 getting the feel of the game right, allowing them access to actual vehicles.”

It worked out pretty well for Sega, of course — the cars not only looked more realistic given they were able to apply textured logos on them, but additional knowledge of how the vehicles themselves certainly seems to have played a role in Sega Rally Championship’s then-unparalleled feel — and given that rally games became a more significant deal going forward, it’s not like the car manufacturers suffered from this setup, either. The one downside is that you’re unlikely to see Sega Rally Championship getting any kind of official re-release, for the same reason that the arcade sequel to Daytona USA had to be stuffed inside of a Like a Dragon game and renamed. The licensing deal hasn’t expired because there was no licensing deal, but that handshake certainly has.

What’s the definitive version of Sega Rally Championship? Good question with a not-at-all confusing answer! The first version of the game released for the Saturn was actually for the North American market, as Sega wanted to take advantage of the Christmas holiday shopping season, per Maximum No. 3, and so came to retail on November 15, 1995. It wouldn’t come out in Japan for another six weeks or so, and in Europe just under another month more than that, and by that time, it had been improved upon further by AM3, meaning that the initial release of Sega Rally Championship, for as killer as it was out of the box, was shortly after the worst home console version of it out there.

And then, in Japan in 1996, Sega Rally Championship Plus was released, which added 3D Control Pad support. This was more than just allowing you to use the analog stick to control your car, however. You could use the L and R buttons, which were analog triggers rather than just shoulder buttons, to accelerate and decelerate your vehicle with that controller with more precision than button presses allowed. Highly recommended, and the kind of thing that would become the norm for racing games as analog triggers began to show up on the controllers for every console. The only real downside to Sega Rally Championship Plus is that it’s a rarity compared to the others: while you can pick up a copy of the (superior to the North American version) original Japanese Sega Rally Championship secondhand for $12 as of this writing, you’ll pay at least $30 more for the Plus variant. This doesn’t take into account that you will also need a 3D Control Pad to take full advantage, but you should get one of those if you’re serious about Saturn games, anyway. Hey, adjusted for inflation, those controllers are cheaper now than they were when they first came out, so you’ve got that going for you.

Sega Rally Championship not only managed split-screen multiplayer — a significant achievement considering Daytona USA was single-player in its launch version; the reworked Championship Circuit Edition from 1996 also included multiplayer, and was built with a modified version of the Sega Rally Championship engine, as well, but no such luck in its inaugural release — but online play, too. The Sega Saturn had the Net Link accessory, which did not come cheap at all, but did allow for online console play in 1996.

This is how North America received Sega Rally Championship Plus, which was that game with its improvements over the original, plus support for Net Link. The Net Link was a 28.8 kbit/s modem that fit into the Saturn’s cartridge slot, and included a browser, as well. In 1996, you could buy a Net Link for $199, or spend $400 to get a bundle that included both the Net Link and a Saturn, and in 1997, Sega drastically changed up the pricing system so that Net Link could be purchased alongside its Net Link-compatible games — Sega Rally Championship Plus and Virtual On: Cyber Troopers — for $99. You have to remember that Sega would release the Dreamcast in Japan in 1998, so by this time in ‘97, they were just trying to move inventory and get people invested in, at least, the ideas and technology of said inventory. With online support coming to the Dreamcast, as well, getting people used to playing a console online, even at a financial loss like this, made some measure of sense.

This was just the first game in the Sega Rally series. Sega Rally 2 would land in arcades, Windows, and on the Dreamcast. There were also N-Gage and Game Boy Advance releases of Sega Rally Championship, though, despite the name, neither was a port of the original, and they’re both different from each other. Sega Rally 2006 was a Playstation 2-exclusive, the first in the series not made with arcades in mind, and the last with series’ creator Sasaki to oversee it. Sega Rally Revo was a multiplatform title for PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and even the Playstation Portable, while Sega Rally 3 brought the game back to arcades, while receiving a home version for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 known as Sega Rally Online Arcade in 2011, though, it was then delisted the next year. To add insult to injury there for everyone who didn’t buy it before this unceremonious tragedy occurred, it’s also the last Sega Rally game out there.

Sega Rally Championship might take you less than 10 minutes to beat, but it’s going to take far, far longer than that to get to the point where you can pull that off. Think of it like you would any other arcade game from differing genres. Yes, you can complete a whole bunch of shoot ‘em ups in 20 minutes or so, but unless you’re shoving quarters in constantly to continue, that’s not happening on your first, second, fifth, or even 10th attempt. Repeatedly playing to learn the courses, the vehicle handling, how other cars will react around you, what the differing terrain will do, what applying the brake or letting off the gas or changing gears at this moment or that one will do to your time… that’s the game. And you’ll get way more than 10 minutes out of all of that, plus the thrill of progress that you’ll see in your times and placement as it all begins to come together for you. And that’s without even getting into the various ways you could play against your friends in this one.

Sega Rally Championship is an all-timer. It’s one that requires patience from its player, but if you give it that much, it will reward you many times over with thrills that will make you understand how it helped to make a little-loved subgenre such a central component of racing games all at once. If you’ve never played, then give it a shot. And if you have played, you were already thinking about going back for more, anyway.

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