Retro spotlight: Vic Viper: Battle Racing

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius was an early pillar for Konami. It wasn’t as popular overseas as it was in Japan, but it was big enough at home that it received plenty of spin-off titles, which regularly became their own series in their own right. Salamander was a pseudo-sequel to Gradius with its own gameplay style and rules, the third of which just released in 2025. Cosmic Wars was a proto-4X strategy game set in the Gradius universe, released for the Famicom of all things. There was Solar Assault, the arcade-only, 3D rail shooter that still followed the general rules of Gradius rather than those of the games it was following in the footsteps of. And, of course, there is Parodius, which was named through a portmanteau of “Parody” and “Gradius,” as it’s a goofy cute ‘em up version of that style of gameplay, only featuring classic music, other Konami characters and sprites, and octopi. Like, so many octopi.

We almost got much weirder than that. Well, okay, maybe not weirder than Parodius, but at least stranger in terms of getting from Point A to Point B… from horizontal shoot ‘em up to futuristic racing game in the style of F-Zero and Wipeout, only starring ships from Gradius as the vehicles. This game doesn’t exist, but only in the sense that it was never released: Konami was working on it at the same time they were developing the arcade sequel to Salamander, Salamander 2, and it was even featured in the same video game magazine as that game in November of 1995.

Electronic Gaming Monthly covered a few Konami titles that were unfinished but playable on the floor of that year’s JAMMA show — the Japan Amusement and Marketing Association’s Amusement Machine Show in Japan, with the likes of Capcom, Sega, Namco, and Konami showing off what they were working on to attendees, which helped give them an idea of what games had players excited. Konami had builds of varying completeness at the show, for the shooting game Salamander 2, the racing game Midnight Run, and another racing game titled Vic Viper. That’s the name of the ship from Gradius — there are other ships to choose from, sure, but that’s the one from the original that appears again and again throughout the series. And here, it was meant to be both the name of a racing game and a racer itself. That’s Vic Viper: Battle Racing.

According to Electronic Gaming Monthly, the version they played at JAMMA’s show was 30 percent complete, and by the time they went to print, it was up to 40 percent. And that was that: it was featured in multiple magazines as a title that could possibly come out, and then nothing again, despite there being a playable build. Obviously, “40 percent complete” and “complete” are two very different things, especially if you’ve ever heard a developer talk about how long it takes to get those last few percentage points taken care of to actually get a game to be finished. But it’s unclear if Konami cut development off at 40 percent, or 50, or 90, or what.

Electronic Gaming Monthly was already speculating that Konami “might not bring it out” considering that Namco and Sega were showing off racing game after racing game at the same show, and, you know, they were mid-90s Namco and Sega. So it’s possible that they decided to just focus their attention elsewhere instead of continuing with Vic Viper: Battle Racing. Regardless of the why, however, it’s disappointing: seeing what Konami had to offer in the style of F-Zero or Wipeout is something I would have jumped at both in the 90s and in the present, and given you are here reading this, at least with the second part, it’s not a stretch to imagine that goes for you, too.

This would not have been the first racing game to feature the Vic Viper. In May of 1995, Konami released Speed King: Neo Kobe 2045 into arcades worldwide, and then would port it to the Playstation in 1996 and 1997, in Japan and Europe, respectively. The Vic Viper was a secret vehicle in the game, which is loaded with references to — and vehicles based on — other Konami properties.

An entire racing game in the style of Gradius, however, featuring vehicles from the series? That would have been something entirely new. Whether adding the Vic Viper to Speed King is what inspired Vic Viper: Battle Racing, or it was something done because a team at Konami was already working on that game in some way, is unclear, but the point is that they were very much in the headspace of Wipeout x Gradius in 1995.

We don’t have video of gameplay of Battle Racing, given it was shown at a trade show 30 years ago in an incomplete build and given the briefest of writeups from a couple of publications. We do have scans of those publications, however, so let’s dive in. Electronic Gaming Monthly wrote:

And then there is MAXIMUM: The Video Game Magazine, which seemed a little confused about what they were even discussing, given the magazine had a photo of the Vic Viper cabinet with the name fully displayed and legible, but described what sounds like a different game in the text itself? At least they had photographic evidence:

You’ll notice there is very little actual information about how Vic Viper: Battle Racing plays, other than that there are multiple vehicles to choose from, it’s futuristic a la F-Zero and Wipeout, and that EGM felt it was “fun to play.” MAXIMUM seemingly incorrectly described it as a “shooter,” so we’re either not getting any additional information there because of some confusion in either writing or editing, or Battle Racing shared some DNA with the as-of-yet-unreleased Extreme-G series from Probe, and, to align it with Gradius in more ways than “hey here’s the Vic Viper,” it also featured some kind of shooting element in the racing. Hey, it was subtitled “Battle Racing,” so that’s not a stretch.

Sadly, the one gameplay screenshot does not clear things up very much, and that’s not a pun about how muddy said screenshot looks.

What’s health, what’s speed, what’s ammo there? Why does the screen say “Warning” — is it because you’re approaching something dangerous, or another racer, or because you’ve got incoming fire to dodge? Maybe it’s the turn — there is an arrow signaling left in this tunnel, after all — but yeah, this doesn’t fully clear things up in terms of what the actual battle racing is made up of. A shame, but it feels fair to educated-guess your way into “Konami was maybe going to do Extreme-G before Extreme-G did,” at least. Maybe just don’t take that as a definitive and absolute conclusion.

Luckily, there is one more screen out to stare at and wonder, and that’s the vehicle select. Here, you see ratings for maximum speed, acceleration, turning, and — here we go — attack and defense ratings. A main weapon and a subweapon are also featured on the right side of the screen, as well as an overall rating — the Vic Viper shown below is described as having “Well Balance” [sic]. Again, whether it actually plays like or resembles Extreme-G is left to the imagination, but the “battle racing” part of Battle Racing is that much clearer after this — you aren’t simply colliding into other vehicles here and calling it a battle. You have armaments, plural.

What is known for sure is that it’s a bummer that Konami didn’t finish the game and release it. The soundtrack was completed, though, and we know this because the only other sign of life for Vic Viper: Battle Racing after November of ‘95 came in 2011, when the music for the game was released as part of Konami Shooting Collection, a 10-disc compilation of tracks from Konami’s vast shooter history. Seriously, how far along did they end up getting this game before pulling the plug?

I’d say “maybe Konami can release it in the present somehow,” but their track record for bringing back games that actually do exist isn’t exactly stellar, and it’s not like Gradius Origins was even all-encompassing — an excellent start, yes, but there is so much more Gradius out there to the point that it’s very unlikely this ever sees the light of day in any form. That might depend entirely on how intrigued M2, which handled Origins and is responsible for the last two original Gradius titles, is about this piece of unfinished media, of course. But even expecting something of that is a bit much, and more wishcasting than anything else — M2’s schedule is already seemingly overloaded, considering games and projects they announced years ago are ongoing and unreleased, while they continue taking on new contracts, and again, Konami would have to sign off on anything happening in the first place. Hamster isn’t in the business of releasing prototypes via Arcade Archives, either, so where does that leave us? Reading about Vic Viper: Battle Racing, mostly, and maybe a little bit of wishing that you could go seek that out, too.

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