XP Arcade: Max RPM

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Bally Midway was into racing games from nearly the beginning of its history. In 1975, Midway released its first arcade title, Gun Fight, and its third game, 280 ZZZAP, got its full release in early 1977. If that name doesn’t scream “racing,” well, that’s because it’s been 50 years since it was first shown in public: first called “Midnight Racer,” the name was later changed so it was named after Nissan’s Datsun 280Z, making it one of the first games with a licensing deal.

In 280 ZZZAP, you race at night, avoiding other drivers, turns, and against the clock. What’s funny about being licensed like this is that you can’t actually see the car, as the view is not from behind or the side of it, but it does say “Datsun 280 ZZZAP” at the top of the playing area, so you can’t miss the connection, at least. Despite this early foray into racing, though, Midway didn’t play it straight with cars for years after this. Spy Hunter, released in 1983, is a vehicular combat game, not a racer. Demolition Derby, released the next year, should be pretty self-explanatory in its goal. The company didn’t seem to have that much interest in the industry arms race that came out of racers like Namco’s Pole Position, instead ceding that territory to arcade rival, Atari, which distributed Namco’s games in the United States.

Midway did eventually go back to a more straightforward racer. Well, straightforward compared to vehicular combat games, anyway. Max RPM, released in 1986, doesn’t emphasize combat or collisions, but instead is just you racing against an opponent and the clock. Rather than lengthy tracks, though, full of twists and turns, Max RPM focused on drag racing. These courses are all very short, and very fast, and you can win or lose in the blink of an eye. There is the one monitor, split in the middle, that allows for head-to-head racing, with a blue car for player one, a red car for player two. You don’t need to have two players, though, as the second car can be controlled by the CPU; more importantly, you need to beat the clock, anyway, as winning against your opponent isn’t enough.

Those qualifying times are designed for you to not make any mistakes, especially as you get further along. And you can make all kinds of mistakes in Max RPM. There is debris on the road that you can hit which will slow you down, ever so slightly. Drafting plays a vital role, to the point that you need to use the on-screen rear view mirror to see where the other car is when it’s behind you in order to not allow them to draft off of you: being ahead if a temporary thing if the car in the back can successfully draft, and the courses are not long enough to make up for that happening. There are speed boosts — nitrous oxide, per the game itself — spread all over the road, especially after the first few courses, and they might seem optional but are anything but. Maybe you can best the other driver without hitting most of them, but you still have to beat the qualifying time to advance further, and that becomes more and more difficult as you progress.

Just as important is shifting gears. Your transmission has four of them, and the very nanosecond that your speedometer hits the red, you need to shift up to the next one in order to keep building speed. Hit the gas hard enough before the light goes off to signal the start of the race and you can shift into second basically from the jump — fail to get that kind of head start, and you will regret it, because again, even if your opponent also falters, the clock is the clock.

While it’s drag racing, every race isn’t necessarily a straightaway, NHRA-style. There are slight turns, but it’s more like angling your driving than actually turning for real. The wheel is a lot tighter than what you would need to actually turn, designed more for going slightly left or slightly right, more for trying to angle yourself behind the car in front of you — or out of its own possible drafting path — than anything else. And to make sure you avoid debris but hit speed boosts as they come up, of course.

You have the four-speed stick shift, the wheel, and a gas pedal as inputs on the stand-up cabinet— no brakes. There is no need for or time for braking in Max RPM — the name of the game is not a suggestion, but a directive. Check the video below for examples of the first few courses, which go in a pattern of straightaway, no-frills qualifier and then the actual course, which will be more complicated, lengthier, and have more to concern yourself with than just getting to the finish line as quickly as possible. That’s still the goal, but this is where stuff is in the road, to be avoided or rammed into for speed boosts, and also where additional use of the wheel comes in for reasons beyond drafting and avoiding being drafted off of.

That first qualifying course is just 1,320 feet long. That’s a quarter-mile track, for a car where you are flooring it. The computer-controlled car in the video above finishes in 11.90 seconds with a trap speed of 149 mph — that’s the average speed over the last quarter-mile, which is the entire course in this case. The actual course itself is longer — it takes place in Atlanta, though you can’t really tell as much from the road itself — but still takes player one just 23.41 seconds to complete. The qualifying time was 25.25 seconds; the player would have done better if they had attempted to draft, but instead, they banked on the opponent hitting something in their way to slow them down, which happened. The CPU car actually had a significantly higher trap speed — 176 mph to 131 — but because of the debris it smashed into, you can see it get practically shoved back and behind player one.

I don’t know why the player didn’t shift into fourth gear in the second full race, but it’s good that they didn’t, for instructional purposes. They finished 4.99 seconds behind despite hitting multiple nitrous canisters for speed boosts, with a trap speed 71 mph slower — they not only lost to their opponent, but did not qualify and suffered a game over because of it. No drafting, no slamming it into fourth at the first opportunity to do so — see how easy it is to fall behind by a significant amount in races this short?

You might have also noticed — if you did watch the video — that the dashboard of the car that shows a speedometer also indicates whether you are drafting or not with a flashing D — at least you don’t have to guess at it. Since you don’t have any time to spare, that matters! Draft while you can, or lose.

You can earn some bonus time with your performances to give yourself some more room for error in future races, but the difficulty does ramp up considerably. You will get to a point — against the computer, anyway — where you are blowing it out of the water, not struggling in any way, and then you might find that you lost for failure to beat the qualifying time, anyway. You have to get everything just right at this point — jump off that starting line, shift the second that it’s time, avoid the cones and garbage on the road, drive right into those speed-boosting nitrous oxide canisters, and, if you’re ever behind, draft to get back ahead immediately. And also, don’t fall behind. There’s simply no time for it, not when you’re trying to achieve — wait for it — maximum RPM.

The game’s lead programmer was Tom Leon, who prior to Max RPM worked on Tron, Spy Hunter, and Rampage for Midway, and afterward would develop for Spy Hunter II, which used a split-screen setup akin to Max RPM’s, albeit for cooperative play rather than competitive. Working with Leon was Brian Colin, who had also developed Spy Hunter and Rampage and would get to Arch Rivals in 1989, but unlike Leon stuck around in the game industry for decades after leaving Midway behind (and worked with Midway on sequels to properties he had originally helped create in the first place, through his own studio, Game Refuge.

While Colin was initially credited for his graphical and animation work, he was eventually a game designer as well, and usually worked with programmer Jeff Nauman both at Midway and after leaving to found Game Refuge. However, Max RPM was one of the rare occasions after 1985 where Colin worked with a programmer besides Nauman. The team did some great work, too, as Max RPM is simple in many ways — drive fast, go (mostly) straight — but it all goes so quickly with failure feeling like it’s on you and not the game that it’s easy enough to toss another quarter in to see if you can do better.

And what more can you ask for out of an arcade game, other than to understand what it is that it needs you to do, and to feel like you can do that very thing if only you allow yourself the opportunity? You could ask for the game to be available in the present, but that’s just not the case with Max RPM, which is a shame: it’s not even available in the recent-ish past, as it was not included in the Midway Arcade Treasure series that came out in the original Xbox, Playstation 2, and GameCube era. Luckily, if you’re in the New England area, Funspot in Laconia, NH does have a fully operational Max RPM cabinet inside the American Classic Arcade Museum portion of the building. And if you aren’t near enough for a pilgrimage there, there’s always emulating the game on MAME — luckily, since the wheel isn’t as necessary for turning as in something like Pole Position or TX-1, even a keyboard’s arrows can work just fine for emulation.

Given that Warner Bros. Games now owns Midway’s titles now and likes to pretend that it does not, MAME or a road trip is the best you can realistically hope for with Max RPM. Maybe that will change at some point, though, when someone at Warner Bros. realizes that, at the least, letting Hamster put out Arcade Archives releases of Midway’s games will make more money than letting them sit dormant, or remembers that a developer like Digital Eclipse is out there to put in the necessary work of bringing the past into the present. Until that time, MAME or a road trip.

It’s a real shame for racing fans that Warner Bros. Games has been so derelict in its duty here, given that, beyond Max RPM, Bally Midway (and Williams, which also eventually roped in Tradewest and Atari Games under the Warner Bros. umbrella) famously developed and/or distributed the likes of Cruis’n USA and Cruis’n World, Off Road Challenge, Hydro Thunder, and San Francisco Rush 2049 for arcades, as well had a hand in a number of console-exclusive racers during the same period in the 90s. That’s a whole bunch of releases — and not even all of them mentioned above — just sitting there in the warehouse of their mind, rotting away in the present day. What a waste.

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