There’s good and bad news if you really want to revisit 1990s arcade racing, as the Top Racer Collection release is postponed to March 2024, but a free demo including three circuits and local multiplayer will still arrive on Steam on January 11th.
Top Racer is the modern name for the Top Gear series originally developed by Gremlin Graphics in the early 1990s. Very similar to the previous Lotus games for the Amiga and Megadrive developed by Magnetic Fields and published by Gremlin, Top Gear was one of the first racing titles to appear for the Super Nintendo, and spawned two sequels, with Top Gear in 1992, Top Gear 2 in 1993, and Top Gear 3000 in 1995.
Gremlin also developed andd published other racing titles. Alongside Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (followed by Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge), games included Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing, Hardcore 4×4, Motorhead and Team Suzuki. They were later acquired by Infogrames, and the studio was closed in 2003.
Back to the present day, and the popularity of Top Gear in Latin America has not only inpspired Horizon Chase – World Tour, but now QuByte Interactive is releasing Top Racer Collection, which includes Top Racer, Top Racer 2, Top Racer 3000, and the new Top Racer Crossroads which adds four iconic cars from other games and Brazilian culture.
You get split screen two-player racing in each title except Top Racer 3000, which bumps it up for four players, along with world rankings, more than 140 tracks across the quartet of games, and some filters to replicate old TV sets.
Personally, I haven’t played the Lotus or Top Gear games since the 1990s, as I suspect they might not live up to my memories from the time. But this might prompt me to dig them out and see how the Top Racer Collection compares. It’s also made me remember the awesome Team Suzuki for the first time in many years, so hopefully I still have my Amiga discs somewhere…
You’ll be able to download the demo version of Top Racer Collection for the PC via Steam from January 11th, 2024.
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