Daytona USA | Code Like It's 198x

At the AOU show in Tokyo in February 1994, Sega lined up 13 linked cabinets of a new racing game, and Edge reported that the first reaction was that it was “better than Ridge Racer”. Daytona USA was the first game on Sega’s Model 2 arcade board, which painted texture detail on to its polygons: decals on the cars, the sky reflected in their rear windows, and a cliff face carved with a giant Sonic the Hedgehog. Up to eight players could race each other on linked machines while the game’s composer sang over the top.

It stayed in the arcades for years. When Edge met its director, Toshihiro Nagoshi, in 2000, he said operators were refusing to part with their cabinets. The home versions had a harder time: the 1995 Saturn conversion drew as much comment for its missing scenery as for its racing.

Fast facts

Developer: Sega AM2.
Director: Toshihiro Nagoshi.
Music: Takenobu Mitsuyoshi.
Hardware: Sega Model 2, its first game.
Shown finished: AOU show, Tokyo, February 1994.
Players: up to eight, on linked cabinets.
Home versions: Saturn (Japan, April 1995), Championship Circuit Edition for the Saturn (1996), Windows (1996), Daytona USA 2001 for the Dreamcast, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (2011).

Building it

Daytona was made to launch a board. Sega AM2, the arcade department run by Yu Suzuki, had put Sega into polygon 3D with Virtua Racing on Model 1. For Model 2 Sega went into partnership with General Electric in August 1992 to add texture mapping, and Suzuki told Edge in 1994 that the board took a year to develop and the game “a further year”. Nagoshi told Edge in 2000 that Sega needed a launch title for Model 2, and that people had told him a racing game built around fun would not succeed.

Edge printed the credits with its first look at a 5%-complete demo in April 1994: “Director: T. Nagushi” (Nagoshi, misspelt) and “Music: T. Mitsuyoshi”. One of the game’s Japanese creators told the magazine that the game “throws 300,000 texture-mapped and shaded polygons around every second”, against about 180,000 untextured ones on Model 1. Suzuki had wanted more players than the eight he got: “Originally, I had wanted to have 40 cars linked up, just like in a real race, but it just wasn’t feasible.”

In the arcade

The finished game has three courses: a beginner’s oval, a canyon course and a seaside city course. Edge’s show report described damage that changed a car’s shape according to how hard it had hit something, an underside mapped with chassis and exhaust for when the car rolled over, and four viewpoints, as in Virtua Racing. The home versions named the courses Three Seven Speedway, Dinosaur Canyon and Sea-Side Street Galaxy. The oval puts 40 cars on the track at once, and a crash into the wall slows the car until it is repaired in the pits.

It became the arcade game to beat. Sega had prepared only a limited number of machines, Edge reported in 2000, expecting a small launch. Edge’s chart of dedicated arcade machines had Ridge Racer at number one in July 1994; from August 1994 to January 1995 the top place went to Daytona, with Ridge Racer usually second. Sega has not published earnings for the game, and the public sources give no reliable figure.

The music

Mitsuyoshi sang on his own soundtrack, and the songs came with titles: “Let’s Go Away”, “Sky High”, “The King of Speed” and a hidden fourth, “Pounding Pavement”. Not everyone liked them. Reviewing the Saturn version in June 1995, Edge complained that “the karaoke-style wailing, repetitive samples and weedy collision effects become much more obtrusive and irritating outside the cacophonous atmosphere of an arcade”. Sega Saturn Magazine reported in 1996 that Sega UK had received “many letters” from buyers of the game about its “inappropriate” music, although the magazine had “grown quite fond” of the songs. For the European release of the 1996 remake, Sega Europe’s musician Richard Jacques remixed the tunes with little of the singing. Other players missed it: one Computer & Video Games reviewer of that remake said he preferred “the funky Japanese music and presentation”.

The Saturn version

AM2 converted the game for Sega’s new console, and it went on sale in Japan in April 1995 at ¥6,800. Edge gave it eight out of ten. The magazine liked the racing, with its powerslides and rival cars that “intelligently block your path with violent swerving manoeuvres”, and it thought the three courses gave the game more life than Ridge Racer’s one. But the Saturn game ran in a letterbox 10% smaller than the screen and drew its scenery “disturbingly late”: “when you approach a corner you usually find that parts of the scenery are missing until the very last second”. Edge put the “rough-and-ready looks” down to a rush job rather than to the Saturn itself. Five years later the magazine summed the port up as “handicapped by poor draw distances and substandard frame rates”.

Sega tried again. The console team that had converted Sega Rally, directed by Ryuichi Hattori, spent 1996 on Daytona USA: Championship Circuit Edition, built on the Sega Rally engine. Sega Saturn Magazine reported that it ran at “a rock solid 30 frames a second” without the letterbox, and it added two courses, new cars and a split-screen two-player mode. Computer & Video Games was not won over in December 1996. One reviewer thought the cars no longer handled “anywhere near the way they do in the arcade”, and another would rather have “the original Daytona. Even the badly-bordered UK version, bad clipping and all.” A Windows version was scheduled for release in Britain on 16 November 1996.

Later versions

Nagoshi produced the arcade sequel, Daytona USA 2: Battle on the Edge, on the Model 3 board in 1998, and told Edge he had not wanted to make it sooner: “we’d accomplished everything we wanted with Daytona”. Having become president of Sega’s Amusement Vision studio, he then oversaw a Dreamcast remake of the original. Daytona USA 2001, developed by Genki, had the three arcade courses, two from Championship Circuit Edition and three new ones, and Edge found no drop below 60 frames a second. With a steering wheel plugged in, the magazine said, it became “an almost perfect replica of the coin-op”. Nagoshi still ranked the original first: he had produced Daytona USA 2 but not directed it, he said, whereas “I did on Daytona USA … For me the original version appeared clearly as the best choice.”

Sega released the arcade game again for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October 2011, redrawn at 720p and with a karaoke mode that, as Eurogamer put it, “overlays the lyrics of Takenobu Mitsuyoshi’s stirringly cheesy soundtrack to the game, inviting you to sing along”. In November 2016 Sega showed a new Daytona arcade game at the IAAPA Attractions Expo in Orlando, the first new arcade game in the series since Daytona USA 2.

Sources

Edge issue 7, April 1994, pp. 26–27: Daytona prescreen (the 5% demo, 300,000 textured polygons against Model 1’s 180,000, eight linked players, four viewpoints, the credits).
Edge issue 8, May 1994, pp. 8–10: AOU show report (Daytona USA, 13 linked cabinets, “better than Ridge Racer”, the three courses, damage, sky reflections, the Mount Rushmore-style Sonic).
Edge issue 9, June 1994, pp. 45–49: “Yu Suzuki: Sega’s driving force” (the General Electric partnership, the development time, 40 linked cars).
Edge issues 10–16, July 1994 to January 1995: monthly charts, “Arcade: dedicated” (Ridge Racer first in July; Daytona first from August to January).
Edge issue 21, June 1995, pp. 72–75: Saturn Daytona USA review, eight out of ten (¥6,800, the letterbox, late scenery, the music, the rival cars, 40 cars on the track, damage and pit stops, the three courses).
Sega Saturn Magazine issue 12, October 1996: Championship Circuit Edition preview and CS Team interview (Ryuichi Hattori, the Sega Rally engine, 30 frames a second, the new courses, the letters about the music, Richard Jacques’s remixes).
Computer & Video Games issue 181, December 1996, p. 49: release list (Daytona USA, Sega PC, 16 November); pp. 68–71: Championship Circuit Edition review.
Edge issue 59, June 1998, pp. 55–58: Daytona 2 prescreen and interview with Toshihiro Nagoshi (his work on Daytona USA under Suzuki, the Model 3 sequel).
Edge issue 91, December 2000: interview with Toshihiro Nagoshi, “director of the original coin-op version” (the Model 2 launch title, the limited first run, operators keeping their cabinets, the Saturn port, Daytona USA 2).
Edge issue 94, February 2001, pp. 84–85: Daytona USA 2001 review (Genki, the eight courses, 60 frames a second, the steering wheel).
Tips & Tricks issue 12, December 1996: sound-test list naming “King of Speed”, “Let’s Go Away”, “Sky High” and “Pounding Pavement” from Daytona USA.
Sega Retro, “Daytona USA” (web, secondary): the course names and their songs. https://segaretro.org/Daytona_USA
Martin Robinson, “Daytona USA review”, Eurogamer, 26 October 2011 (web, secondary): the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network version, 720p, the karaoke mode. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-26-daytona-usa-review
Michael McWhertor, “Sega’s bringing Daytona back to arcades”, Polygon, 1 November 2016 (web, secondary): the new arcade game at IAAPA 2016, the first since Daytona USA 2 in 1998, and the 2011 port. https://www.polygon.com/2016/11/1/13490350/daytona-usa-3-sega-arcade