There’s something about 90s arcade racers that still lingers, not in a nostalgic, rose-tinted way, but in that very specific memory of being stood in a dim arcade, coin in hand, wondering if you could actually beat the guy next to you before your credits ran out, and that was it, that was the design brief, nothing else really mattered.
Retro racing game 4PGP has already spun its wheels on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and is part of the surge of ‘90s-inspired arcade racers in recent years, whether it’s the recent anime-designed Screamer, the on-the-nose Old School Rally, or the newly revealed Crazy Taxi: World Tour. But 4PGP has one advantage over the other newcomers: this retro-inspired game is made by creators who were there in the ‘90s.
4PGP’s special advisor, Kenji Sasaki, who joined the game to help with everything from logo and UI design to music direction and “assisting with game balance and visual design”. He remembers it well, and it’s probably no surprise given he helped shape some of the genre’s most defining games at Namco and Sega back in the day, including iconic racers Ridge Racer, Sega Touring Car and Sega Rally, where he oversaw visual design and real-time CG, before leading racing game development as President of Sega Rosso.
Why simplicity worked
The interesting thing, Sasaki suggests, is how simple it all really was. “The essence of an arcade game lies in a combination of simplicity that anyone can play and instant fun,” he says. “What made arcades so great back in the day is that even if you don’t have a driver’s license and have never driven a car, you could grab the wheel of the arcade cabinet and race with friends and rivals alike.”
There’s a bluntness to that which feels almost radical now, especially in a world where racing games increasingly come wrapped in tuning menus, performance graphs, tyre wear models and enough systems to make you hesitate before you even start a race. Which isn’t a bad thing; I love Forza Horizon 6, but it’s a different beast to the kind of games Sasaki gave us, and is making in the arcade purity of 4PGP.
Because the arcade philosophy wasn’t about depth in the modern sense, it was about immediacy, about being in a race within seconds, even if you had no idea what a racing line was supposed to be, even if you’d never driven anything in your life, you could just push the pedal, pull the shoulder button, push the PlayStation Controller’s ‘X’ button and get racing. That’s exactly the space 4PGP is trying to be, but what’s interesting isn’t just the design intent; it’s the realisation that even something as seemingly simple as “making it look like a ‘90s arcade game” turns out to be unexpectedly difficult when you’re working with tools that were never designed to go backwards.
“Arcade racers focus on immediate, moment-to-moment excitement, whereas racing sims aim to faithfully reproduce the experience of driving a real car in a virtual environment,” reflects Sasaki. “Our goal wasn’t to simulate driving itself, but to deliver the thrill of high-speed, head-to-head competition – pure racing excitement that players can feel right from the first lap.”
4PGP’s director Jonathan Marole puts it in a way that sticks because it’s not about nostalgic settings or visual filters, which many retro remakes and retro remasters, even the good ones like Marvel MaXimum Collection and Star Wars Dark Forces Remaster, tend to drift towards; it’s about how modern rendering now has its own momentum, its own assumptions baked in, and how working within those dynamics can affect the look and feel of a ‘retro inspired game’, like 4PGP. Marole was responsible for developing the arcade physics engine and produced all graphical assets, both 2D and 3D, for 4PGP, so he was under the hood, wrangling modern tech to replicate ‘90s arcade racing.
Replicating early tech
Early arcade hardware, he explains, didn’t have the luxury of complexity, so everything was reduced, stylised almost by necessity: “At the time, hardware limitations forced developers to rely on clever tricks and simplified physics to recreate the motion of cars. I deliberately embraced these methods to capture the essence of what made those games so fun and accessible to everyone,” says Marole.
Those old games were built using low-poly cars, limited textures, colours pushed a bit further towards bold and garish, and that combination created a visual language we now associate with ‘retro’, even though at the time it was just the only way things could be done. For 4PGP, the Marole embraced that restraint, saying, “I adopted similar modelling and texturing techniques – low-poly models, a limited number of low-resolution textures, and no filtering or advanced post-processing”.
He adds: “Recreating this delicate balance – achieving a vibrant colour palette while maintaining a balanced yet subtly overexposed image – proved to be a real challenge when working with modern tools, which are not designed with this specific visual style in mind”.
However, the graphical work doesn’t stop there. Overall photographic coherence is just as important. Games from the 1990s are renowned for their bright, colourful, and highly saturated visuals. Recreating this delicate balance – achieving a vibrant colour palette while maintaining a balanced yet subtly overexposed image – proved to be a real challenge when working with modern tools, which are not designed with this specific visual style in mind.
That’s the real tension in making a game inspired by a ‘90s retro aesthic and gameplay, because modern engines are great at what they do, but what they do is increasingly tied to realism, physically based rendering, accurate lighting, surface response, all of it pulling towards photographic reality, so anything that sits outside that, anything intentionally flatter or more exaggerated, has to be carefully pushed back against. Marole has worked on photoreal racing series, including Test Drive Unlimited, The Crew, and Gear.Club Unlimited, so know how to make those kinds of games, but creating a retro-like racer proved a challenge.
“Overall photographic coherence is just as important,” begins Marole, saying: ”Games from the 1990s are renowned for their bright, colourful, and highly saturated visuals. Recreating this delicate balance – achieving a vibrant colour palette while maintaining a balanced yet subtly overexposed image – proved to be a real challenge when working with modern tools, which are not designed with this specific visual style in mind.”
Which is why recreating something like Sega Rally, Virtua Racing or Checkered Flag’s resurrected Atari Jaguar debut to get that retro look isn’t just a case of simplifying everything; it’s about getting into the mindset of how and why those games were made in the first place. It’s a journey Jonathan Marole has been on with 4PGP, and why having a legend like Kenji Sasaki in the room has proved helpful.
Those older games still feel so distinct because every limitation at the time ended up becoming part of the style, not an obstacle but an accidental design motif that shaped everything from colour to motion to the way speed itself was communicated. But with 4PGP, it feels like the team wants more than simply replicating a style; they want a moment in time, when gaming was a little more accessible, as Marole says, “I want to focus on instant-fun experiences – arcade racers that I can enjoy playing with my sons, just like the ones I grew up with in the 1990s.”
4PGP is out now for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and will release on PC and PlayStation 5 on 11 June.
