It’s 6:30am on July 15th 1999. The Real Racing Roots ’99 Grand Prix, an eight race tournament, has made its fourth stop at a Yokohama course, Out Of Blue. The dawn sky is overcast with cloudy lavender and muted blue while gentle piano keys and daydream synthesizers compose the accompanying Lucid Rhythms audio track. Seaside shipping lanes sit idle, birds of prey circle the mountaintops and a slumbering city will occasionally peek over the horizon. You’d fall back asleep if you weren’t barreling toward a lighthouse at 120 miles-per-hour.
Released in North America on May 1st 1999, R4: Ridge Racer Type-4 closed a generation—and a millennium—with character and class. Namco’s signature racing series, once defined by its garish spectacle and manic energy, finally relaxed into a state of confident sophistication. Chill is a peculiar adjective for a white-knuckle arcade racer, but an eclectic acid jazz soundtrack, a soothing—almost blasé—announcer, and the soft focus of its Gouraud-shaded car models cast Ridge Racer Type-4 as a calm, cool, and collected retreat to euphoria. As the extreme edge of the 90’s dulled, and before September 11th reshaped how Americans view the world, Ridge Racer Type-4 felt like the ultimate product of 1999. Never mind games, few pieces of art are as symbolic and reflective of their exact place in time.
This may have strained belief in 1995. As one of the launch games at Sony’s entry into the videogame hardware business, the original Ridge Racer’s use of 3D car models and texture-mapped polygonal courses created a level of arcade fidelity unmatched by any of its peers in the burgeoning 32-bit console space. By comparison, the Sega Saturn’s port of Daytona USA, released four months earlier, never refreshed higher than 20 frames-per-second and its polygons were practically falling apart at the seams. Few enthusiasts were prepared to take Sony’s PlayStation seriously until Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden, however quaint they seem now, embarrassed Sega’s slipshod Saturn ports of Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter.
Ridge Racer and its 1996 PlayStation sequel, Ridge Racer Revolution, captured the frenzied electronic ambiance of the glittering 90’s rave scene. Fast cars, bright colors, and wildly ridiculous drifting harmonized with a jubilant soundtrack full of tenacious energy. Getting away with just one course, and a circuit variant of that course, worked because of Ridge Racer’s childlike innocence; the only emotion it was capable of generating was glee. Rage Racer, 1997’s third PlayStation Ridge Racer entry, felt the heat of Need for Speed and included a progression system and a more sober, assertive cadence. Like any impulsive adolescent, Rage Racer wanted to make a statement with a cocksure posture and an aggressive presence. As Ridge Racer Type-4 is extremely 1999, Rage Racer was very 1997.
And then Gran Turismo happened. Polyphony Digital’s third racing game, after two Motor Toon Grand Prix entries, reconsidered the 32-bit definition of a racer. Instead of Need for Speed’s monstrous road courses with a handful of licensed supercars or Ridge Racer’s fondness for boisterous arcade sensibilities, Gran Turismo delivered convincing facsimiles of 140 real cars and prepared a campaign for players to spend time earning money, buying parts, and tinkering with arcane upgrades. Gran Turismo’s photorealism—it’s difficult to comprehend now but nothing in the console space looked as good as Gran Turismo—and its sublime full-race replays appealed to a mainstream audience and, with 10 million units shipped, became the bestselling title on the platform. Creatively and commercially, Gran Turismo joined Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid as one of the most profound statements developers made on the PlayStation. People had played racing games. No one had played a driving game.
Instead of doubling down on Rage Racer and engaging in direct competition with Gran Turismo, Ridge Racer Type-4 responded with a serene drift into colorful dynamism and careful expression. Eighteen years before Persona 5, it thought about menu layout, player interface, and selective color combinations as integral expressions of a handcrafted style. It offered four visual novel-style campaigns with provocative and obstinate crew chiefs. It was where Namco discovered Metal Gear Solid’s use of motion blur, creating light trails from dragging tail-lamps and race replays stricken with a perennial summer haze. Deliberate control of soft color pallets, both in its courses and its cars, forged character and identity from objects typically absent of personality. It didn’t bother licensing its music or its cars, instead choosing to develop both in-house to project a cohesive singularity. Ridge Racer Type-4’s concentration on style made Gran Turismo’s aggressive commitment to accuracy feel clinical and prosaic.
Before Ridge Racer Type-4, the tone of a racetrack was an immaterial means to an end. Corners were ways to measure your skill in efficiently and effectively balancing a vehicle’s speed with its (however rudimentary) physics system. Ridge Racer always pushed this to a hilarious extreme, enabling its Drift-class cars to perform outrageous tire-slipping turns that defied reality. Ridge Racer Type-4 breaks the absurdity of its Drift cars down into a more controlled, albeit still unrealistic, assault on the physical world (and Grip-class cars still handle, more or less, like “normal” gas-brake vehicles). Collisions with walls still took time off the clock and, once enough time was removed, it would rule out a first-place finish. Ridge Racer Type-4‘s eight courses composed a condensation of its past as a launching point for its present. Namco knew how to develop challenging courses. Now they want to make the player feel them.
Ridge Racer Type-4’s Real Racing Roots Grand Prix, which in modern parlance would act as a campaign, is organized in a fairly digestible form. The player selects one of four racing teams that will define the default difficulty of the campaign; Dig Racing Team (expert), Pac Racing Club (normal), Racing Team Solvalou (hard), and R.C. Micro Mouse Mappy (easy). One of four car manufacturers is then selected; Age Solo and Terrazi offer Grip-class options while Lizard and Assoluto provide Drift-class cars. Three upgrades to new cars, based on your finishing position, are allotted over the course of the Grand Prix. Each manufacturer has twenty models, all of which receive different livery based on their respective racing team.
Car performance and handling has been (slightly) reined in from past entries. Briefly letting off the gas in Drift cars, waiting a moment, then re-applying the throttle causes the back end of the car to slide around turns. It’s disarming but, with practice, easily under control and the only way to maintain speed. Ridge Racer Type-4 doesn’t spin its cars 180 degrees left and right anymore, but it also doesn’t behave in a way generally acceptable in our reality. Grip cars actually require the player to use the brakes to slow down before entering sharper corners. You never want to touch a wall or, if possible, make contact with any opponent. Ridge Racer Type-4 is an arcade racer, but it isn’t without principle.
The player is treated to story sequences before and after every single Grand Prix race. A portrait of your crew chief shuffles facial expressions to reflect the severity of their dialogue. He or she will then espouse their current predicament and how you can (or have failed) to solve it with your best performance. It’s all a one sided conversation, but in practice it’s not unlike the social links that made people fall in love with modern Persona games. On Your Way and Garage Talk, both of which support these story sequences, even sound like they fell right out of Persona 5.
Dig Racing Team is fronted by an American, Robert Christman (which is a hell of an American name). Robert is a sheepish Yes Man who lacks any sort of charisma or confidence and seems genuinely surprised with positive performance. He’s a great contrast to Shinji Yazaki, manager of the Pac Racing Club, who speaks to the player like they’re garbage. Condensation bleeds through every single word until the middle of the season, when Yazaki softens up and admits he doesn’t want the player to suffer the same grievous fate as his last driver.
Sophie Chevalier, chief of the French club Micro Mouse Mappy, presents a nice change of pace. Living in the shadow of her sick grandfather, it’s her first time managing an older club. Chevalier’s positive nature encourages the player to do better, and her agency gradually expands with shared success. It’s liberating when she cuts her hair before the last race, but slightly too anime/creepy when the epilogue suggests she wants to date her driver.
Enki Gilbert, of Team Solvalou, is as professional as he is jealous. He’s the only crew chief to references the other team’s captains by name and offers exacting advice of, “there are no excuses. Only results.” Gilbert finally exposes some vulnerability as he genuinely begins to care about the well-being of the player. He fears the human and mental cost of perfection and struggles to watch the player pay its price.
Ridge Racer Type-4’s presents a clever, efficient layout with all of its information. Before a race starts the date and time, race and attempt number, course name, and finally, music selection are rolled out one-by-one. Dialogue sequences use Ridge Racer Type-4’s signature yellow as a background color and deliver portraits with a neat cross-striking and unfolding animation. Buzzing the chief name in a blurry font serves as a less formal introduction, and fits neatly inside Ridge Racer Type-4’s breezy aesthetic. Even an action as simple as the delivery of a new car has its own car-unloading-off-a-truck animation and custom music track, Ready to Roll. Moments like these suggest every detail, no matter how outwardly minimal, were considered and accounted for in Ridge Racer Type-4’s interface.
It’s also important to remember the absurd bridges Namco built to provide the player with a satisfactory sense of control. In addition to supporting the analog sticks of the newly minted DualShock controller, Ridge Racer Type-4 also accounted for both the Jogcon (which was bundled with some copies of Ridge Racer Type-4 in Japan) and the neGcon controllers. The former plopped an actual wheel, complete with force-feedback, in the center of the controller and allowed the player to steer in real time with their thumb. The neGcon, which was also a suitable flight stick, twisted 180 degrees in the middle of the controller in each direction to simulate analog turning. Both are insane methods of handling a car that feel surprisingly intuitive in practice.
Ridge Racer Type-4’s support for obtuse hardware doesn’t stop with controllers. It also made use of the PocketStation, a memory card with an LCD screen Sony hastily constructed to compete with the Dreamcast’s Visual Memory Unit. The accessory was never released in North American, but players could still use it on local builds of Ridge Racer Type-4 to swap cars outside of the Grand Prix. In addition to the split-screen two-player mode, Ridge Racer Type-4 also supported, without any documentation, the infamous PlayStation Link Cable. It was Sony’s local network solution that required two copies of the game, two PlayStations, and two televisions. The use case (especially in 1999) had to be an absurdly low percentage, but Ridge Racer Type-4 threw it in anyway.
Perhaps the weirdest flex was used for the bonus disc inside of every launch Ridge Racer Type-4 package. Namco used an entire separate disc to not only house demos for Tekken 3 and Klonoa, but also included a sixty frame-per-second remodel of the original Ridge Racer. It paired the game down to a single course against one opponent, but it demonstrated how far Namco’s programmers had come after three years of development experience with Sony’s machine (and no doubt was inspired by the Hi-Res mode buried inside Gran Turismo). Witnessing the original Ridge Racer—which is also on that disc!—with a smooth frame-rate is a dream, and one of the few times a publisher remade a game (and then gave it away) on the same generation of hardware.
Each one of Ridge Racer Type-4’s courses are introduced with judicious camera cuts across major landmarks. The announcer, always projected in a reverbed echo, states the title of the track in an accent that is impossible to identify (his speech at the end of each campaign sounds like a non-native english speaker reading a phonetic translation of english words). It works, though. His cadence is relaxing. The camera starts on a female model—a part of Ridge Racer’s culture that wouldn’t survive the modern era—then cuts to three or four establishing shots before refocusing on the model. A 3-2-1 countdown starts the race.
“Helter Skelter” is an apt title for Ridge Racer Type-4’s opening course. The frenetic intensity of a brand new Ridge Racer game on the edge of the millennium deserves a title that, while conjuring an uncomfortable part of American culture, fits Ridge Racer’s new focus. The first race takes place on May 1st 1999—the same day Ridge Racer Type-4 released in North America—at 11:30am in Yokohama. Packed inside the 3.2 mile course are comforting Ridge Racer hallmarks (the Galaga screen, empty tunnels) and exciting Type-4 promises. A clear blue sky envelopes a densely packed urban city, stunt planes and helicopters perform flybys, and fluorescent green and yellow lights brighten its pair of tunnels. The construction zone suggests Ridge Racer Type-4 is building something new while the elevated highway ramps and cascading skyscrapers leave a trace of modernity.
True to Out Run’s ethos, Ridge Racer Type-4 allows the player to select one of fourteen songs from its soundtrack for any course. There are, however, suggested tracks that play by default in every race. Helter Skelter’s music, Pearl Blue Soul, serves as the perfect introduction to Ridge Racer Type-4’s spontaneous fusion of acid jazz and late 90’s electronica. Pearl Blue Soul’s electronic drums and synth beats quickly make room for bursts of horns, piano keys, and some light guitar. Hiroshi Okubo’s piece functions as an opening statement for the entire twenty-five song soundtrack.
Taking place in the soft glow of the evening twilight, the “Wonder Hill” course in Fukuoka is Ridge Racer Type-4’s chance to bask in the ambiance of a sunset. A residential area near starting line gives way to a huge suspension bridge. A purple haze of clouds hangs over distant mountains. Tight turns against a granite mountainside demand careful braking or advanced drifting, all before seeing a huge dam in the space outside the course. The top of the mountain flirts with country homes and more rural locals before it delivers Ridge Racer Type-4’s only attempt at a bona fide slalom; right, left, right, hard left before you’re back to the base of the mountain and surrounded by pine trees.
Naked Glow, this time from Kohta Takahashi, gets Wonder Hill started immediately. Leisurely guitar strumming works in tandem with delicate piano keys and forms calming melody. When the mountaintop is reached about a minute later, Naked Glow rapidly switches instrumentation and starts belting out horns, a bass guitar, and hard drum beats. Forty-five seconds later, when you’re back down the other side, record scratches signal a return to the more mellow side of Naked Glow. The final minute combines every instrument into a volatile concoction that, ideally, contrasts against the player securing their first place finish.
New York City’s 3.54 mile course, “Edge of the Earth,” serves as Ridge Racer Type-4’s first summer night race. It begins adjacent to an airport, complete with airliners taxiing on the right and landing on the left, before fading to an urban landscape. Nightlight skyscrapers are visible on both sides of the highway before the player finds a straightaway that leads to Wonder City, which is (I guess!) either a large hotel or casino. The entire course is lit with a mixture of dark green and soft white light, with exceptions granted to the artificial yellow light from the lamps below an overpass. The second tunnel is only two lanes, evenly bisected by stripe on the asphalt and a constant light source on the top. It’s a laser track to guide the player to the final tunnel before the finish line.
Oddly, Edge of the Earth carries two different song suggestions. Hiroshi Okubo’s Burnin’ Rubber is heavy on percussion, flutes, and scratching. Classic Ridge Racer “one-two-three-four” up-pitched vocal samples serve as appropriate callbacks. Burnin’ Rubber is light and energetic, and easily the most upbeat song on the entire soundtrack. Koji Nakagawa’s The Objective can also make an appearance, delivering a mush-mouth electronic chirps right before it hammers in a tight drum beat. Percussive elements are gradually added until The Objective repeats synth samples and nearly bursts from the relentless energy.
Yokohama’s “Out of Blue,” which I touched on in the introduction, serves as Ridge Racer Type-4’s signature course. The sun rises at 4:50am on July 15th in Yokohama, allowing plenty of overcast light to conduct the fourth race in the Grand Prix at 6:30. Modern and sleek with no rough edges, Out of Blue casts its slice of Yokohama is a sleepy port-side town. It’s a high contrast from the urban rumble that permeates the cityscapes of its New York and The Grand Prix’s other Yokohama tracks. Overhead seagulls, biplanes leaving contrails across the sky, an empty shipping harbor—every surface is wrapped in soft purple and blue, leaving Out of Blue as the most visually distinctive course in the game.
Like Edge of the Earth, Out of Blue also alternates between two separate pieces of music. Tetsukazu Nakanishi’s Lucid Rhythms serves as the canonical piece, as I can’t imagine a better signature to a 6am start time. The cool piano slides, the mellow and indestructible synth line, and the push-and-pull between symbols and drums creates a track that perfectly symbolizes “waking up” while also somehow accounting for the player’s maniac driving. Quiet Curves, from Hiroshi Okubo, pulses bleeps and bloops and bends its synthesizers up and down pitch, all creating one of the most rhythmically complex pieces in the entire soundtrack. Lucid Rhythms is the most appropriate, but Quiet Curves may hold up better to scrutiny from actual music scholars.
“Phantomile,” taking place in Yokohama in September, feels every bit of its 12pm start time. The sun is directly overhead and every surface seems oppressively hot to the touch. Ridge Racer has never been shy about referencing Namco’s rich history, and Phantomile (in addition to sharing its title with the first Klonoa) features giant busts of Pac-Man and Pooka right behind a barrier wall. Overhead covered walkways, a blimp that moves with each lap, an indoor garage, and a giant domed arena are the rest of the highlights for, at 1.88 miles, Ridge Racer Type-4’s shortest course. This is also when the Grand Prix gets serious, as a first place finish in Phantomile (and the remaining three courses) is required to move forward.
Motor Species, a Tetsukazu Nakanishi track that always accompanies Phantomile, may be Ridge Racer Type-4’s most otherworldly piece of music. It opens with alien samples that sound like the mating calls of machine insects. They form the melody that highlights a ceaseless drum beat and stretches over rhythmic synth slides. Motor Species’ obvious contemporary pop influences dates itself harder than the rest of the soundtrack, but its opening beat is also Ridge Racer Type-4’s most isolated and identifiable. Every song has the same jubilant theme, but, somehow, they all sound different.
“Brightest Nite,” the second New York circuit in late October, clocks in at 3.66 miles. It also takes place at night, and, featuring another look at an active airport, shares more than half of its course with Edge of the Earth. Brightest Nite breaks off when it shifts to a cobblestone-like racing surface and identical rows of colorfully lit warehouses. It also has the longest and steepest downhill in Ridge Racer Type-4, ending in a murder curve that demands serious preparation. Creatively, Brightest Nite is Ridge Racer Type-4’s low point. It’s fine, but covers territory that’s largely explored. It copies a personality in a game defined by unique characters.
Brightest Nite also carries two alternate tracks. Revlimit Funk, from Kohta Takahashi, features a buzzing synth introduction and builds into and even snazzier onslaught of crashing symbols and guitar accents. Revlimit Funk is what Ridge Racer Type-4 qualifies as a heavy track, although it does breakdown into a moor moody piece around the 1:40 mark. Your Vibe, from Asuka Sakai, would sound like a lunatic conducting baseball organ music if a harsh drum beat didn’t rescue it from the depths of madness. Your Vibe is still the corniest arrangement, but its silliness kind of fits with Brightest Nite’s odd retread down familiar roads.
“Heaven and Hell,” a 4.01 mile track in Fukuoka, is Ridge Racer Type-4’s longest, most complex, and hardest course. It uses half of the same circuit from Wonder Hill, but changes the season to autumn and greatly increases the intricacy of its corners. The track is shaped like an hourglass and surrounded on all sides by mountains. You reach an observatory at the top (heaven!) then descend (to hell!) with a monster wide turn that follows a predictable curve until it veers sharply at the end. It can ruin what was otherwise going to be a first place finish. The mental inertia from switching between the two can feel paralyzing. The bottom of the course is actually visible from the top, which was an impressive trick in the waning days of the original PlayStation.
Move Me, Heaven and Hell’s signature track from Kohta Takahashi, begins with a pastoral and slow-tempo organ before it erupts with every bag of tricks in Takahashi’s handbook. It’s an apt mixture of slow natural instrumentation follow-up by contemporary upbeat techno, all rolled into an eclectic, wildly unpredictable package. Ridge Racer Type-4’s most complex course deserved its most diverse piece of music.
“Shooting Hoops,” which starts at 11:45pm in Los Angeles on January 31st, is Ridge Racer Type-4’s final course. It’s a six lap battle where skilled players shouldn’t, in any car, ever touch the brakes or feel the need to drift. Shooting Hoops is pure speed and careful control, and its six laps guarantee the player better find their driving lines. On the final lap fireworks explode in the distance, the jumbotron replaces Galaga with “Happy New Year,” and the victory parade begins as the clock ticks over to the year 2000. Ridge Racer’s past is officially over and the new millennium, and the promise of a new generation of hardware, is the only objective in the series’ future.
Hiroshi Okubo’s Movin’ in Circles is the only track that could have accompanied Shooting Hoops. Kimira Lovelace’s voice returns from Ridge Racer Type-4’s intro movie and strikes a formidable declaration with step back, it’s Ridge Racerrr. This was seven years before Kaz Hirai ruined it and, even in its objective cheesiness, rules in the moments of its proper context. Six laps, each taking thirty second, and the fastest in-game car available create a breakneck pace match evenly by Lovelace’s digitally sliced vocals and deep, vibrating bass. Movin’ in Circles is a celebration of and a farewell to an entire generation of hardware.
After its Grand Prix is over, Ridge Racer Type-4 manages two paths to longevity. The first is its circuitous quest to collect every car. With help from Nemesis’ FAQ, we can see that 320 cars break down into twenty cars for each manufacturer, each with twenty pallet swaps for each racing team. Cars can be earned by strategically finishing in different places . It’s definitely a grind, but it rewards the player at the end with a special Pac-man car and Hiroshi Okubo’s ridiculous Eat ‘em Up track.
The second path, and the one that I have been embracing once a week for most of 2019, is to appreciate Ridge Racer Type-4 from an academic perspective and marvel at what Namco was able to accomplish with the PlayStation hardware in 1998. With Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, Tekken 3, Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (which shares a sister soundtrack), and Ridge Racer Type-4 closing out the system over two-year period, Namco was at its creative peak and technical peak. Only Square-Enix delivered as many diverse and successful products on Sony’s hardware.
When I play a season of Ridge Racer Type-4, I can feel the last time in my life that I didn’t have anything to worry about. 1999 was the last summer that I was unemployed (I was fifteen) and had unlimited free time. I bought Ridge Racer Type-4 and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete with grass cutting money after my last day of school and subsisted on both until Final Fantasy VIII and the Dreamcast came out on the same day later that fall. Nostalgia is a powerful force, as is a thirty-five-year-old man aching for days when he didn’t have a single responsibility, but Ridge Racer Type-4 had longevity in an era defined by rapid experimentation and, from a modern perspective, horrendous-looking games that some find tough to revisit. Ridge Racer Type-4 is one of the few games of its time that, thanks to the strength of its art direction, will be beautiful forever.
A culture that demands remakes often loses sight of the time and place that made the original game feel so special. Final Fantasy VII was a product of built from equal parts limitation and inspiration, and no remake can possibly hope to live up to the expectations set by its legend. Along the same lines, I don’t ever want to see Ridge Racer Type-4 remade on modern hardware (and using an emulator to boost the resolution looks gross). The pixelated fuzz, stretched texture maps, and illegible in-game font speak to its class and its character. Replicating it with a perfect sheen would destroy what made it appealing, even if the soundtrack would still kick everyone’s ass.
There are still some substantive modern ways to play Ridge Racer Type-4. The easiest (legal) way is to own a PC with a decent graphics card, eBay a copy for $15, and play it with the ePSXe emulator (which was also what I used to capture all of the screenshots in this piece). If you’re still maintaining an active PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, or Vita, it’s also available as a PS1 Classic at the PlayStation Store. Finally, it was also on 2018’s PlayStation Classic, although unmodified units present Ridge Racer Type-4 as bad as can be.
Critics of Ridge Racer Type-4, of which there are plenty, point to the ease of control and lack of a formidable challenge as weak points. These are valid criticisms, but can lose sight of the goals Ridge Racer Type-4 was trying to reach. Punishment is anathema to the chill and relaxed mantra the game chants and repeats with its visual pallet, soft focus, and jazzy soundtrack. It’s no wonder the extra trials for the best cars are buried deep in the options menu and not part of the core campaign. Ridge Racer Type-4 is meant to be played and replayed as a way to unwind and loosen up, not engage in Rage Racer’s exacting torment or Gran Turismo’s obsessive tinkering.
Perhaps the most shocking (and, in retrospect, most merciful) action was Namco’s reluctance to reproduce any of Ridge Racer Type-4 moving parts in the 2000 sequel Ridge Racer V. It launched with the PlayStation 2 in Japan, Europe, and North America and visually carried the promise of the next generation. Ridge Racer V ran at sixty frames-per-second with a divine clarity that, side-by-side, made Ridge Racer Type-4 look like it was moving in slow motion. Along for the ride, however, was a campaign that focused on course repetition and engine upgrades, a remodeled physics system that made every car feel heavy and bulky, and the visually homogeneous all-encompassing locale of Ridge City. There’s plenty to love about Ridge Racer V, it’s a top three launch game for the system, but its presence isn’t as dominant and enduring as its predecessor.
Two more direct sequels launched with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The PlayStation Portable had a pair widely respected entries, and the latter (which never came out in North America) even had some Ridge Racer Type-4 courses on board. By the time Ridge Racer made it to the 3DS and Vita, the game had kind of devolved into a generic arcade racer. Its identity, apparently, was locked to a turbo mechanic and its signature outrageous drifting. Gone was any attempt at establishing a personal brand. Ridge Racer was the racing game that launched hardware and nothing else.
Even if Bugbear’s Ridge Racer Unbounded is somehow qualified, there hasn’t been a Ridge Racer game in seven years. Ridge Racer Type-4, against all odds, received a 20th Anniversary Soundtrack earlier in 2019. This signaled that Namco is, at the very least, cognizant that it still owns the property (and its website, somehow, remains active). Whether players would trust anyone at Namco, who hasn’t produced a widely admired Ridge Racer game in nearly two decades, to create a numbered sequel is another question.
Ridge Racer’s collective legacy doesn’t have much of an effect on Ridge Racer Type-4’s power or prestige. It celebrated the year 1999 as it was happening and ended, in-game, with farewell light show as the clock ticked over to 2000. Ridge Racer Type-4 was a party at the end of the world—the hardware generation, Ridge Racer as we knew it, and the actual millennium—and operated as a celebration and a goodbye. A game defined by its tranquility, rather than the insatiable quest for speed that consumed every other racer, creatively and artistically outlasted every one of its contemporaries. Ridge Racer Type-4 suggested a controlled exhale is more valuable and satisfying than exasperating content and austere accuracy. In 1999 and 2019, with two decades of perspective, it continues to be the right bet.
