Road Rash 64

Throughout the nineties, Road Rash was an in-house Electronic Arts brand, developed internally for whichever platforms EA needed to sell on at the time — Genesis, Sega CD, 3DO, later PlayStation. Road Rash 64 is the exception to that rule: it's the only entry in the series that wasn't developed by EA, and it's also the one that came out on the Nintendo 64. Publisher THQ licensed the rights to the brand for this single game, and handed the actual development to the American studio Pacific Coast Power and Light, which had had nothing to do with the main series up to that point.

That change of team shows in the finished game. Instead of continuing the visual and technical line of EA's earlier entries, Road Rash 64 got its own take on motorcycle combat, tailored to the N64's power and its controller with its four-way joystick and analog stick — so handling collisions, kicks and weapon use feels different here than on PlayStation or the older Segas where the series had lived until then. The game stays true to the core idea — illegal street races where physical contact with your opponent matters just as much as raw speed — but does it with its own take on tracks, camera and the combat system, since the Pacific Coast Power and Light team had no access to EA's source code or tools from earlier entries and had to build the engine from scratch.

For the series, it's also the last traditional entry before Road Rash went quiet for a long time, so Road Rash 64 also works as a kind of final stop for the classic take on the game, on a console that otherwise had nothing to do with the series and that EA never returned to afterward.

Why play it: Road Rash 64 is interesting to series fans precisely as a curiosity — the one episode EA didn't make, on the one console Road Rash otherwise never appeared on, with its own, independently created vision of what motorcycle mayhem should look like on the N64.