Sega Rally Championship

Mud spraying from under the wheels, a slide through a corner and the co-driver's voice in your head — Sega Rally Championship brought a feel of driving to the screen that racing games had lacked until then. SEGA built the arcade hit on the idea of different surfaces, where tarmac, gravel and mud behaved completely differently, and the game forced you to change your driving style according to what you had under your wheels.

The magic lay in a perfectly tuned slide model. The cars behaved in an exaggerated but believable way — learning a controlled drift arc across gravel was among the most satisfying feelings racing games of the time had to offer. Short tracks and a ticking time limit turned every drive into an adrenaline sprint over seconds, where every mistake hurt.

The conversion to the SEGA Saturn was among the console's flagship titles and showed what the machine could do in the area of 3D racing. For players who had grown fond of the arcade original, it was a chance to bring the rally euphoria home and hone the best times in their own living room. The game became one of the reasons the Saturn earned a reputation as a good home for SEGA's arcade ports.

In the mid-nineties SEGA set the pace in the genre of arcade racing, and Sega Rally brought into it the theme of rally, which until then had remained a little to the side. The emphasis on surfaces and slide physics influenced the view of how a racing game should handle varied terrain.

To this day Sega Rally Championship is remembered as one of the most influential arcade racers of the nineties — a title that combined accessibility with a sense of speed and sliding in such a way that players love to return to it.

Why play it: Arcade rally with an unforgettable slide model and different surfaces — one of the best racing experiences of the Saturn era.