Sega’s Rad Mobile deserves to be remembered for more than just its dangling keychain

destructoid.com:

Sonic the Hedgehog first appeared in 1990’s Rad Mobile for arcade a few months before the first Sonic the Hedgehog game. He appears as an ornament dangling from the ceiling of the car.

I wanted to get that bit of trivia out of the way because it’s often all anybody knows about Rad Mobile. That is, if they even remember the name. I say that because I could never really remember it. Not until I became interested in pre-3D racing games.

This is mostly because Rad Mobile was only once ported to console and never in North America. That is, until it was chosen as one of the games for the Sega Astro City Mini. That’s still a pretty niche platform in this part of the world, so I’m still waiting for it to finally get the spotlight over here.

Rad Mobile is interesting to me because it uses the “Super Scaler” pseudo-3D technique that Sega built their hardware around. It’s best remembered for Space Harrier, but it was used in OutRun and Hang-On. However, both OutRun and Hang-On used raster effects for their pseudo-3D road, whereas Rad Mobile just makes heavy use of scaling sprites. This is the same technique used by 1988’s better-remembered Power Drift.

So, rather than your car driving on a background layer or single sprite, you’re actually riding across a steady stream of overlapping sprites that gradually get bigger to simulate parts of the road getting closer to the screen. It’s as obvious as it is effective. Because it was easy to create bridges and hills using Super Scaler, racing games that used the effect typically had a lot of variation in elevation, to the point where they can sometimes feel like roller coasters.

Despite being designed by Yu Suzuki, Rad Mobile is hardly the best racing game of its era. The floatiness of the