Sunsoft has revived a 1981 arcade maze game nobody was asking about, and I mean that as praise

ROUTE16R came out on Steam on August 5 at $19.99, developed by Wit One and published by Sunsoft. It is a new entry in a series whose last instalment was a Japan-only Famicom game in 1985, and whose first instalment was an arcade cabinet from 1981. If you have never heard of Route-16, that is the point, and it is why this is more interesting than the usual anniversary reissue.

The original was a Sun Electronics arcade game from 1981, handled by Centuri in North America and Tehkan in Europe. You drove a car through a maze split into sixteen rooms, collecting money bags while dodging enemy cars and watching your fuel drain. What set it apart from the maze games it was competing with was an overworld map showing where you, the enemies and the treasure all were, which was a real design idea in a year when most maze games expected you to memorise the whole thing. It got an Arcadia 2001 port, and in October 1985 Sunsoft put out Route-16 Turbo on the Famicom in Japan with more difficulty levels and better graphics and music. Then that was it, for forty-one years.

The new one keeps the shape and adds a fight. There are two modes, Maze Mode for driving the labyrinth and Radar Mode for seeing all sixteen mazes at once, which is the 1981 overworld map grown into a mechanic. Where the original was pure evasion, colliding with an enemy now transforms your vehicle, the MAD X-R, into a combat robot and starts a battle using attacks and collected SP items. Money recovered from stages upgrades fuel and speed. Clearing a stage’s items brings out a boss fight against the Kanharoo Gang. There is local split-screen versus with flag-capture mini-games, and no online at all, which is either a limitation or a statement depending on how you feel about arcade games.

The reason I like this is the lineage. Sun Electronics is the company behind the Sunsoft name, so Route-16 predates the brand it is now being revived under. This is a publisher going back past its own famous era, past Blaster Master and Journey to Silius and the Batman games, to the arcade cabinets it was making before anyone knew who it was, and building a new game on top of one. Most catalogue revivals pick the safest asset in the vault. This one picked something almost nobody remembers, and then bothered to work out what its one good idea was and make more of it.

Windows only for now, and there is no word on a console version. A Vault entry for both games is going up alongside this.