Route-16 is a maze arcade game developed and published by Sun Electronics in 1981, distributed by Centuri in North America and by Tehkan in Europe. The player drives a car through a maze divided into sixteen rooms, collecting money bags while avoiding enemy cars and a steadily draining fuel gauge. Contact with an opponent or an empty tank ends the run.
Its notable contribution to the maze genre was an overworld map showing the positions of the player, the enemy cars and the remaining treasure across all sixteen rooms. Most maze games of the period expected the player to memorise a fixed layout; Route-16 instead gave the player information and made route planning part of the game, which is where the title comes from. The result sits somewhere between a driving game and a pursuit game, closer in feel to the chase-and-collect arcade titles that followed it than to the screen-at-a-time maze games it launched alongside.
The game was ported to the Arcadia 2001 console. In October 1985 Sunsoft published Route-16 Turbo for the Famicom in Japan, an improved version adding difficulty levels and upgraded graphics and music, which was never released outside Japan. The series then went quiet for four decades.
Route-16 matters most as a piece of company history. Sun Electronics is the firm behind the Sunsoft brand, so the game predates the name it is now remembered under, and it sits well before the run of NES titles, Blaster Master, Journey to Silius, Batman, that made Sunsoft's reputation in the West. In August 2026 Sunsoft published ROUTE16R, a modern revival built on the original's structure, making Route-16 one of the oldest properties in the catalogue to be brought back.