Virtua Racing

Virtua Racing is a Formula One-style racing game released by Sega in 1992, developed by Yu Suzuki's AM2 division. It was one of the first arcade games to render its world in fully 3D, flat-shaded polygons rather than scaled sprites, running on Sega's new Model 1 hardware. The shift to polygons let the game offer something earlier racers could not: a selectable camera, including a then-novel external chase view, and genuine three-dimensional tracks that the player could read and attack from multiple angles. Linked deluxe cabinets let several players race head to head. Virtua Racing proved that polygonal 3D could deliver a fast, readable, commercially successful arcade game, and it directly paved the way for AM2's next polygonal milestone, Virtua Fighter. It was ported to home consoles, most notably a technically ambitious Sega Genesis / Mega Drive version that used an add-on chip, and stands as a key bridge between Sega's sprite-scaling past and its 3D future.