Atari has announced that Headless Chicken Games’ NeoSprint, the successor to the classic-ish arcade series that I always get confused with Super Off-Road, will be launching on June 27. It will be released on Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Atari VCS (which still trucking).
Okay, so think back. There were these arcade cabinets with (usually) three steering wheels. It was a top-down tilt-angled racing game. You and your friends would stand shoulder to shoulder and steer your cars around a track. If you remember it having a lot of dirt, that was probably 1989’s Super Off-Road. However, if it was F1-Racing on tarmac; that was probably 1986’s Super Sprint.
I’m just finding out now that the two games weren’t really related. They’re not part of the same series. The arcade cabinets look functionally the same. I definitely played both.
If you’re a lot older than me, the series goes all the way back to 1977 with Sprint 2. That’s not a sequel. There was also Sprint 4, 8, and One, and the number is how many players each version was, and not the order in which they were released. Wild stuff.
Since Atari is going back and resurrecting all their old classics, they’ve got a new entry to the series NeoSprint. It definitely looks like a Sprint game. It’s got a similar angle and eight players. The track is really tight. There’s a trailer for it that features some really bad drivers. Although to be fair, it’s kind of hard to judge your turn radius from that angle. You’d just kind of bump off each other.
Weirdly, it refers to it as 8-player co-op racing. So, wait. What’s the objective? Is it not to race?
It’s local co-op, so you’ll at least be on the same couch (in the same auditorium?) as each other. But, I don’t know. I think I’d miss being crammed up against the arcade cabinet in some hockey arena playing with whoever was hovering around at the time.
I guess to make up for it, there’s a track builder which looks like a fantastic feature. I don’t think NeoSprint’s design really allows for some wild tracks, but at least you won’t run out.
NeoSprint releases on June 27 on Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Atari VCS.
