Road Rash
Motorcycle racing on California two-lanes where you could punch the rider next to you off his bike, club him, or get arrested for crashing in front of a cop. EA's 1991 Genesis hit, its two sequels, and the fake bike brands Panda, Shuriken, Kamikaze and Diablo.
Road Rash started as a car game that the Nintendo could not draw. Electronic Arts had decided to develop console games in-house, and one of its first projects was an NES title called Mario Andretti Racing; programmer Dan Geisler and technical director Carl Mey were hired to give it banked roads, and the NES turned out to be incapable of the effect. Producer Randy Breen, bored by the tedium of straight racing simulations, brainstormed something less realistic with Geisler, Mey and designer Walter Stein, and the project moved to the new Sega Genesis with motorcycles instead of cars. The name came from Breen reminiscing about riding his own bike on Mulholland Drive and thinking, "Man, if you wiped out here, you'd get some serious road rash"; Geisler suggested Road Rash on Mulholland Drive as the title, and Breen used it to pitch the concept to EA.
The road effect alone took Geisler about six months, and the early tame version, shown at the 1990 Consumer Electronics Show, was nicknamed "Randy's Sunday Ride" behind Breen's back. Mey asked for creative control to make the game "kick ass," and the fighting went in: punches and clubs inspired by Grand Prix riders who shoved and kicked each other, and by the biker scenes in Akira, plus police motor officers who arrested you if you crashed near them. Artist Arthur Koch photographed a real motor officer for reference and gave the wipeouts extra frames of animation. No manufacturer would license its bikes to a game this violent, so EA invented Panda, Shuriken, Kamikaze and Diablo in place of Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Ducati. Breen said the road effect made some players throw up, and counted it a triumph.
After about 21 months, Road Rash shipped for the Genesis in September 1991, took a perfect score from GamePro and became EA's most profitable title to that date. Road Rash II arrived in 1992 with split-screen play and a chain, Road Rash 3 in 1995 with races around the world, and a 1994 CD version added live-action video sequences. Later entries, Road Rash 3D in 1998, Road Rash 64 in 1999 and Road Rash: Jailbreak in 2000, never matched the Genesis games, and Jailbreak was the last. EA reused the engine for the 1994 inline-skating game Skitchin', and a spiritual successor, Road Redemption, arrived in 2017.
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