Arcade racer Screamer is returning after 30 years, and you really should care

One of the most unexpected announcements at The Game Awards 2024 was a new entry in the Screamer series, which first started on PC back in 1995.

Coming back after 30 years, it’s likely going to be difficult for some gamers to understand why there’s any excitement around the announcement at all, especially looking at old screenshots. Well, Traxion can explain exactly why you should be excited. 

For starters, it’s creators have never forgotten the Screamer ethos, even going so far as to say 2018’s Gravel was the spiritual successor to Screamer, with the then-head of Game Design at Milestone, Irvin Zonca, saying he took the design brief for Screamer down from the shelf and laid it out on his table when he was designing Gravel.

But while Screamer 2 had off-road vehicles, it’s the original that really shines brightest, and for the best reasons.

Incredibly, you can actually buy Screamer on Steam today, though it runs in DOSbox and not exactly flawlessly, especially on Mac where it runs about as well as it did in the mid-90s, which isn’t ideal.

On a PC that can do it justice, however, the arcade DNA is plain to see. 

For starters, the colours are bold. The road is textured with white-lined lanes, like Daytona USA. The car flips like in OutRun if you crash hard enough. And there’s an announcer telling you that your being in first place is ‘exactly what he wanted to see’.

For anyone who knows their racing heritage, that’s straight out of Ridge Racer. There’s a countdown timer, checkpoints, fallible AI cars (which was a big deal for the time), traffic cones you can knock over, tunnels, billboards – some even displaying video – and roadside funfairs.

It’s pure 90s arcade racing and it still elicits that feeling of ‘wow’ as you hurtle over a crest and see the next trackside detail, like a plane overhead, cable car or flyover with moving traffic. The team was really showing off at the time, and it was genuinely just about keeping up with the big boys, Sega and Namco. 

Does it play brilliantly? Not quite brilliantly, but it’s decent.

Turning is cumbersome unless you drift, and there are a couple of ways to do that, neither of which feels ideal. If the corner is cambered correctly you can simply steer hard in one direction (using the keys, of course – no controller support for this relic), or you can dab the brakes, causing your car to go into a sort of ‘drift mode’, much akin to the original Ridge Racer with its slide state.

And just like that game, getting stuck in a slide for too long will sap your speed, though Screamer doesn’t appear to have an easy way to get out of it. 

Track design is arguably the game’s greatest asset and that’s arguably the main thing the brand needs to retain.

They feel like Sega arcade racer tracks, with long, sweeping corners, flat-out kinks in tunnels and the occasional super-challenging hairpin or chicane to really test your car control.

But if you do fall off the road, the game has commendable off-road physics as you slew around over the grass, even spinning a full 260 degrees if you ask too much of the car. It sounds obvious now, but in 1995 this sort of thing was a commendable feat of programming, and Screamer holds together surprisingly well in the harsh light of 2024 as a result.

So for Milestone to be making a new Screamer, it might be exactly what the racing genre needs – an injection of pure arcade magic.

The trailer may seem a bit more ‘anime’ than ‘amusement arcade’, and will apparently feature the voice talent of Troy Baker (show me a game that doesn’t), so it’s unlikely the game will look as full of sunshine as the original. But so long as the company stays true to the original’s values of speed, sliding and spectacle, this should really be worth playing when it arrives in 2026.

It’s coming to PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC, soon to be available to wishlist on Steam, and we’d very much advise keeping an eye on its progress. This could be absolutely stellar.