Forget Daytona USA, THIS is the game Sega should have pitted against Ridge Racer

As the 32-bit console wars kicked off in 1994 and 1995, one thing was clear: Daytona USA on Saturn was not as graphically impressive as Namco’s PlayStation conversion of Ridge Racer.

Record scratch. BUT WAIT. What if I told you Sega completely missed the chance to prove Saturn was every bit as capable of delivering a Ridge Racer conversion as Sony, only with bikes instead?

In the first 12 months of the Saturn’s life, Genki released its own racer under the Sega Sports brand, named Hang On GP 95, with a Western version called Hang On GP 96 following soon after.

Irony of ironies, it looks a lot like Ridge Racer, even featuring similarly blue-tinged tarmac. It’s almost like it’s a deliberate “Anything you can do” moment. If anything, the bikes are more detailed than Ridge’s mostly flat-shaded cars, and it features more circuits too. 

But most interestingly of all, it doesn’t display the Saturn’s usual graphical issues very much at all. For starters, it runs at a rock-solid 30fps, just like PlayStation Ridge Racer. It even displays true transparency effects, which the Saturn was famed for not being able to do with ease.

The first-person view features a beautifully translucent windshield, complete with its own colour variation and shading, covering a significantly large portion of the screen. Sure, it’s a 2D image which allows for the trick, but it still looks fantastic and would have silenced a lot of critics. 

So, if it’s so good, you’re probably wondering why you’ve never heard of Hang On GP 95. How can a Ridge Racer competitor have just disappeared without a trace, taking the Hang On name with it in the process? 

The problem was, without question, the standard controls. The game appears to have been designed pretty much exclusively for the Arcade Racer steering wheel.

Plug in Sega’s plasticky peripheral (that doesn’t even have any pedals) and the game is smooth, controllable and realistic-feeling, at least by 1995’s standards. Ride behind another bike into a tunnel on the Albatross Cliff Reef circuit (gotta love those mid-’90s track names) using the on-board view and the Saturn’s steering wheel peripheral and – just for a second – it’s arguably better than Ridge Racer on PlayStation.

Trouble is, at £49.99, the arcade racer was the equivalent of paying £100 today. And why would most people buy a wheel when they could buy Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter 2 or Virtua Cop that same year for the same amount? With every major 32-bit game feeling magical and exciting, the decision was easy for most people. The game won every time. 

What wheelless consumers got as a result is one of the worst digital control efforts of all time. Even at the preview stage, Sega Saturn Magazine was saying the game ran well but needed work on the controls, but the version that actually released is frankly abysmal.

The bike flaps around on the screen as you touch left and right, which is a problem with all bike games, of course, but seems super-exaggerated here. Then there’s the drifting mechanic, which seems to ape Ridge Racer in that you can deliberately slide your vehicle around the corner before it catches and you get full grip again.

Trouble is here the bike catches and sends you hurtling forwards, usually into a wall. Of course, you can learn to work with it, but compared to Ridge Racer’s smooth if slightly ‘computer digital’ handling, this game is a disaster. To make things worse, playing the game on automatic transmission keeps the revs rather high, so you get a dreadful ‘wasp in a jam jar’ effect while it’s all going on. 

Thing is, none of these problems are terminal. Controls can be fixed or changed altogether. For instance, GRID 2 had its entire handling model scrapped and made again from scratch in the later days of development, not that it really helped the game in fairness.

So Sega could have given Hang On GP 95 an extra boost, the same level of care and attention lavished on the astonishing Sega Rally Championship port that same year, and pitched it as a Ridge Racer beater. “Sega does what Namcan’t”. You know what I mean. 

It’s sad to see something so close to brilliance become a mere footnote instead. Still, it’s worth a look if retro Sega’s your thing… just as long as you have the wheel.