"Pole Position (025)" There Are Things You Can't Out Run 880 x 660 px, GIF 2022

** Glitches from Corrupted Sega Genesis ROMs of the classic arcade game Out Run (1986) **

Out Run is perhaps one of the most beautiful racing games ever made. Produced by Sega in the mid 80s and designed by Yu Suzuki, Out Run is a simple premise executed to perfection with a timeless chiptune jazz soundtrack by Hiroshi Kawaguchi. Suzuki shunned some racing game conventions like explosive crashes to focus on recreating the joy of driving. Out Run became an arcade hit for being extremely fun and challenging, but what lingers inside you after playing this classic is a certain sense of melancholy. Out Run draws from the iconography of the road novel and the post-war American automotive frontier; the cross-country race film "The Cannonball Run" was a big inspiration for Yu Suzuki. Supposedly he lobbied Sega to send him on a Road Trip across the US, but they felt it was too dangerous, sending him around Europe instead.

There is a sense of freedom and romance as you race with a partner by your side in your red Testarossa, a masterpiece of sprite design crafted with photogrammetric love. But alas, this is a coin-operated arcade game, and you are in a race, not against rival cars, but against time, the greatest and most terrifying foe of all. Out Run is ultimately a game about time, about how it drips away, about the fantasy of speed to overcome the ravages of time. Maybe if you could only reach back like Einstein and embody absolute speed, the speed of light, maybe then time will finally cease. Maybe then there will be nothing left to Out Run.

Record of Provenance: https://glitchphotography.tumblr.com/post/704382135716528128/

// Artwork by Sabato Visconti // @sabatobox // www.sabatobox.com //