Racing games are, in a sense, the lifeblood of early gaming. While hardcore gamers may not appreciate a good racing game, the appeal of racing games to the casual gaming crowd is apparent. Sure, Mario Kart has been a smash hit ever since it arrived in 1992, but the rise of more realistic racing games in the 1990s reveals an interesting story. The more racing games became popular, the more realism became a selling point of the biggest and best games in this subgenre. And on October 11, 1994 — just a few months after Need for Speed and two years before Mario Kart 64 — Sega released Sega Rally Championship, which, by 1995, would find the game on multiple platforms including PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Windows.
So, thirty years later, does the game hold up? Is this a seminal moment like Need for Speed? Or did Sega Rally offer something else? The answer is a little of both. While not as objectively awesome as Need for Speed, what Sega Rally did was nonetheless ahead of its time. It created a new feeling for racing games, one that wanted desperately to emulate reality in a very specific way. And in doing so, Sega Rally did change the future of gaming— just probably not in the way people might think.
