Originally released as Top Gear in North America and Top Racer across the rest of the world, the Top Racer games on the Super Nintendo and Super Famicom were some of the best representations of console-exclusive arcade-influenced racers from the early ’90s. The brand continued to be used into the original Xbox era, but nothing was quite able to replicate the magic of the earliest entries. Last year, a Top Racer Collection with three full SNES-era games and a new collaboration with Aquaris, makers of Horizon Chase Turbo and Horizon Chase 2 was announced. Towards the end of the year, it was shown on the eShop page that it would get a January 11 release, but that has now changed.
The publisher, QUByte Interactive, has announced that instead of the full game releasing on January 11, there will instead be a demo on Steam. The delay of the full game is set to allow the final product to be of a higher quality and match the expectation of what fans want out of the collection. There’s no word on what kind of content we’ll get in the demo, but hopefully it’ll be a little bit of each included game, as they all play similarly to one another with gameplay refinements as time went on. The collection was set to have Top Racer 1, Top Racer 2 and the future-set Top Racer 3000 – the final SNES entry in the series.
The collaboration content with Aquaris was perhaps the piece of content I was most looking forward to, as Horizon Chase Turbo was a fantastic spiritual successor to the Top Racer games, which were massively popular in Brazil and this franchise fit right in. It kept the same kind of art style alive, only using polygonal models and had quips from driver to driver as well. Having them work on the collection with original content in the style of Horizon Chase but seemingly with Top Racer content would have been a fantastic modernization of the franchise.
The Top Racer Collection is now set for release on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC via Steam on March 7, so it’s not a huge delay at a bit under two months, but is just enough to sting a bit. If the delay allows for more polish either on the new content or ensuring the legacy content is as perfect can be expected, then it will be far better in the long-haul. We have seen issues with classic collections being rushed to market in a sub-par way and that would harm this release with it being for a lesser-known series in today’s market.
