For more than ten years, the SEGA Rally series has helped to define the off road genre. The quarter munching arcade title is still wildly popular and profitable today, and many racing fans still enjoy jumping into the arcade cockpit and racing each other for bragging rights. But SEGA is looking forward to taking the Rally series out of the arcade and into the home. This fall, SEGA Rally Revo will peel out on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We managed to check it out at a press event for some quick early impressions.
The first thing that we were told was that the SEGA Racing Studio out of the UK will be handling racing for SEGA properties. The team definitely knows its racing, as the more than 60 developers have worked on driving games from various developers like Criterion, Codemasters and Rockstar. With a stated studio mission "to bring state of the art racing to next-gen consoles," the Racing Studio is focusing on three specific facets of gameplay for the upcoming title. The development team wanted to make state of the art graphics, putting attention on the handling of vehicles in various environments and the close racing experience that was key to the competition during games. While we were shown examples of this from the original Sega Rally Championship as a indication of where the series had been twelve years ago on a SEGA Model 2 arcade board, we really wanted to see how this would translate to a game console.