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Leaked Ridge Racer 8 Footage for Nintendo Switch Finally Emerges
Rumors burned for years that Namco almost revived its long-dormant Ridge Racer on the Switch. Now we finally have proof of the effort. The post Leaked Ridge Racer 8 Footage for Nintendo Switch Finally Emerges appeared first on The Drive.
Someday, I do believe we will get a new Ridge Racer. Gaming franchises rarely stay dead forever, even niche ones. Unfortunately, that day isn’t today, though never-before-seen footage of a Ridge Racer title that was reportedly in development for the Nintendo Switch, dating back to 2017, has just emerged. If nothing else, it demonstrates that Bandai Namco has attempted to revive the arcade-racing great in recent years—it just hasn’t panned out yet.
On Sunday, a thread in the Gaming Leaks and Rumors subreddit included this prototype Ridge Racer build in a pile of unreleased software purportedly ripped from a development kit—Switch hardware that developers use to make games. Since then, clips of it in action have been posted online from multiple sources, including X user Jesse Young and Nenkai on YouTube. The latter video, embedded below, shows everything from the game’s front end to replays of a race.
Aspects of this build, like the menus, do seem relatively polished, and the game appears primarily composed of content from the last mainline entry in the series, released for the PS Vita. Cars and tracks will be familiar to anyone who played that 2011 title. There’s a customization suite, but it’s limited to non-cosmetic performance upgrade trees and the ability to repaint cars. The Grand Prix campaign consists of a short series of individual races, not unlike Ridge Racers on the PSP.
Once we get into a race, though, it becomes clear that Bandai Namco Singapore, the team reportedly responsible for this canceled game, still had plenty of work to do. Every Ridge Racer has an announcer, but the stand-in here sounds like the female version of Microsoft Sam, is weirdly low in the mix, and also never shuts up over three laps. The collision system is obviously extremely wonky, with the player car bouncing haphazardly while drifting and driving up inclines. Audio is delayed and tinny, the lighting is bugged, and environmental objects pop in and out of view. It’s a mess.
Rumors of this game first began about seven years ago, when a Bandai Namco Singapore designer who worked on “Ridge Racer 8” listed it in their resume. This coincided with reports at the time that the same studio was behind Metroid Prime 4; since then, it’s understood that Namco’s version of the game was canceled, and work was restarted under Retro Studios. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is finally set to launch on Switch and Switch 2 later this year.
This curious take on Ridge Racer, though, wasn’t so lucky. Personally, I heard a rumor years back (from a source that shall remain nameless) that Bandai Namco was working on a new Ridge Racer, built in Unreal Engine 5, targeting the PlayStation 5’s launch in 2020. That didn’t pan out, but seeing as how this Switch version was reportedly built in Unreal Engine 4, perhaps that work was salvaged and carried over to next-gen hardware at some stage before it was nixed again. Unless we get more information from someone involved, we can’t know for sure.
What we do know is that Namco’s classic arcade racer nearly came back on Nintendo’s outgoing console, and the results appear to be strange. Of course, it’s difficult to say anything definitive about pre-release footage of any game, but the way the cars move and the loose nature of the chase-view camera feel very un-Ridge Racer. Gameplay resembles less of a true step forward for the franchise and more of an attempt to recreate the dynamics of every Ridge Racer going back to the PSP entries in a new engine. It looks like an approximation of the past built with new tools.
But that’s just a surface-level take; who’s to say what this effort could’ve become? As a longtime fan, all I can say is that I hope when Ridge Racer does eventually return, it does so with true conviction and an understanding of what made the series great in the first place, rather than another rearranging of the same furniture. The sublime artistic vision and world-building of R4 and Rage Racer come to mind, as do Ridge Racer V’s meticulously crafted physics. Ridge Racer deserves to come back when it’s ready, and nothing less.
Got any tips on what became of this canceled Ridge Racer game? Drop me a line at adam.ismail@thedrive.com
The post Leaked Ridge Racer 8 Footage for Nintendo Switch Finally Emerges appeared first on The Drive.
