Top Gear Review (SNES) (Retro WedNESday #7)
Developer: Gremlin Graphics
Publisher: Kemco
Released: April 1992
Top Gear on the SNES was the first console racing game I ever played. My dad, my brother, and I played it a ton in the early 90s. This one only had two-player splitscreen, so two of us would play, the winner would play the other one, and we just kept it going that way. Object being see who could win the most, and thus play the most. Good times. I always picked the white car.
The game is straightforward by any modern standard. You pick one of four cars, each with different attributes across speed, fuel consumption, nitro power, and tire grip, and then you race across 32 courses spread over eight countries, trying to finish in the top five and qualify for the next stage. There’s a password system to save your progress, a pit lane for refueling on the longer tracks, and three nitro boosts per race that can push you well past 200 miles per hour on a good downhill stretch. That’s the whole game. No career mode, no car customization beyond your initial pick, no story. Just racing.
And it’s great.
The controls are simple and responsive. The third-person perspective gives you just enough visibility ahead to react to traffic and turns without feeling like the game is cheating you. The AI is competitive without being obnoxious, the difficulty scales naturally as you move through the countries, and the two-player split-screen runs smoothly in a way that not every SNES game could pull off. For one of the first racing games on the platform, the technical execution was impressive.
The graphics were something else when this came out for little me. The sense of speed, the way the road scaled and curved ahead of you, the scenery changing between countries. I thought this game looked incredible as a kid. Coming back to it now, it still looks pretty good. It has that clean SNES visual style that aged better than a lot of its contemporaries, and the variety between locations keeps things from feeling repetitive even across 32 courses.
Then there’s the music, which deserves its own paragraph. Apparently, Composer Barry Leitch had exactly one week to deliver the entire soundtrack, which sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. What he turned in became one of the most beloved racing game soundtracks in SNES history. The Top Gear soundtrack, particularly its main theme, has achieved cult status decades later. I have sometimes gotten the Las Vegas track theme stuck in my head at various points for over thirty years. It’s that good.
One thing worth mentioning for anyone who wants to revisit this or try it for the first time: QUByte Interactive released the game for modern systems in 2024 under the name Top Racer Collection, which is available on PS5 and other platforms and includes online multiplayer. I haven’t played the modern version myself, so I can’t speak to how that port holds up, but the option exists if you don’t have original hardware or want to race against other people online. The original SNES experience is what I’m rating here.
This is as clean and fun a racing game as the era produced. Simple to pick up, genuinely fun to play, and even more fun with someone sitting next to you. Some of my best memories of gaming with my dad and brother happened in front of this game, and going back to it now, it still delivers exactly what it always did. Not every game needs to be complicated to be great.
Top Gear gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.
This one trigger some nostalgia for ya? Check out my previous Retro WedNESday entries, including TaleSpin on the Sega Genesis and Super Mario Bros. on NES. Retro WedNESday runs every Wednesday here on Titanquisitor. Browse the full archive here. Next week, I’m hopping back on the SEGA for Sonic the Hedgehog.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect Forums.
