Jalopnik Is Live on Twitch at 4 p.m. ET With a Trio of Sega Racing Classics

We’ve been doing these weekly streams here at Jalopnik for some months now, and despite my best efforts to use this platform to highlight forgotten racing games, I’ve done you all a terrible disservice. That’s because we’ve yet to acknowledge Sega’s pioneering contributions to the genre. You best believe we’re righting that ship today at 4 p.m. Eastern over at twitch.tv/jalopnikdotcom.

On our schedule are three Sega racers, taking you through the early ’90s right up until the publisher’s more-or-less exit from the genre in the late aughts: Daytona USA, OutRun 2 SP and Sega Rally Revo. All three will be played on original hardware — something that deeply excites the nerd in me — and all will be wonderful.

We start with Daytona, the quintessential arcade racer, the one that still exists to this day in every bowling alley and Barcade. The one that looked and moved unlike anything else when it came out circa ’93, save for its mortal foe, Namco’s Ridge Racer of course. The one for which I have a poster, printed out large, hanging in my apartment because it is just that timeless, that perfect. My paradise exists on the banks of Sea Side Street Galaxy, with the dulcet tones of Sega’s Takenobu Mitsuyoshi inviting me to fly sky high with him and the flock of four-polygon birds overhead, and lose ourselves in the deep blue expanse. This is the best game ever made.

Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, the voice of SEGA (Daytona USA, Burning Rangers) – Archipel Caravan via YouTube

Next, we head for the globetrotting opus that is OutRun 2 SP, where we’ll get even more sideways with the wind in our hair in one of eight Ferraris, before ending our tour of racing bliss with Sega Rally Revo, a fitting tribute to 1995’s Sega Rally Championship developed by the short-lived Sega Racing Studio. Those two last games appear here in their Online Arcade forms, during a brief, beautiful period in the middle of the Xbox 360 generation when Sega decided digital storefronts were the perfect venue to resurrect its beloved arcade racers in bite-sized guise.

Joining me as I get unreasonably emotional will once again be Steve DaSilva, Andy Kalmowitz and José Rodríguez Jr., my three streaming partners in crime. It all goes down at 4 p.m. ET on Twitch!