OutSider is a cancelled “open city” motorbike racing game that was planned in 1996 for the Nintendo 64. Players would be able to freely ride around the city, escaping from chases and resolving different missions. As far as we know the project was never officially announced, but in June 2021 a former developer shared some images on Twitter. The name of the company is blurred out in the document, but it seems the developer worked for Hudson Soft in the ‘90s, so this could have been one of their strange but fascinating N64 projects.
When it was conceived OutSider was quite an original racing game, but it seems after Climax Entertainment released Felony 11-79 / Runabout in 1997 the team decided to cancel the project, possibly because it was too similar to it or not as fun to play.
Images:
That’s a shame this never got a release. It looks fine from the images we have but then again it may have ran poorly.
That’s fascinating. At first I was thinking, “No way this was actually one open map” but the comparison Runabout makes sense; this actually seemed like it might’ve been doable on the N64. Still, 1996/97 was REAL ambitious for any team, let alone (maybe) a Hudson developer. Their N64 games were never that impressive, technically. But man, I would’ve liked to see them try.
The N64 had some great racers, but it really struggled when it came to “Japanese feeling” racers compared to the Saturn and Playstation – all the great ones were pretty much from American and European teams, save for non-Diddy Kong Racing cart racers (even Ridge Racer 64 was developed in the US, after all). It could’ve used something like this!