I want to speedrun another racing game that is structured like Star Wars Episode I: Racer

[05-12-2025]

Out of the many games I have speedrun in the past 10 years, one that I spent quite a lot of time on was Star Wars Episode I: Racer, first on the Dreamcast version and later on PC. The game is extremely demanding, not only is it extremely fast and punishing and the courses are long with many obstacles and tight hairpins, but it is also by far the most input intensive racing game I've ever played. In order to have access to all mechanics independent of another and be able to compete on a high level, you need a customized input mapping, and when I had that set up on my Xbox360 controller, pretty much every button on the controller was in use. I have a hard time with complicated input schemes and many of the button mappings were unintuitive, so that I had to spend a long time building muscle memory for basic actions. In short, this is a game that you need to dedicate a huge amount of time and brain power to in order to speedrun it, which is also the reason I eventually dropped it and have no intentions of returning to it any time soon even though I always look back on it fondly.

However, there are aspects to the game's design that make me long for it frequently, and that is not the racing itself, but its structure. The game has a career mode with unlocks and upgrade mechanics, so you have a good sense of game progression as you play. The game has 25 courses, which are split up into three different difficulty classes: Amateur Circuit, Semi-Pro Circuit and Galactic Circuit with 7 courses each, as well as 4 courses in the Invitational Circuit, which you unlock upon completion of previous circuits. All Circuits except for Invitational have the first course already unlocked on a new save file. Credits are triggered upon completing Galactic Circuit, which means all that an any% run has to do is play the 7 courses of Galactic Circuit. The other main categories are 100%, which unlocks and wins all 25 tracks, and two categories for each of the other circuits.

Two additional mechanics are added on top of the basic category structure: Firstly, the game has quite a huge number of very broken level skips, which is always fun to mess around with, as it adds an additional layer of spectacle and unexpectedness to the run. Skips and No Skips are, of course, their own subcategories, and both have their own appeal (although in some cases I have beef with what strategies are classified a skip but that's no longer my problem). Secondly, the game's upgrade system. Between races, you can buy upgrades from the shop to improve your podracer's stats. Upgrades are unlocked linearly with the level progression, and get more expensive the better the part is you're buying. But there is also the junkyard, where you get a randomized selection of upgrades, independent of your progression, with a random amount of damage and discount (damage is also repaired between races). This means that, if you're lucky, you can get an endgame level upgrade at a ridiculous discount very early on, and everyone who knows what speedruns I like knows that I love gambling. This leads to a lot of really cool interesting routes with different risk vs. reward calculations that you can attempt: For example, you can buy a mediocre damaged part, playing a race and having it repaired, and selling it at a much higher price than you bought it for, and now having a lot of spare money to be able to buy better parts with. Alternatively, you can hope for the very small chance that you get the endgame part right away at a high discount, but it will make the run more reset heavy. You can also freely decide when in the run you buy the upgrades, as doing earlier is faster, but also riskier, because you have not had the chance to collect a lot of prize money from the races. Runs with upgrades are a lot faster and more dynamic, but runs without are more consistent and rely more on optimization, so once again, both are their own subcategories with their own appeal.

I love speedrunning racing games, but I have a very hard time finding games that are actually suitable for the kind of speedrun that I wanna do. My favourite kind of racing games to play are arcade racers, something that has a sense of being based in reality but not a sim-racer, something like Need for Speed, Project Gotham Racing, PS1+2 era Gran Turismo, those kind of games. Essentially, I like real (looking) cars and real (looking) settings. But most of those games have a very long career mode with tons of repetition, often looking at several hours for an any% run, which is far outside of my comfort zone. If you find a short category, it's usually something arbitrary (for example All Tracks), which often lacks a feeling of accomplishment and progression that you get from starting a new save file, unlocking things and beating the game. Many games lack a variety in categories altogether, which I always find adds a lot of additional motivation to keep playing it, as while you're playing other categories, you improve at the game, and then want to apply those new skills to the categories you have already done and improve your runs there. Another thing most of those games are usually missing is glitches and exploits. I'm not one of those people who say that "just playing a racing game" can't be a speedrun because you're just playing the game as intended; being good at racing takes a lot of skill and you can just as well optimize your playthrough of a racing as you do with any other type of game. But at the same time, optimizing a run where you're "just playing a racing game" also quickly starts feeling tedious to me. I like having some tricks to keep me on my toes, to mix things up, to add a bit of spectacle. I enjoy watching "just playing a racing game" type speedruns, but I don't enjoy optimizing them.

Kart racing games avoid many of these issues, as the runs are typically of a manageable length, and they also tend to have a lot more tricks and exploits than other racing games. I have speedrun a number of kart and kart-adjacent racing games, and a lot of them are very good speedgames, but they usually don't quite hit the spot. What I am missing from them very often is a sense of progression, as most kart racing games tend to go for the "All Cups" type categories. On top of that, driving mechanics in kart racing games are often very gimmicky and gamified, and I prefer feeling like I'm actually controlling a vehicle when playing a racing game.

To conclude, my dream racing game speedrun would be the structural skeleton of Star Wars Episode I: Racer, with gambling and a number of short, game-progressing categories to choose from, but with the gameplay of Project Gotham Racing. Structurally, Star Wars Episode I: Racer does everything right in what I'm looking for in a speedrun, but the level of dedication required to compete in it in the long term due to its mechanical complexity is not sustainable for me anymore