In 1987, months before Final Fantasy established Square as one of the most important names in role-playing games, the company was trying to make a Nintendo Famicom perform like an arcade machine.
The result was Highway Star, released in Japan on August 7, 1987. American players would know it by a much louder name, Rad Racer. Instead of knights, magic, and wandering heroes, Square placed players behind the wheel of a speeding automobile and sent them through mountains, cities, deserts, rainstorms, snow, and coastal highways while a clock constantly threatened to end the journey.
On paper, it was a relatively simple racing game. The player accelerated, braked, steered through traffic, reached checkpoints, and tried to finish each course before time expired. In motion, however, Rad Racer was an attempt to create something far more ambitious. Square wanted the flat television screen to suggest a road stretching into the distance, cars approaching and disappearing with convincing speed, and scenery rushing past the player as if the Nintendo Entertainment System had somehow become a miniature arcade cabinet.
The people responsible for making that illusion work included several developers who would soon become closely associated with Final Fantasy. Hironobu Sakaguchi was involved in the project, Nobuo Uematsu provided music, Kazuko Shibuya worked on graphics, and programmer Nasir Gebelli supplied the unusual technical talent around which much of the game was constructed. Later Square developers remembered Rad Racer as one of the projects where the company learned how much could be squeezed out of Nintendo’s hardware.
Nasir Gebelli And Square’s Search For Speed
Nasir Gebelli had already developed a reputation among computer enthusiasts before arriving at Square. He had programmed games for the Apple II, where developers often had to accomplish impressive visual effects with extremely limited hardware. Hiromichi Tanaka later remembered that Square’s developers knew Gebelli’s work before meeting him. Square founder Masafumi Miyamoto encountered Gebelli through the game development community, and Gebelli eventually joined the company.
According to Tanaka, Square’s first project with Gebelli was The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner. Their second was Rad Racer. Only afterward did the company begin the project that became the original Final Fantasy. That sequence makes Rad Racer particularly important to Square history. It belongs to the short experimental period immediately preceding the company’s transformation into an RPG powerhouse.
Takashi Tokita later recalled just how unusual Gebelli’s programming appeared at the time. While most NES development remained rooted in conventional two-dimensional graphics, Gebelli was able to simulate the perspective of a road scrolling toward the player. Tokita described the technique as particularly difficult to accomplish on Nintendo’s hardware and remembered an era when a single programmer might carry enormous responsibility for an entire game.
Kazuko Shibuya offered an even more revealing description of the process. Rather than constructing the road as a collection of ordinary moving sprites, the racetrack was drawn line by line. Shibuya would sit beside Gebelli and explain the colors and pixel lengths needed for sections of the course while he translated that information into the racing environment. The resulting road curved, widened, narrowed, and rushed toward the player with a smoothness that helped create Rad Racer’s defining sense of motion.
That technical experimentation was not incidental to the game’s creation. Hironobu Sakaguchi later explained that games such as WorldRunner and Rad Racer were intended in large part to demonstrate Gebelli’s programming abilities. Square had recruited an unusually gifted programmer, and racing offered a highly visible way to show what he could do.
From Highway Star To Rad Racer
Square released the game in Japan under the title Highway Star on August 7, 1987. Surviving cartridge records identify the Japanese release as SQF-HI, while the original packaging placed a sleek red automobile at the center of the game’s identity.
The American version developed a different personality before it even reached stores.
In September 1987, Computer Entertainer reported that Nintendo’s automobile racing game, previously listed as 3D Racing, had been renamed Rad Racer. It was a small announcement, but it captures Nintendo of America’s marketing language during the NES boom. “Rad” immediately positioned the game inside the slang, advertising, and youth culture of late 1980s America.
The game reached North America in October 1987, published by Nintendo for the NES. Some later databases provide a specific October 1 date, but the surviving evidence is stronger for October generally, so that remains the safer historical dating.
Nintendo did not market Rad Racer as merely another driving cartridge. The box and manual emphasized speed, 3-D technology, dangerous curves, powerful automobiles, and the fantasy of crossing spectacular landscapes at tremendous velocity. The North American manual opened not with a technical explanation, but with a dramatic description of a driver racing across America, losing control, crashing, recovering, and continuing toward the checkered flag. The message was clear. Rad Racer was selling an experience.
Eight Courses Against The Clock
The structure underneath the spectacle was straightforward.
Players selected either the 328 Twin Turbo sports car or an F1 Machine and entered a succession of eight courses. The objective was not to defeat another human player or complete a traditional series of circuit races. Instead, Rad Racer borrowed the checkpoint structure that had become popular in arcade driving games. The player had a limited amount of time to reach the next checkpoint. Reaching one added more time, allowing the drive to continue. Falling short ended the attempt.
Nintendo’s 1987 Official Nintendo Player’s Guide devoted several pages to the game. It explained the tachometer, remaining time, speedometer, turbo system, checkpoints, and techniques for navigating corners. It also treated memorization as an essential skill. Players needed to learn where dangerous curves appeared and decide when raw speed was worth the risk.
The scenery changed dramatically from course to course. The opening Sunset Coastline shifted through different colors of sky. The second stage headed toward the illuminated skyline of San Francisco. The Grand Canyon followed, then the Ruins of Athens, the twisting L.A. Nightway, and the snowy roads of the Rocky Mountains. Later stages introduced rain and increasingly difficult conditions before the final coastal highway.
Traffic changed with the scenery. Nintendo’s manual associated different stages with cars such as the Volkswagen Beetle, Corvette, Citroën, Mercedes-Benz, Lamborghini, Lotus, Porsche, and Testarossa. Those vehicles were more than decorations because traffic could interrupt a player’s line through a corner or force a sudden decision at high speed.
The game even encouraged players to think tactically about surrounding traffic. Nintendo’s manual described slipstreaming behind other cars, taking an outside-inside-outside path through curves, and even using contact with another vehicle as part of an advanced maneuver. The challenge therefore came from balancing aggression against survival. Going fast was easy. Going fast without losing the seconds needed to reach the next checkpoint was much harder.
Making An NES Road Feel Three-Dimensional
The central achievement of Rad Racer was its road.
There was no true three-dimensional polygonal world hiding inside the cartridge. Instead, careful programming and graphic tricks created the impression that the player was traveling forward into depth. Road lines converged toward the horizon, cars changed apparent size as the player approached them, and curves swept across the screen while roadside scenery moved in ways designed to reinforce speed.
That illusion mattered because arcade racing games had raised expectations dramatically during the middle of the 1980s. Home consoles could not simply reproduce expensive arcade hardware directly. Developers had to find convincing substitutes.
Gebelli’s solution allowed Square to create a road that felt fast despite the limitations of the Famicom and NES. Shibuya’s recollection of assembling its appearance through precise instructions about pixel lengths shows how carefully constructed that illusion was. What looked fluid to the player was the result of painstaking decisions about individual lines of graphics.
The game itself became evidence of what Square’s programmers had learned while experimenting with simulated three-dimensional space. Those experiments would not turn Final Fantasy into a racing game, of course, but the people, tools, and working relationships surrounding Rad Racer became part of the foundation of Square’s next era.
The Promise Of 3-D
Nintendo added another layer to the illusion by making three-dimensional imagery part of Rad Racer’s identity.
The North American version came with red-and-blue glasses. During a race, pressing Select changed the screen into a special 3-D display intended to be viewed through them. Pressing Select again returned the game to its standard appearance. The manual presented the feature as an integral part of the cartridge rather than a hidden novelty.
Nintendo’s Official Nintendo Player’s Guide promoted the effect prominently, describing the glasses, the ability to switch into 3-D mode during a race, and the sensation of accelerating at high speed. Nintendo’s advertising similarly placed the feature near the center of its sales pitch.
In Japan, Highway Star also belonged to Nintendo’s short-lived experiments with stereoscopic gaming around the Famicom 3D System. An institutional history of Japanese digital content later listed Square’s Highway Star among titles associated with the system. Pasted markdown
The technology was primitive compared with later attempts at stereoscopic games, but historically that is precisely what makes it interesting. Nintendo would repeatedly return to the problem of displaying depth, from the Famicom 3D System through the Virtual Boy and eventually the Nintendo 3DS. Rad Racer belongs to an early chapter of that much longer story.
Nintendo Sells The Feeling Of Speed
Nintendo supported Rad Racer heavily during the company’s rapid American expansion.
The Winter 1987 issue of Nintendo Fun Club News advertised the game with language centered on power and racing at the edge. The same issue also provided gameplay advice, helping players understand a game whose high speed and sharp curves could punish anyone trying to rely only on reflexes. Barba Non DB
Nintendo’s official guide went further. Rather than giving Rad Racer only a short catalog description, it received an in-depth section explaining the eight courses, turbo acceleration, the 3-D mode, cornering, traffic, and course strategy. That level of treatment reveals how seriously Nintendo viewed the title during the NES’s early American years.
Players responded to its combination of speed and spectacle. In the February and March 1988 issue of Nintendo Fun Club News, reader Pasha Durr praised the graphics, music, vehicle selection, and especially the 3-D feature. A reader review is not evidence that everyone loved the game, but it does provide something valuable that later retrospectives cannot: the reaction of an NES owner while Rad Racer was still new.
Contemporary Japanese criticism was also favorable. Bibliographic indexes of the July 10, 1987 issue of Famitsu record a score of 32 out of 40 for Highway Star. British magazine Computer & Video Games later gave Rad Racer 7 out of 10 in its July 1988 issue. The responses varied, but they demonstrate that Square’s racer attracted international attention well beyond Nintendo’s own promotional publications.
Rad Racer Leaves The Living Room
The game’s life did not end with the home cartridge.
By 1988, Rad Racer was being offered as part of Nintendo’s PlayChoice-10 arcade system. A surviving “Fresh Choices” sales flyer advertised Rad Racer alongside games including Castlevania, Double Dribble, and R.C. Pro-Am.
The PlayChoice-10 occupied an unusual place between arcade and home gaming. Instead of creating entirely different arcade versions, Nintendo could place NES software into commercial machines and allow players to experience familiar games in arcades. For Rad Racer, a game already designed to imitate the sensation of arcade racing, the transition was particularly fitting.
A title born from Square’s attempt to bring arcade-like speed to Nintendo’s home hardware had, in a sense, completed the circle by returning to the arcade floor.
The Nintendo World Championships
Three years after its Japanese debut, Rad Racer received another unexpected burst of historical importance.
Nintendo organized the Nintendo World Championships in 1990, taking a large competitive gaming event across the United States. Competitors played a specially designed cartridge combining portions of three games: Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris.
Nintendo Power explained the format in its March and April 1990 issue. A competitor first collected 50 coins in Super Mario Bros., then moved into a special Rad Racer segment and attempted to complete a predetermined stretch of road. Only after finishing the racing section did the player reach Tetris, where the remaining competition time could be converted into additional points.
That placed Rad Racer beside two of the most famous video games of the era.
The selection also suited the competition format. Super Mario Bros. tested platforming execution. Rad Racer demanded quick control at high speed. Tetris rewarded rapid decision-making and scoring skill. Together they produced a compressed test of three very different types of NES play.
Later Nintendo Power coverage of championship finalists even noted competitors who had little previous experience with Rad Racer, showing how the game became part of a competitive environment far removed from its original 1987 release.
Because surviving Nintendo World Championships cartridges eventually became some of the most famous collectibles in video game history, Rad Racer remains embedded inside one of the best-known artifacts of early American competitive gaming.
Rad Racer II And The End Of The Road
Square returned to the concept with Rad Racer II in 1990.
The sequel again placed players on eight courses and emphasized turbo-powered arcade racing. Cartridge records date the North American release to June 1990. It retained much of the first game’s identity while introducing new roads and visual effects, but it never established a long-running franchise.
By then, Square itself had changed.
The original Final Fantasy had appeared in Japan in December 1987, only four months after Highway Star. What began as another project involving members of Square’s small development circle became the foundation of the company’s future. Gebelli, Sakaguchi, Shibuya, Uematsu, Tanaka, and other developers associated with Square’s experimental Famicom years moved into projects whose influence would eventually overshadow Rad Racer.
That can make the racing game easy to overlook when Square’s history is told backward from its RPG successes.
Viewed in its own time, however, Rad Racer looks much more important.
Why Rad Racer Matters
Rad Racer did not invent arcade racing, and it did not create the idea of simulated three-dimensional driving. Its importance comes instead from what Square managed to accomplish within the limitations of Nintendo’s 8-bit hardware and from the people who accomplished it.
The game stands at a crossroads in Square history.
It shows Nasir Gebelli demonstrating the programming abilities that had made him famous among Apple II developers. It shows Kazuko Shibuya constructing graphics at the level of individual lines and pixels. It shows Hironobu Sakaguchi and other young Square developers experimenting with ways to create spectacle before their company became synonymous with role-playing games. It contains music from Nobuo Uematsu during the same formative period that would soon lead to Final Fantasy.
At Nintendo, the game became part of another story. It was promoted through Nintendo Fun Club News and the company’s first major strategy guides, packaged with 3-D glasses, adapted to the PlayChoice-10 environment, and ultimately inserted into the Nintendo World Championships cartridge alongside Super Mario Bros. and Tetris.
More than anything, Rad Racer captured a particular moment in video game history when developers were learning how to make home consoles suggest experiences that the hardware could not literally reproduce.
The NES could not become a powerful dedicated racing cabinet. Square made the road move convincingly enough that players could imagine otherwise.
That illusion, a thin strip of pixels stretching toward the horizon while the speedometer climbed, is the reason Rad Racer deserves to be remembered not simply as an old NES racing game, but as one of the experiments that helped define Square immediately before Final Fantasy changed the company’s history.
Sources & Further Reading
Nintendo of America. Rad Racer Instruction Booklet. Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1987. https://manuals.plus/m/55f0c7a239ff32c056971e43ea53206479ceee41af12b353f067c1509b4a81e9
Nintendo. The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide. Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1987. https://manuals.plus/m/55226b52165300629be06ef923cd06ff43fb902cd08f9730c1ee30fa49c0bf03
Nintendo of America. “Rad Racer.” Nintendo Fun Club News 1, no. 3 (Fall 1987). https://db.barbanon.org/source/00017136
Nintendo of America. “Feel the Power of Racing on the Edge with Revolutionary, Action-Packed Rad Racer!” Nintendo Fun Club News 1, no. 4 (Winter 1987). https://db.barbanon.org/source/00017137
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Fun Club News. February/March 1988. https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/0/02/Nintendo_Fun_Club_-_1988-02.pdf
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. Vol. 1. July/August 1988. https://manuals.plus/m/5cabd1a58e1d549965ab86042dff5d388b9b14ce15a8b5f18f52fa5a834facbc.pdf
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power. March/April 1990. https://fliphtml5.com/zrdmcs/kwwn/89/
Nintendo of America. Insider’s Guide to the Nintendo World Championships 1990. 1990. https://www.digitpress.com/library/manuals/gameboy/nintendo%20world%20championships.pdf
Nintendo of America. Nintendo Player’s Guide: Top Secret Passwords. Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1992. https://db.hfsplay.fr/files/2020/07/03/Nintendo_Players_Guide_-_Top_Secret_Passwords_1992-compress%C3%A9_HHyRub4.pdf
Nintendo. “Fresh Choices.” PlayChoice-10 arcade sales flyer, 1988. Arcade Flyer Archive, International Arcade Museum. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/1828
“New Games and Software.” Computer Entertainer 6, no. 6 (September 1987). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Computer_Entertainer_6-6.pdf
“New Games Cross Review: ハイウェイスター [Highway Star].” Famitsu, no. 27, July 10, 1987.
“Highway Star.” Famitsu, August 7/21, 1987.
“Rad Racer.” Computer & Video Games, no. 81 (July 1988). https://www.retromags.com/magazines/uk/computer-and-video-games/page/4/
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 1: Hiromichi Tanaka.” Final Fantasy Portal Site. https://na.finalfantasy.com/topics/171
Square Enix. “FINAL FANTASY III 30th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 2.” Final Fantasy Portal Site. https://na.finalfantasy.com/topics/176
Shibuya, Kazuko. Interview. Originally published by 4Gamer, 2013. Translated by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/kazukoshibuya/
Nutt, Christian. “Interview: Serializing RPG Storylines on Final Fantasy Legends: Takashi Tokita.” Game Developer, 2011. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/interview-serializing-rpg-storylines-on-i-final-fantasy-legends-i-
“Hironobu Sakaguchi: The Man Behind the Fantasies.” Next Generation, no. 50 (February 1999): 87–90.
Wiltshire, Alex, ed. Japansoft: An Oral History. London: Read-Only Memory and Thames & Hudson. https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/japansoft-an-oral-history-softcover
Szczepaniak, John. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers. Vol. 3. 2018.
Square Enix. SQUARE Enix Preserved Tracks Collection from 1986–1996. Tokyo: Square Enix Music, 2021. https://www.jp.square-enix.com/music/lineup/item/SQEX-10896-8.html
Digital Content Association of Japan. Report on Digital Content and Game Technology. 2005. https://hojo.keirin-autorace.or.jp/seikabutu/seika/17nx_/bhu_/it_/h17_it_digitalcontentskyoukai-3.pdf
Fujii, Daiji. “The Birth of ‘Final Fantasy’: Square Corporation.” Okayama Economic Review 37, no. 1 (2005): 63–88. https://ousar.lib.okayama-u.ac.jp/en/40488
Foster, Neil. “Rad Racer.” Hardcore Gaming 101, November 19, 2017. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/rad-racer/
NESHQ. “Rad Racer.” NESHQ Games Database. Includes scans of the North American and Japanese manuals, packaging, cartridges, and screenshots. https://www.neshq.com/games/r/radracer/
MobyGames. “Rad Racer.” MobyGames. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7765/rad-racer/
GameFAQs. “Rad Racer Release Information.” GameFAQs. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/nes/587550-rad-racer/data
Arcade-History. “Rad Racer [Model NES-RC-USA].” Arcade-History. https://www.arcade-history.com/game/55476/rad-racer-model-nes-rc-usa
Nintendo Player. “Nintendo World Championships 1990.” Nintendo Player. https://www.nintendoplayer.com/feature/nintendo-world-championships/