the women in the white convertible: on 3D OutRun
I was going to say that OutRun is a timeless game, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that OutRun will always take me back to a particular time.

More than any other game, it was OutRun that taught me that games are so much more than raw mechanics, that visual design and music have a profound impact on our experience. In gameplay terms, OutRun is fine–it is exactly what it needs to be to complement the look and sound of the game, but it is those aspects, and the world OutRun creates through them, that make it one of the greatest games of all time.
My family was living in the San Fernando Valley in 1986, the year OutRun debuted in arcades. My experience of Los Angeles was strip malls and smog and traffic and utilitarian public schools and terrifying local news broadcasts. Occasionally my dad (who loved to drive) would ask me to hop in the car with him and I’d see another side of L.A. We’d wind our way up Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Pacific Coast Highway where I breathed in the salty air and saw the sun set over the ocean and the palm trees silhouetted by the sky.
This is the California OutRun taps into, but the game’s varied regions take it to a gorgeous, glorious, idealized extreme. The game is a California dream.
Life at home in those days was tumultuous and scary. Nothing felt stable. There were constant fears about money. People were always getting into loud arguments with each other. Two of my family members were haunted by demons I didn’t understand. And I was struggling with feelings of anguish and hopelessness about my own gender identity, feelings I had no place to put and no idea how to express.
Designer Yu Suzuki has said that OutRun is not a racing game but a driving game, and I got good enough at it that I experienced it that way, not worried about the ticking clock, just cruising to my destination, the wind in my hair and a great song on the radio. Playing OutRun at the arcade or at home–I had the Master System version–was like a little vacation, an eight-minute escape from my real California into a dream of California and a dream of my own future, a time when I would be able to hit the open road myself, choose my own path, and get away from all the scary things.
Still, I was aware that while OutRun was a fantasy, it wasn’t entirely my fantasy. On the long road trips my family sometimes took, I’d often look at another driver and escape from my own life for a while by wondering who that person was, where she might be going, what her life might be like.
This would happen when I played OutRun, too. I didn’t give a damn about this guy in the Ferrari with a lady by his side. His California adventure was not the story I was really interested in. Always when I saw the convertible with what I interpreted as two women in it…

…I started wondering who they were. I wanted them in the center of the screen, and the Ferrari with the man behind the wheel and the woman in the passenger seat to be just another car I was outrunning on the road. I wanted their California adventure. Were they good friends or lovers? Were they getting away to San Francisco for the weekend? Would they go on wine tastings? What did 25-year-old women even do together, I wondered. Whatever it was, that was the life I wanted. And even in this fantasy world, I was still denied it.
Now 3D OutRun is available on the 3DS and I am astounded by it, not because it looks so much better than OutRun has before but precisely because it reveals how stunningly beautiful OutRun has always been. My childhood love for its visuals and sound was not misplaced. Even now, almost 30 years later, its magic has not been diminished, its ability to transport me to a California that only exists in dreams has not gone away. And that escape feels as vital to me now as it ever did. I’m so glad to have this game back in my life.
It’s 28 years since I first played OutRun and my life is hardly a fantasy. I still live in fear about money issues. I still sometimes wish I could leap out of myself and into the lives of women who are fully accepted as women by society in a way that I never will be. But things are better now. And last night when I closed my eyes to sleep after playing 3D OutRun for a few hours, I saw its California stretching before me and felt like I could hop behind the wheel of that white convertible and go anywhere I wanted to go.
Notes
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