Taito's Top Speed and its rare sequel are now on consoles

Hamster Corporation has released Arcade Archives TOP SPEED and Arcade Archives 2 TOP SPEED on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 today. These releases bring Taito's late-80s racing history to modern platforms, with the sequel representing a particularly deep cut for preservationists.

For those who didn't spend their allowance in smoky arcades in 1987, Top Speed (known as Full Throttle in Japan) was Taito's answer to the scaling racer craze ignited by Sega's OutRun. You drive a red convertible, which is legally distinct from a Mazda RX-7, through various scenic courses while trying to beat a strict timer. The game's primary gimmick is a nitro boost system that lets you hit absurd speeds at the cost of handling, usually resulting in a spectacular crash into a roadside billboard.

A sequel from the vault

The arrival of the first game is welcome, but the release of Arcade Archives 2 TOP SPEED is the actual headline here. This title is significantly more obscure than its predecessor. While the original saw ports to the Commodore 64, Amiga, and ZX Spectrum, the sequel stayed largely confined to arcades. It runs on upgraded hardware compared to the original, offering smoother scaling and more detailed backgrounds, but it never achieved the ubiquity of its rival, OutRunners.

Naming your racing game Top Speed is a bit like naming a platformer Jump Guy, but the generic title hides a competent technical showcase. Taito's engineering team was pushing heavy sprite scaling capabilities in the late 80s. This was the era of the "Super Scaler," where 2D sprites were zoomed in and out rapidly to create a pseudo-3D effect. It's a visual style that ages better than early polygon graphics, mostly because it looks like a stylistic choice rather than a technical limitation.

The confusion with LucasArts

It is worth clarifying that despite the Japanese title being Full Throttle, this has absolutely nothing to do with the 1995 LucasArts adventure game about bikers. If you buy this expecting Ben Throttle and a heavy metal soundtrack, you are going to be very confused by the lack of polecats and the abundance of checkpoints.

Hamster has included their standard suite of Arcade Archives features in both releases. This includes online leaderboards, which will likely be dominated by the same three players who have been mastering this game for 40 years. You also get save states, button remapping, and display settings that let you replicate the scanlines of a CRT monitor. The difficulty settings are adjustable, which is helpful since arcade operators in the 80s usually set these machines to "devour quarters" mode by default.

Preserving the B-sides

Releases like this highlight why the Arcade Archives project matters. It's easy to find ways to play Pac-Man or Street Fighter II. It is much harder to find accurate, legal ways to play the B-tier racers that filled out the corners of game centers. Taito had a massive output in this era, including Chase H.Q. and S.C.I., and Top Speed sits right in the middle of that lineage.

Both titles are available now on the Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store.