11/07/2025
R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 - A Memory From Before I Was Born
I’m not a racing gamer. The only racing game I’ve ever put some real time into is Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed: Honeydew DLC. Like many not yet alive when this game arrived, I came across this game from youtube PS1 jungle playlists. The music in R4 is so achingly all consuming for its presentation it's hard not to see it as a youtube playlist you can play. The gameplay feels like it exists to have you really live in these tracks rather than having a video play on your left monitor while you pretend to be working or sitting in a discord call that should’ve ended about 2 and a half hours ago. An unreal amount of foresight for a game from 1998 to have you play subway surfers while you listen to their great music.
I was born in 1999 so I grew up in the fumes of this culture so expertly depicted here. My father was 18 years old in South East England in 1989 and so from what I was told lived exactly like they do in the film Human Traffic. Playing Ridge Racer Type 4 had returned to the back seat of my dad’s car. Driving in the night swamped in what were nostalgic tracks for him and new sonic adventures for me. Staring out the window at the motorway lights some time in 2004 while the recent memories of the 90s were streamed through the cigarette lighter to car radio device.
I don’t think I ever learned to drift properly in this game as I turned a corner and just without much inertia seemed to clear it without issue. This strange unrealness to the handling of these cars added to the dreamlike sense of R4. Gladly I accepted that this was not like so many racing games that aim to create a perfect simulacrum of being a professional real life racing man. Ridge Racer is much more interested in the dream of owning a car that goes real fast and real hard.
Here it's all about being cool. Even the opening suggests to you that owning a car this fast might make you just cool enough to have a girl want to enter that car and sit next to you, the driver of this car. You and her could be blasting down the motorway listening to some tunes that straight cum. R4 might be the most aspirational game I’ve ever played.
This is the only game with a car in it that's made me want to own a car.