Neo Racer

Summary
Neo Racer (ネオレーサー) was a game released on December 14th, 1984 for the Nintendo Famicom (任天堂ファミコン) in Japan, later seeing a release on the NES in 1986. The game did fairly well and went on to spawn many sequels, spin-offs, 2 manga series, and a successful anime.

Development
Neo Racer began in the head of Yoshioka Koizumi, a new designer at Ocean Games. The company was finishing up a new game called Bumper Balloons (バンパーバルーン). While the company was polishing Bumper Balloons, they created a new team to develop new ideas for a game. While at work, Yoshioka was looking out of his office window, contemplating different game ideas. He was looking down at the roads, and the cars filling those roads. His eye caught a very popular car in Japan at the time, the Mitsubishi Starion ESI-R (TSi). This car ignited his imagination, with him immediately drawing up the car on a piece of sketch paper. He believed that the car looked futuristic and imagined a futuristic car game. But what type of game would it really be? As Koizumi was a massive fan of the Super GT races, he decided that the game would be a futuristic racing game. He presented his ideas to his team and they loved it.

The game officially began development on June 22nd, 1982. The game originally was being developed for the NEC PC-8801mkII per request of the companies higher-ups. However, the game's console was changed when the company Nintendo (任天堂) caught wind of the development of the game. Nintendo offered to publish the game unless they released the game on their console, the Famicom and that they signed a 3-year contract which meant that Ocean Games (海洋ゲーム) couldn't develop any games for any competing hardware or couldn't create their own hardware if so inclined.

Ocean Games didn't have many problems in the development for the game. The main issue for the developers was restarting development for the Famicom after Nintendo made their publishing offer. The game had already been about 50% completed at the time Nintendo made their offer. This added a whole year to the game's development, as it was originally going to release on October 23rd of 1983.

Launch
The game received good scores and sold around 50k units in its first week on the market. Eventually, those sales numbers grew to be around 500k units sold overall. The game had such an initial good reaction, that the Japanese gaming magazine Hobby's Jump (ホビーズジャンプ ) made a manga about the game, marking the first appearance of the now series staple character Jet. The manga lasted from the year 1984-1988 when the magazine shut down.