Super Hang On: The Complete History - SGR

welcome to the complete history of hang on or super hang on if you will if you guys want to see more complete history videos like this then please do consider supporting the show via patreon or YouTube members both those things will be down below anyway on with the show when you look back at the most important video games ever for Sega you think of all of the obvious you know you got Sonic you've got Shenmue Streets of Rage Virtua Fighter altered beast there was just so many classic titles that helped not only shape every single one of us in some way but for me the historical Sega nuts I prefer to look at what they did for the company how did these games all define Sega in their own way well to answer this question we need to not look at the obvious but instead we need to stop getting ahead of ourselves and go back to the beginning to a game series that will likely become the underdog of the complete history series in numbers but at the same time its story just needs to be told I am of course talking about hang on [Music] to join me as we look at exactly why and how that happened how this rather standard series of motorbike racing games influenced and shaped such a huge chunk of classic Sega goodness and of course we will be looking at all of the games to which you'll be surprised to hear actually has quite a few entries in the series so buckle up ladies and gentlemen because this video is actually the start of something much much bigger welcome to slopes game room [Music] here we are back again radical dudes and dudettes in 1984 a year that we have visited many times on the complete history show simply because this was the year the champion boxing was released on the sg-1000 if that is all sounding very familiar to you well thank you for your longtime support as you know this is a game I've brought up several times and I'm likely to do so again quite often in the future yep champion boxing was not only a pretty primitive by today's standards but still fun little boxing game but most notably for this video it was the first ever game created by Yu Suzuki a guy we have mentioned multiple times on the complete history show to date as he was responsible for such titles as Shenmue and Space Harrier and word of warning expect to hear plenty more about him in the coming years as he was also responsible for titles such as Virtua cop Virtua Fighter Virtua racing and of course that of a rather legendary title involving a Ferrari oh yes you Suzuki I think it's pretty fair to say that without you Suzuki Sega simply wouldn't be Sega he joined the company only one year prior to his excellent release champion boxing on the sg-1000 and honestly it wasn't exactly a big project created on a system with very limited hardware and quite a small following on a global scale too due to the console only having 42 cartridges and 29 my cards to its name but still you Suzuki gave it his all pushing the small little system to its limits suzuki-san and his team of two manage to get facial expressions on the characters they animated the characters brilliantly even when not interacting with each other the crowd actually moved about themselves without getting in the way or distracting you the player quite simply put it was a rather stellar game for the time sure titles such as punch-out would soon surpass it but as its own game on a system like this it was damn impressive in fact it was so impressive that not only did they literally got an arcade machine and shoehorn in an sg-1000 so that punters could pay to play the title which proved to be very popular but on top of this his boss promoted him on the spot to project lead of his next game something that he was advised when joining wouldn't happen for at least 7 years of our draft quite simply put you Suzuki was that good this project lead role however did involve him moving off this about five minutes down the road from Sega's main office in Japan to a small apartment looking building and this new location was known as Studio one to eight eventually and its history is incredibly secretive in itself in fact the studio's history was so off-the-grid compared to the rest of the world and even the rest of Sega for the most part the Sega's president for the time Hayao Nakayama was once refused entry into the complex as stated very little is known about what went on behind these walls and if there ever was a way that I could go back and secretly spy on what was being worked on in the history of video games this would be the building that I would choose to visit the idea for this tiny team of about 5 to 10 employees was to work on and develop Sega's cutting-edge taken games for those that don't know and honestly I didn't know taking games is actually roughly translated to bodily sensation or experience games this is a term that Sega came up with themselves during the 80s simply put these are your favorite mechanical moving arcade titles from back in the day the big swaying outrun and power drift machines the circle hydraulic afterburner cabinets and Galaxy force cabinets among others all originated right here but before those titles back in 1984 when it first opened the first ever mechanical arcade game was being worked on at the studio and the guy in charge was none other than you Suzuki a colleague had bought the idea of including a torsion bar into an arcade cabinet which in case you didn't know is most commonly used under cars and is that big long pole that goes dead Center from front to back providing feedback when steering from left to right constantly wanting to bring itself back to his neutral position the idea was great but sadly just wasn't achievable for whatever reason in an arcade cabinet however what you tsuki did learn from his experience of playing with this torsion bar was that the springs used to bring back the steering to his natural state could actually be implemented into something else it was pretty obvious that you Suzuki still had to implement this new technology into a racing game of sorts and with this being the height of arcade gaming rivalry and Sega's latest arcade racing title turbo getting smashed out of the park by Namco latest game hole position he knew he had to up the game once again and as a fan of motorcycles especially off-road and cross-country biking such as enduro racing and motocross racing he knew exactly what vehicles to use except market research got involved and explained that a worldwide scale GP racing star was actually a lot more popular than dirt bike racing so mrs. Suzuki that is the route you're gonna be going down for now I'm all standard high speed GP motorsport racing game it is then and when looking for inspiration he came across the 21 year old motorcycling world champion Freddie Spencer Freddie Spencer saw riding style it was certainly nice and my game was like a homage that's the reason I wanted to make it Freddie Spencer he rode a Honda bike and I loved the way I know how long you say that's a cool name however if you're thinking that's how the game's name came about you'd be wrong in fact the name hang on was actually down to a mixup in translation as you tsuki off the research motorcycle culture for the production of this game he read in a magazine about a maneuver known as hang off the magazine printed it as hang on which you know technically makes sense I suppose because you know because you're hanging on your bike but at the same time you're also hanging off as you go around tight corners right which is what this manoeuvre was known for well whatever by the time he found out the correct translation he routed the hang on name so much that he decided to keep it anyway as stated in my previous Space Harrier video which obviously used the same although slightly advanced engine as well as several other classic Sega games the original idea was to create a poor 3d experience my designs were always sweidy from the beginning all the calculations in the system were 3d even from Hannah I calculated the position scale and zoom rates in 3d and converted it backwards to 2d so I was always in the fleeting this was his work around a high-powered modification of the Sega VCO arcade board used in games such as the Fonz beforehand for the time it was stupidly powerful in fact it was the most powerful gaming hardware of on the planet and it gave users uki and his team the ability to pull off this fake 3d effect by giving them the opportunity to scale sprites in real time the specific hardware was only ever used five times three of those times were for hang on titles as you will soon see before it was upgraded and the newer releases would be used to power that Ferrari game that everyone goes on about anyway enough is enough I think it's time that we finally looked at the game that quite literally started it all [Music] hang on was released to the arcades in 1985 the game was a pretty simple affair involving you needing to race for as long as you can dodging other players and anything that may be in your way slightly off track you go on and on until you hit a checkpoint where your timer will boost up with a load of extra time needed to get to the next checkpoint and you continue to do all of this until you run out of time or reach the end and it's as simple as that the idea of an execution is as standard as they come but thankfully behind this rather simplistic idea is a solid and perfect racing experience the controls feel great the feedback is excellent and it doesn't matter what version of the arcade you players you're gonna have a great amount of fun with this title the different arcade versions include a standard upright cabinet with motorcycle handlebars attached under a big screen the same again with an included seat and the more popular but harder to ever find working nowadays motorcycle unit which has a small screen in the visor at the front of the bike which involves you genuinely having to tilt your bike from left to right thank you torsion bar on the lead up to his release it was surprisingly given incredibly mixed reviews as critics in Japan didn't see anybody wanting to show themselves up on a fake motorbike in front of others also criticizing the people in miniskirts wouldn't exactly want to be using it either however thankfully when it was released it gained nothing but positive reviews as cues of people spent ages in line in order to try it out these reviews also shattered out regarding the excellent music found in the game - this soundtrack was composed by hiroshi Kawaguchi who was bought on by Yu Suzuki after hearing that he was in a band yu Suzuki wanted to step away from the bleepy bloppy funtime looping melodies that was the standard in most games for the time and instead wanted to create a full rock face tracks as best he could with the hardware Cal Gucci son did exactly this by creating a small demo and handing it over to be synthesized by the game's sound programmer and guys this was the case for both hang on and super hang on and I've got to say guys that this the super hang on soundtrack is one of the greatest chiptune soundtracks of all time seriously put it right up there with Streets of Rage Sonic 3 & Knuckles in that Ferrari game super hang on is absolute bliss one of the greatest things you will ever listen to in fact when this video is over I highly suggest checking out the SST band cover of outride a crisis [Music] this music this game played is new arcade cabinet if you can find it really was the perfect experience creating the only a great game but a game that influenced so many small parts of Sega's arcade division that would eventually become staples to the entire brand that is Sega another example of the game's importance was when Tom Petty the head of Sega enterprises in America was asked to go to a meeting in Japan where he was expecting to lose his job as Sega enterprises main role in America for the time was to deal in the refurbishment of old arcade cabinets this market had become incredibly saturated by the competition and in Tom's eyes this was the end except it wasn't upon arrival in Japan tom was greeted with the opportunity to try out the new game himself he loved it returned home and very quickly started taking in hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of pre-orders for the new arcade cabinet in fact the several renditions of the arcade game became so popular in the States that Sega amusements America simply couldn't keep up with demand in other words without hang on there is a good chance that all of those memories we cling on to about going to the arcades back in the day will of course still exist but with those memories show-off Sega quite as much without hang on my guess is no honey my crew handled a lighting you can that thing up mad 3d hot wine the game's popularity was pushed even higher when the game got ported into the home alongside the release of Teddy boy blues for the launch of Sega's new system the Sega Mark three eventually this was released on the Master System 2 in the UK and it was also released in America as well however it was only released as a double pack with safari hunt and eventually Astro Warrior 2 it's a pretty standard port it doesn't offer much of anything besides the racing itself but it's solid enough and for the time it continued to build up its popularity as several systems around the world had the game bundled in and the reviews were very positive an MS export also existed as did a PC 88 and they are both pretty horrific they gave off the feeling of constantly sliding about the racetrack and are only worth playing if you're curious the same could also be said for the earlier released hang on to for the original sg-1000 which is actually not a sequel but instead a port in fact it's a port of the MSX and PC 88 ports very much not worth it at all and before we move on to the game that you all want me to talk about there was actually one more sequel of sorts released between the end of 1985 and 1986 called hang on junior I say sequel in the loosest manner possible as this is actually a stripped back version of the wildly popular original arcade game with doctored tracks and an even worse music oh yeah you've also got the impossible to play hang on tiger LCD game 2 but less said about that the better huh anyway let's move on to super hang on this is the one that I'm sure we all remember the most the stunning music the visuals the ability to boost your vehicle on a terrain that now gives off the illusion of going up and down - this was super hang on the most nostalgic motorbike racing game of all time so what does this do better than the original well would you not listening in the grand scheme of things this wasn't much more than a typical upgrade to an already brilliant game there were a few other upgrades - that helped polish off the original and a lot of those advancements could be seen in that Ferrari game as that came directly before Super hang on and if you want to get technical it was actually Suzuki sans enduro racer that influenced them both as that was essentially hang on with dirt bikes which was what he wanted to do since the beginning anyway super hang on had become a staple for the arcade yet again and even though on this surface it may not offer crazy amounts more than the original simply put the company had built up such a good reputation that they could get away with it it's so well it reviewed well it was a massive hit not only in the arcade but on the Mega Drive / Genesis - this version was an incredibly good port sure the music isn't quite as good and the graphics are not quite there but come on for an incredibly early Mega Drive title I'm sure you will all agree that this was pretty much the best they could do thanks to him super Hong Kong May got away with it toto original mode of a machine your grade of labor Oh thousand expected a single game Sega super hung gone Plus on top of that you also have the ability to boost up your fight with upgrades which in all honesty are actually pretty limited fun it does add a small amount of depth that's for sure in a nutshell super hang on is simply a joy to play we all have those games that we play over and over again just as something to do and this game fits in perfectly choosing the music track and it plays you zoom past your opponents it can and will be a hard challenge that you will want to play over and over but on the flip side it's also a meditative and relaxing experience to boot the same cannot be said however for its pause the Amiga the Amstrad Atari ST Commodore 64 IBM PC Mac ZX Spectrum and sharp x68000 all got ports of this game pretty much all of them or 100% pointers to play beside the sharp x68000 competing with the mega drivers the very best port and you got the commodore 64 version being the absolute worst to play so bad in fact then it's reported that they even removed the game from shops back in the day due to overwhelmingly negative feedback a spin-off of sort came in a few years later with the release of GP Ryder in the arcades and even though that game is considered a spinoff of source 2 super hang on it is indeed its own game the title was created using the third super scanner arcade hardware released by Sega meaning it was essentially the perfect and final transition between the classic style that uses you kid come up with several years prior and the more commonly used polygon 3d based games that we are all far more familiar with making the game quite of the jump so much so that it feels quite different but it's ports do not this guy's is essentially the best way to play a hang on type game on an 8-bit system for those that want a less relaxing game and a more beefed up hardcore racing experience this is the game to get it was released on the game gear and mass system and even though I don't see much of a difference between the two I've got to give the edge ever so slightly to the master system it has great music it has loads of racetracks and plenty of bikes to choose from which all play very differently it's a relatively cheap game to pick up and is a good amount of fun fully worth trying and finally one more game to talk about during this period is yet another arcade release simply titled limited edition hang on which was released back in 1991 you think this would be a beefed-up version of super hang on right well it's not is essentially an easy mode of that game if fewer hard turns and fewer vehicles on the road where you now ride on a blue bike room limited edition written down the side rather than a red bike with a Sega logo on it that may sound bad but still it's perfectly fine and lends itself towards that more relaxing experience this was the final hang on that was released in the arcades as the very next and last release was put out on the Sega Saturn [Music] released after game such as Virtua racing and Virtua Fighter this game during development also went under the Virtua hang on banner but for unknown reasons it got Sega Sports branding slapped onto it instead changing its name to hang on GP in America hang on GP 95 in Japan and finally hang on GP 96 for us European folk the game got pretty average reviews upon release but if you ask me this is the better game and it really is the hidden gem of the series it feels like a classic Sega racing game should feel not realistic in the slightest but instead 100% rkd fun and granted I will say that this game does have a little bit of a learning curve and the graphics are not exactly the best it's still a great experience even if it doesn't have much to do with the originals at all hang on GP or whatever you want to call it is its own title if you like Daytona you're like Scud race and everything else that goes along with those style of games then you're gonna enjoy hang on GP the final game in this mini franchise the hang on series in my opinion just never gets the love it deserves any classic Sega fan will normally run to the other classic racing games from the company and there really are plenty of them but again you asked me from a historic point of view it's quite possibly the most important one of them all look hard enough and you'll still find this game is constantly hidden away in the background of certain Shenmue titles as well as the occasional classics collection including incredible sega rages Freedy release which is probably the best way to play it and for you people out there that still don't quite understand why this series of games was so important and more importantly why i've decided to go so in-depth with it well you can talk about that game until you've talked about this game which does mean that yes this is the next complete history see you later [Music] hey there guys thanks for checking out hang on or super hang on the complete history yes outrun the complete history is coming up next and as we are all in the isolation right now I'm going to try and get out as soon as I can for your mother wait for the weekend as soon as it's done I'll get it out for you guys yes very very excited for it I'm already halfway through the script for it so shouldn't take too much longer to make that episode and got some great great tidbits I've not found in any other videos or history pieces so yes a lot to come for this out run complete history but yes if you guys want to support the show meet you know creating more and more complete history videos like this and other videos I do as well then please do consider becoming a youtube member or patreon member both of those links will be down below in the description so yes let me firstly give a massive shout out to all of the patrons burst spatially the these particular patrons who help me out every single month when creating videos like these have an actually big shoutout going to Gary pingas Ryan Burford Andrew Dalton Ben Jackson Jonathan Hayward Kevin King kristeva Turnbull Richie waveforms Jeff me and Al ste elf daughter crafts richard alder dick shadow doll roman army ryan Holtz retro to next gen Tina Robertson done Adam lefty Taylor intrigued gaming Tim Levante sob crying DX Timlin Conrad Constantine pretend Oh 64 creamy elephant lips edgy King link reviews Jeff Ladd Mike Martin retro reversing comm ro Sloan friendly shadow dragon game apologist wobbles and being the Wonder duck's GL Hamburglar dan Bertie Lucas off tell Ronnie method sswb solids captor Nick Pollard brand her heirs Marcus King emo cut Tindall richard Carter aka fantastic do the total float G petty new Deena 81 trans rights and Samuel Nielsen thank you all - every single naming is seen on the screen here plus so many others for helping support the show in helping me do videos like this this is 100% while I being on YouTube and I'm it's because of you people that you let me continue doing what I do so yes like I said outrun the complete history is coming up next live it's actually the next video I might put a midweek one out we will see we will see but the next complete history is definitely outrun and yeah I'm gonna go get indoors and continue editing that so stay safe guys make sure you stay indoors at the moment and yeah everyone please do look after yourself during these trying times this is DJ slope signing out and hopefully I'll see you all next time

Channel: Slope's Game Room

Views: 47,558

Keywords: slopes game room, dj slope, SGR, Review, Opinion, the complete history, daniel ibbertson, slopes gaming room, franchise, sega history, sega, master system, mark 3, arcade, super hang on, hangon, hang-on, limited edition hang-on, mame, mega drive, megadrive, genesis, sega saturn, hang on gp, hang on gp 95, hang on gp 96, classic sega games, outrun, out run, the making of, yu suzuki, hang on jr, hang on 2, sg-1000, gp rider, s.s.t band, SST BAND, outride a crisis, the history of

Id: j7Jvl9x0Xlw

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020