It’s Daytona USA, alright? Sega’s going to re-release Daytona USA.
Can you spare 56 seconds? Cool. Watch that video embedded at right.
Back? Great. If you took only one thing away from that video, it should have been that bunnies are super adorable.
If you took two things however, that second one should have been the realization that Sega is planning to revive one of its classic series, and is doing a really terrible job of being coy about it.
In theory, I think the idea here was that Sega would release a video with a snippet of audio and gamers would wrack their brains trying to figure out which series the gaming giant would be reviving. In practice though, Sega issued a video containing a snippet of sound that should be instantly familiar to anyone who owned a Dreamcast or spent any amount of time in an arcade in the late 1990s.
That “Rolling Staaaaarrrtttt” bit about halfway through the video? That’s a dead giveaway that the game is Daytona USA. It’s kind of a weak tease, but this does make the video’s sweepstakes a whole lot easier. Any of you hoping to enter the ‘stakes, should head over to the firm’s official rules page first, but then yeah, go ahead and enter to win a free copy of whatever upcoming game is being promoted here.
Alright, now that we’ve nailed down which series Sega is bringing back, we can get to the more important questions. For instance, how exactly is Sega planning to revive Daytona USA?
A full-fledged sequel seems unlikely — you don’t announce a triple-A racing game with bunnies, no matter how cute — but if this is an XBLA/PSN re-release of an earlier game, we have to wonder which earlier iteration of Daytona USA would Sega want to offer us? The arcade original? The Dreamcast port? That unreleased 32X version?
Look Sega, I spent my entire childhood worshiping you as a deity, so obviously I’m going to buy this game. It’s Pavlovian at this point. Just stop with all the pretense and tell me what I’m going to be spending my money on!
