Goodnight, Rave Racer

During my junior year in college, I lived far away from campus and had to take Ubers between my home and school. It was hard to study in my apartment, so I'd stay at school from noon until midnight. 

For a short time the school had a student arcade that opened late. The old surf shop shut down and they stuffed it with all sorts of old arcade games. I'm talking air hockey, Dance Dance Revolution, and the 1998 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game of all things. But there was one machine that drew me in time and time again: Rave Racer.

Rave Racer is the third entry in Namco's Ridge Racer series. Like many games from 1995, the gameplay is unforgiving. The slightest mistake could take you from first place to dead last if you're not careful.

But that wasn't the only challenge. The machines were so old and worn-down that you also had to deal with physical controls that didn't always work. Not to mention, the damn steering wheels fell off all the time so they had to either bolt it back into place or try to keep it together with duct tape. Whoever was maintaining these things did so out of a fierce sense of love and passion, because the machines always had some kind of MacGyver-style fix.

I brag that I'm not too shabby at racing games. It's because I cut my teeth with one of the hardest ways to play them. I spent hours honing my timing at the corners of the race track. I'd be on the way home and practicing the gear shifting movements with my hands, visualizing in my head what I did wrong and how I could improve in the future. I felt like I got what the machine was trying to tell me, and would adjust my handling to match its abilities. It was therapeutic, in hindsight: We were both broken and tired.

The year before I began my journey on the digital asphalt, my father passed away. Since then time marched on and I entered one of the loneliest periods of my life. I was disconnected from everyone around me, thanks to my own demons and actual miles of distance. I was also failing a class I needed to graduate. My heart was still processing that the man who raised me wouldn't be waiting for me at home anymore. The gravity of life pulled at my shoulders every single day. So I ran away from it all by racing my way to first place.

The amount of concentration and sheer stubbornness you need to beat the other cars in Rave Racer makes it ideal for people who are scared to face their problems. I should know, I was one of them. My goal was to beat that pesky blue car who always placed first. My weapon of choice? The yellow car because it looked cool and had great acceleration with a do-able trade-off in handling. My conditions? Manual transmission in the City map because I needed a challenge.

It took many frustrating nights to finally overtake that blue bastard. During our last bout we were neck and neck. If I wasn't careful he'd ram me from either side of my rear to knock me out and win. I never felt anything so harrowing before in my life. My eyes flickered back and forth between the road in front of me and my rear view mirror. My hands did all they could to stay still. I maneuvered my car's body side to side like a wobbly mess so the blue car couldn't use a last-second boost to beat me. I couldn't breathe except for the bare minimum needed to function. This was it. We'd settle things once and for all.

I don't remember the exact moment we crossed the finish line. He swung in at the last second and went neck for neck with me. I was prepared for yet another loss. Then I looked at the screen and saw that glorious number one. I did it. I won. Leaving the arcade, I felt that post-win daze of not believing that I pulled it off. Sure, I won by only a single pixel. But it was still a victory.

Life went on. I got busy with school and graduated. That arcade shut down at some point. I got into R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 after failing to emulate Rave Racer. I tried to reclaim my glory days with Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 5DX+ at the local Round 1. But paying to win with better parts just didn't feel the same. Playing with a controller in front of a T.V. at home didn't feel the same either. When I left the arcade that night, the only things I took with me were my problems and some memories I think about once in a blue moon. 

Sometimes, I think about having one last race on the tracks. But chasing after the ghosts of my past also meant clinging to my father’s memory. From the nights I spent awake and pondering the future, to the treks back home where I told myself everything would be alright. How can I touch the present moment without letting go of my attachments? To refuse my present is to insult the past that made me. 

I wrote this piece to help these ghosts sleep in peace. If I didn't then they'd continue to follow me wherever I go, crying echoes of moments that are gone for good. So I’m stopping for a moment to send off an old friend before hitting the road again. Goodnight, Rave Racer. You can rest now. 

Justin's many things: Memer, designer, developer, game maker, Tarot reader, writer, and more. Now he's a keyboard monkey for Final Arc (don't tell them he said that). Website: heyjustinkim.com