It Took 27 Years, But There’s Finally A Port Of Out Run For The Game Boy

If you’ve been considering buying a Nintendo Game Boy, but have been on the fence since 1989 because you really didn’t want to plop down your $89.99 in your Reagan/first Bush-era dollars until you knew that you could play Sega’s iconic driving game Out Run, then I have to say, smart thinking, because you still can’t play Out Run on an original Game Boy. But! Consider this: what if you reconsidered things in 1998, when the Game Boy Color came out? What if that’s when you started waiting to see if you could play Out Run in the palm of your hand? In that case, I have really good news for you, because a version of Out Run has finally, after 27 long, miserable years, been ported to the Game Boy Color.

Yes, you read that right – you can now play what is very much not an official version of Out Run, as Sega does not seem to have had anything to do with this effort, except perhaps maybe kindly looking the other way, which I hope they continue to do. This version was made by independent developer Rocketship Park, and considering how much more limited a system the Game Boy Color is compared to the original 1986 Sega Out Run arcade hardware, it’s a shockingly good port.

Here, you can watch for yourself, or even play in a browser, or, if you have a flashcart for an actual, real-hardware Game Boy Color, you can run it right on the real thing!

That’s pretty impressive! Now, even though the Game Boy Color was released about 12 years after the arcade version of Out Run hit the arcades, you have to remember that one is a console you can hold in one hand, and the other could crush you to hummus if dropped on you, at least the sit-down cabinet version:

Despite the Game Boy Color’s decade or so of advancement since the Out Run arcade hardware, the Game Boy Color was still dramatically less powerful than the arcade machine, as you’d expect for something that had to be cheap, light, and run on batteries. Where the Game Boy Color used a CPU that was a system on a chip and was essentially a combination of two 8-bit CPUs, the Z80 and 8088, the arcade Out Run system used two 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPUs along with dedicated graphics chips, sound chips, and way more memory than Nintendo’s handheld.

Just shrinking the graphics down from the arcade to the handheld’s tiny, nearly-square screen was a massive challenge, as you can see in the music selection screen here:

That’s some very good reworking going on there! The screen is half the width, so a lot of clever editing had to happen. Same goes for the main gameplay screen. Here’s the arcade original:

…and here’s the Game Boy Color version:

Sure, a lot of simplification had to happen, but the overall tone and feeling are still there, and that’s what matters.

I’m very impressed by this effort, and even more than that, I’m always delighted to see such fundamentally absurd projects happen, especially ones like this, that seek to right a wrong from the past. Maybe a trivial wrong, sure, but the point still stands, and now we know Out Run can be played on a Game Boy Color, freeing us from sleepless nights of wonder and worry.

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