I don’t remember exactly when I first encountered Out Run, although I’d guess around ten years old, but I do remember exactly where: the fair that used to pop up in my home town every summer. It had an arcade – a creaky, temporary structure folded together off the back of a truck, with a single route through it surrounded on all sides by games – where I’d stay as long as I could. There was everything from fruit machines and coin pusher games to classics like Pac-Man and whatever the new hotness was, each doing their utmost to coax people to play, their competing music and sound effects given an added bassline by the growl of the generator outside.
In that nest of noise and nerds, Out Run stood out. The music got you first as you walked by; the soundtrack was, is, brilliant. Like so many cartoon theme songs and advertising jingles, it lives on preserved in the minds of millions of people who could probably use the brain space for something more useful but will recall it to their dying days because it’s an absolute banger.
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