Unirally

Uniracers
North American cover art
Developer(s)	DMA Design
Publisher(s)	Nintendo
Platform(s)	Super Nintendo
Release	1994
Genre(s)	Racing
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer

Uniracers (Unirally in PAL territories, and called 1x1 during development) was a video game released for the SNES in 1994 by DMA Design (now Rockstar North).

Undoubtedly one of the more unique racing games for the SNES, the gameplay of Uniracers involved racing disembodied unicycles around a 2D track. Heavy emphasis was placed on performing stunts. Said stunts either caused the unicycle to go faster on race or circuit tracks (the logic is justified in the instructions) or earn points on stunt tracks. Even the instruction manual was unusual, using an extremely non-serious and tongue-in-cheek tone throughout. A particular example could be the entire page dedicated to the instruction manual itself, which then manages to change the topic to how small pizzas "...are about the size of a CD and cost twice as much."

As unicycles are not very well-suited to complex stunts; the stunts that could be performed were relatively simple, mostly only involving jumping in the air and rotating about a given axis in 3D space. The idea was to be able to perform these stunts quickly in tight situations while landing the unicycle on its wheel to avoid wiping out (and losing speed). On tracks with sharp, unpredictable turns, this was not as easy as it sounds.

The game featured nine tours of five tracks each (two race, two circuit, one stunt). Beating each of the first eight tours (Crawler, Shuffler, Walker, Hopper, Jumper, Bounder, Runner, Sprinter) required defeating computer-controlled opponents for each of bronze, silver, and gold ranks. The last circuit, Hunter, featured the Anti-Uni as the computer-controlled opponent. During that tour, touching the Anti-Uni caused all manner of odd effects to take place, from the track becoming invisible, the controls reversing, the background no longer moving in sync with the action, and other strange things.

Split-screen two-player modes were available as well, including a league mode that allowed up to eight players to compete in one-on-one races. The level of statistical tracking was, and still is, very impressive, tracking and comparing scores and times between 16 unique profiles at a time.

The Split-screen system had to be verified by Nintendo as it used a the technique of sprite ripping often found by accident on the Commodore 64. So before DMA Design were permitted to use it in a final game, Nintendo insisted that they hand it over to Nintendo R&D to test this technique on every generation of hardware.

Trivia

• The instructions and the game itself hint at the presence of certain "mega" stunts. In the game, there are two tricks (the Head Bounce and the Tabletop) which count as "mega"s.
• One of the tracks, "Wario Paint", is a reference to the Nintendo character Wario as well as the game Mario Paint.
• If "SEGA" or "SONIC" are entered as a name, they are not accepted and the game tells you the name is "Not cool enough", which is the same response given if a curse word is entered.
• One of the special effects used by the Anti-Uni is called "Hedgehog Speed", and is essentially a slow-motion mode. This is a dig at the relatively slow speeds (compared to Uniracers) achieved by the title character in the Sonic the Hedgehog series.