A reason to hate Pixar: Uniracers on the SNES is a masterpiece

One summer during high school I had a hard time concentrating on anything that wasn’t related to skateboarding. When I wasn’t on a board, I was thinking about it. I would see ramps and ledges in everything I looked at, imagining what could be if only a skateboard could grace those surfaces. The only other thing I did that summer was play Uniracers on the Super Nintendo.

While Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was the first great skateboarding game, Uniracers was the first and only great game that brought a skateboarding mentality to a game about self-aware, racing unicycles. It’s much more awesome than it sounds.

Uniracers was entirely about stunts. Though the racing segments made up a large part of the experience; these too required plenty of flips and twists. Because tricks made you go fast. And the more tricks you managed to pull off, the faster you would go.

Considering that they had just one wheel and no rider, the unicycles in Uniracers could pull off a surprisingly large array of moves. As you sped across the 2D plane, you could flip forward and backward, twist left and right, and turn upside down. More importantly, these tricks could be mixed and matched into all sorts of combinations, and the more air you got, the larger and more complex your trick combinations could be. You were even rewarded with more points for pulling off a more varied array of stunts.

Pre-Tony Hawk

In addition to the focus on stunts and speed, a lot of what made Uniracers work as an action sports-type game was the level design. It was insane. Though the first race was literally just a straight line, after that the intensity got ratcheted up quite a few notches. The game took place in some sort of parallel universe where not only are unicycles living beings who desire nothing more than to race, but the 2D race tracks existed in a vacuum. There’s no pretense to reality in the track design, which is part of what makes the game great. You speed across oh-so-’90s colored roads that twist, turn, bend, and just seem to hang there in mid-air, suspended on nothing.

It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it didn’t have to. It was full of white-knuckle action that was wholly unique at the time. Not because of the bizarre theme, but because action sports games hadn’t yet become ubiquitous. In 1994, when the game came out, the genre didn’t even really exist. This made Uniracers a revelation, because it wasn’t just a game about cute little one-wheeled bikes that loved to race, it was a game about pulling off the craziest tricks you could across a number of strange and unique stages.

Uniracers

Uniracers was also full of personality. While it featured the mid-’90s attitude that makes most of us look back and groan, it did so without taking itself seriously. At all. Uniracers knew it was ridiculous and it embraced it, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the game’s goofy and hilarious instruction manual, which featured an overly detailed story outline involving bored deities and a notes section that was already filled out because, really, who uses the notes section?

A reason to hate Pixar

Unfortunately, part of that charm led to the downfall of the game. Uniracers featured impressive-looking CG unicycles that animated smoothly and convincingly. They would lean forward intensely when in the lead and look at the user with boredom when nothing exciting was happening. But they also looked a little too much like the unicycle from the animated short film Red’s Dream. At least, that’s what Pixar thought.

Developer DMA Design ultimately lost a lawsuit against Pixar, and Nintendo ceased production on game cartridges. Uniracers sold through its initial run of 300,000 units and that was it. Because of the lawsuit, it never reached the mass audience it deserved.

This means that we won’t be seeing the game rereleased in any fashion. Nintendo hasn’t put the game out on the Virtual Console and DMA is now a part of Rockstar Games. It’s a shame; Uniracers is the type of game that classic download services were really made for. It’s an incredible game that wasn’t able to reach a large audience, and isn’t easily accessible today.

The SNES was a console full of innovative games that are still held up today as timeless pieces of work. Given the chance, Uniracers would’ve been part of that group.

Pre-Tony Hawk

A reason to hate Pixar

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