Obscure Games You May Not Have Heard Of - Episode 7, Super Locomotive!

1982 was a magical time for games, what I call the Golden Era of Arcades. Things were BOOMING, and new fantastic games were coming out every day. You had technical marvels that blew people away. Just off the top of my head, 1982 brought us Dig Dug, Donkley Kong Junior, Q*Bert, and Pitfall! And older games like Pac-man and Donkey Kong were of course, still everywhere. It was good time to grind for high scores and insert some quarters. But around this time, late into the year, Sega covertly released a game that most of you have probably never heard of. Or at least you WOULDN’T have, until this year, but we’ll get to it. And this is my favorite arcade game of all time, an absolute masterpiece known as Super Locomotive.

Technologically, Super Locomotive doesn’t look like something from 1982. Every other game had the colorful characters on a black background, usually, or something simple. This game has complex art and backgrounds, popping colors, and it’s showing two screens of info at once!! This doesn’t look like a game from 1982, it looks like a game from the Master System, which came out four years later… And that’s kinda because its the prototype for the Sega System 1, a line of boards that would dominate. Lots of amazing cutting edge games would come out on the Sega System 1, but Super Locomotive was the first, ahead of the line.

Unfortunately, Super Locomotive did not get to enjoy its time ahead of the line. I can’t find the numbers, and the reports vary, but I’ve heard as few as 30 cabinets of this ever existed at once. That’s batty. The game was at LEAST only released in Japan and Europe, so Americans like me sadly never got to experience it.

Now this is all well and good Liz, but what the heck is the game like? It’s a bit more complex than most games from 1982, I’d say. You control the train, the titular super locomotive I guess, and you can see your position at two angles, up down and side to side. On the top screen is the up and down view, where you see a zoomed out view of where everything is. This is how you dodge blockers (that red circle there), and other trains coming along from other tracks. You can also see the layout of the tracks, which you can swap between by pressing left and right.

On the bottom screen you see the verticality of the enemies. You have to fight things like bombers, planes that run by fast and bomb quickly, and a jet that shoots missiles, and you can fight them by pressing the first button, which releases a tuft of smoke. Holding the button makes it raise up first, then as soon as you let go, it moves behind you, destroying almost anything in its path. You can also use this to blow up trains behind you, just let go quickly. There’s a bullet train that cannot be hit… unless you hold the button for exactly one frame, which I assume is a glitch.

You also have button 2, which causes your train to glow and you can immediately destroy anything in your path. But it uses up a lot of your energy! If you run out of fuel, you can still move, but you can no longer use either attack, so you’re a sitting duck! But it’s SUPER satisfying to run out of energy and somehow dodge every enemy to the end anyway. You can find fuel reloads on the ground, as well as the occasional money cart for extra points.

After you get to the end, you’re carted off to the bonus stage, which reminds me a lot of the bonus stage from Jaws on NES. You sit still, cannot move, as planes move above you. Just shoot em for points! If you get a perfect bonus stage, it says “YOU ARE PERFECTED”, which is just delightful.

Oh, and I would be remiss to mention the SOUNDTRACK? It’s really the one song, plus a small loop for the bonus stage. Here it is. You MAY have heard of this song before. It’s called Rydeen, from Yellow Magic Orchestra. It’s a very good port of it, apparently it was licensed too, which is sick. Those Sega nerds know good music when they hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyAQOhNmybc

And… that’s it! It’s a game that’s hectic, and it grows way WAY more hectic as the bombers and planes grow faster and faster, making them so much more difficult to dodge, but it’s so fun. ESPECIALLY for 1982, this game STILL blows me away, how was this made in 1982?! Sadly, no one got to play this game, basically, and it was never re-released…

…is what I WOULD have said a few months ago. But this game actually JUST got a re-release! Apparently, years ago, M2 (the same devs who made the virtual console emulators on the Wii and 3DS) made a port of Super Locomotive to the Genesis… just because they could! They showed it to Sega, who liked it, and when the Genesis Mini was coming around, they went “Hmm, Nintendo had a big exciting release with their SNES mini having the unreleased Star Fox 2… we could put on our unreleased port of Super Locomotive we have sitting around! …….nah, no one cares about that game”, and they put on Darius instead. I love Darius. But FUCK Darius. GIMME SUPER LOCOMOTIVE.

And thus they apparently heard me! I literally have contacts who got into contact with Sega and said “people are interested in Super Locomotive”. That’s real, though I doubt my interest had anything to with this. The Genesis Mini 2 released this year, with a LOT of unreleased Genesis games, including Super Locomotive. And while it does NOT have Rydeen (it has a song called Ryzeen, which is very similar), it’s a great port, and now people can FINALLY play this game.

…And that’s the story of Super Locomotive. I’m glad people can finally experience this perfect arcade classic. It’s one of my holy grails too, if I could have any game, it’d be this. I’ve found it for sale for a few thousand pounds, which uh, is out of my poor ass’s price range, but I’ll get to it someday.

Thanks for reading <3