Holy Crap, They’re Making A Movie Based On The Video Game OutRun

Translating video games into movies or television has had a pretty checkered history. For a long time, it seemed that any video-game-to-movie was doomed to failure, as movies like Mortal Kombat and Tekken and the recent Borderlands have all been kind of, well, crap. But then there are series like The Last of Us and movies like Ari Aster’s powerful and deeply disturbing psychosexual drama based on Q*Bert that force me to reconsider this idea. Now there’s a new video-game-to-movie happening, and it’s based on one of the true icons of driving games: OutRun.

Yes, OutRun! Sega’s 1986 masterpiece about driving a Ferrari Testarossa convertible (which were never officially built by Ferrari; only a tiny number of conversions actually exist) with a blonde passenger to one of five goals, all while avoiding hitting what looks like a ’72 Beetle, a Porsche 911, an E30 BMW convertible, a ’70s Corvette, and a big rig truck.

That was pretty much the entire plot of the game, as you can see here:

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Is this enough material for director Michael Bay to sink his teeth into, and really find the motivations and goals and emotional demons of the brown-haired driver and his blonde passenger? Is he going to use the course map as the basis for the movie’s plot? He should, because look at it:

Nuanced, that’s what that is! I hope Bay can do it justice. Are there enough explosions for Bay, though? That’s the real question.

Sydney Sweeney is also attached to the project, but not as The Passenger, as one may assume due to nothing more than hair color, but as a producer. No mention of casting has been announced as yet, but if I had to make an educated, rational guess, I’d say that we’re likely to see Nathan Lane as the driver and Grace Jones as the passenger, or perhaps Tilda Swinton in both roles. But who knows, maybe they’ll try something weird?

The overall plot, of course, isn’t known yet, but perhaps we can find some clues in the five possible endings of the game (spoiler alert?):

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There’s a genie involved in one? And in one version, the passenger gets the trophy? I forgot this game had such depth!

OutRun is one of the jewels in the Sega crown and was groundbreaking at the time. Designer/programmer Yu Suzuki was inspired by the 1981 Cannonball Run movie that introduced the world to Captain Chaos:

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I don’t think Captain Chaos has anything to do with OutRun, really, but I’m not going to lose an opportunity to provide you with some chaos of the captain variety.

Suzuki described the game as a driving game instead of a racing game, which I think is a telling distinction, and also explains choices like how you can pick driving music before the game. It’s more about the joy of driving than the thrill of racing, and I think that’s a big reason for the game’s huge success.

The hardware used for the original arcade version of OutRun was revolutionary for the era as well; the machine used two Motorola 68000s for CPUs (that’s the CPU used in the first Macintoshes and the Amiga and Atari ST computers), and the video board had six special processors. While not a true 3D display, OutRun did compute three-dimensional positions and used scaled sprites to render the images.

Will an OutRun movie be any good? Will the movie capture all of the subtle interplay of the various passions that guide the human experience like the video game did? Maybe. What I do know is that the best adaptation of OutRun as a property has already happened, thanks to this project from my friend Garnet Hertz:

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That’s pretty damn cool.

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