I must confess, I never played Hang-On or Super Hang-On a great deal back in the day; I always found motorcycles a little less interesting than cars, and the games always struck me as “the Sega racers that weren’t quite as good as OutRun”.
I recently picked up Super Hang-On for Mega Drive, though, and after an evening of playing pretty solidly, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that I’ve been missing out for all these years.
This is an excellent 16-bit racer, particularly in its home console incarnation, and I’m very glad I’ve finally added it to my collection.
For the unfamiliar, Super Hang-On is a “vanishing point”-style racer in which you ride a motorcycle towards the distant horizon. The original arcade game featured a conventional timers-and-checkpoints structure, tasking you with completing a long point-to-point race across a series of stages against the clock, gaining bonus time at each checkpoint.
Like many other Sega racers, the aim was as much to get a high score as it was to successfully finish the race; while driving, you earn points for the distance you cover and the vehicles you overtake, with your score income increasing considerably the faster you race. Conversely, leave the road or race too slowly and you won’t earn points until you get back on track. This scoring system meant that even those who couldn’t make it through all the stages before time expiring could see themselves improving and compete against other players on the leaderboard.
There are four different routes to challenge in Super Hang-On, with each being tougher and having a longer series of stages to complete. The Africa course is the shortest and easiest, consisting of just six stages; then comes Asia with ten stages, America with 14 stages and finally Europe with 18 stages. Each route has its own independent high score table.
The Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On features a solid recreation of the arcade game, albeit without the smoothly scaling sprites of the original hardware. It’s still a decent racer, though, and actually presents some notably distinct mechanics from other similar titles of the time, helping make it stand out and feel worth playing even if you’re intimately familiar with the “vanishing point” subgenre and Super Hang-On’s more well-loved stablemates.
Of particular note is the way that skidding works, whereby it’s possible to take corners at a pretty high speed, but the longer you hold the bike to one side, the more likely it is that the back end will slip out and send you sliding quickly across towards the outside of the bend you’re on. This necessitates actually slowing down for corners — and even using the brake at times rather than simply letting go of the accelerator — which is a notable difference from many other racers of the period, particularly those focusing on cars.
Super Hang-On also features a turbo mechanic, whereby once you get your bike up to its “base” top speed, the speedo will turn red, indicating that you can hold down the turbo button as well as the accelerator to gain even more speed. There’s no limit on how much the turbo can be used aside from the requirement you be going fast enough to trigger it, either, meaning if handled skilfully you can whizz through simpler sections of the course at an absolutely terrifying velocity.
These two mechanics make Super Hang-On feel very much like its own distinct beast — in some respects, a rather more technical-feeling racer than something like OutRun which, for the most part, was about foot-to-the-floor thrills.
But the Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On doesn’t stop there. Not by a long shot. In keeping with some of Sega’s other arcade conversions of the period — notably the slightly later Super Monaco GP — the Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On includes not only a full conversion of the arcade game, but also an all-new “Original” mode with its own mechanics and structure, specifically designed for more longevity in the home.
This is an extraordinarily generous inclusion, considering that Super Hang-On‘s arcade mode is already pretty substantial, but it’s also thoroughly interesting to take a look at. Because in many ways, in Super Hang-On’s Original mode we can see the genesis (no pun intended) of today’s in-depth racing sims such as the Gran Turismo and Forza series, and their numerous imitators.
In Super Hang-On’s Original mode, you take on the role of a rookie biker with a rookie mechanic and a sponsorship deal with a local pharmacist. Your rival is a cute girl named Mia Ferraru, and it’s up to you to defeat her five times in order to ascend to the next tier of competition. Unfortunately, you start out with a bike that handles and performs worse than the Rover Metro I learned to drive in, and thus you’ll need to take some time to gather some winnings, maintain your ride and perhaps shell out for some better parts.
It’s a slow process. While you’re competing against Mia, you race the same course repeatedly, and it’s a simple lap-based course rather than the point-to-point races of the arcade mode. It might initially seem a bit frustrating to race the same course over and over again as you “grind” enough money to improve your bike — but after a couple of sessions and upgrades to your ride, you’ll come to realise that this structure is both intentional and actually quite a good idea.
Racing the same track multiple times allows you to improve your skills without constantly having to learn new things, meaning that even without new parts on your bike, you’ll improve your lap times and thus the likelihood that you will beat Mia. Not only that, but when you do scrape together enough cash to buy an upgrade or two, you can easily and directly compare the different it has made to your bike’s overall performance by looking at your lap times.
You do have to be careful, though. Your bike suffers wear and tear simply through use, meaning you’ll need to replace components and things like tyres and oil every few races. And, as you might expect, crashing into things causes damage; you can ruin your engine or the bike frame altogether with too many collisions, leaving you in a position where you’re completely unable to race. Thankfully, as the manual suggests, you earn a small amount of “prize” money simply for entering a race, so even if your bike is completely knackered, you can start an event, immediately retire and still get paid, then repeat this process until you can afford the parts you need.
You do have to bear in mind, though, that every retirement from a race counts as a loss, and if you’re racing rivals after Mia or working with sponsors beyond the initial pharmacist, scoring five losses will cause you to drop back down to a previous level of competition. There’s no way of actually getting a complete “Game Over” in Super Hang-On’s Original mode, but you can effectively undo all your hard work and end up having to pretty much start over!
Super Hang-On’s Original mode won’t be to everyone’s taste. Your bike is, let’s not beat around the bush here, absolute garbage at the start of the game, making the game feel considerably less responsive and enjoyable to race than the arcade mode. Original mode is all about gradual improvements — to that end, it incorporates a password system so it can be played over multiple sessions — and thus perhaps lacks the immediacy of the arcade mode. But it’s definitely satisfying when you start to get somewhere.
And that’s part of the beauty of the Super Hang-On package for Mega Drive: you can choose how you want to enjoy it. If you prefer the immediacy of the arcade mode, you can just jump right into that, and its four courses provide plenty of longevity by themselves, since there’s no way you’ll beat them right away. If you prefer the gradual process of improving your skills and your bike in Original mode, that’s there too — and if you like a bit of both… well, they’re both there for you to enjoy.
While dated in many respects, Super Hang-On for Mega Drive remains a great example of Sega on top of their game. It’s a great value package designed to combine arcadey immediacy and more in-depth longevity, and it succeeds admirably at what it does. It’s a game I feel like I’m going to come back to very often indeed, and I’m very glad I decided to finally add it to my collection.
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