Zero4 Champ is a series of Japan-only video games that, at first glance, you’d think was about motorsport - what with all the cars on the covers and screenshots of drag racing gameplay....
I'm a sucker for cars and Japanese imports, and had stumbled across the series because the very first game features one of my own cars on the cover. I figured I’d give it a quick curiosity check. I expected a typical early-’90s, sprite-based racing game that might keep me entertained for three minutes, tops.
What I got instead was months of entertainment from a shamelessly horny Japanese slice-of-life simulator / quasi-RPG. In this game, you’re not just drag racing—you’re convincing mechanics that your car is worth tuning, haggling over prices, chasing girlfriends, and even battling rats in hotels to scrape together money for parts. It’s like a proto-Yakuza game, except it's all about JDM car racing.
I knew I had a duty to share this weirdness with the English speaking world, since no one here has ever heard of these games.
So I decided I needed to figure out how to make a Let's Play, and bring more people on this journey of discovery with me…
It resulted in a LP that’s very interactive and informative, with some amazing user contributions about Japanese Culture, Motorsports History, random trivia and Japanese Television Commercials.
For my part, it’s also a great excuse to flex some creative muscle and make stupid videos in Beam.NG to visualise parts of the plot in a way that wasn’t possible in the early 90s.
So far we’ve completed the first three games in the series - and the story just keeps going!
