Just a quick update on the game featured in the last video for anyone that is interested.

The full title is Drift King Shutokou Battle 2: Tsuchiya Keiichi & Bandou Masaaki and it was released in 1995, as a sequel to Drift King Shutokou Battle '94

It was a Japanese only title for the Super Famicom, and it's perhaps most interesting for its awesome looking Mode 7 graphics, which are better known in Super Mario Kart and F-Zero.





Released late in the console's life, these games were getting the most they could out of the aging hardware. I particularly love the sprite based external camera on the top half of the screen, which can also be switched to be a rear vision camera. There must have been a technical reason why these games did this split screen thing all the time - Super Mario Kart did the same, though they fill the area with a map.





Unlike Mario kart with its cutesy fantasy world, characters and gameplay, DKSB2TK&BM (what an acronym) was going for more realistic depictions of real life cars, locations and even people.

It even has motocross with cones!





Most notably this is probably the first game to feature the ‘Shutoko’ highways of Tokyo - aka the location of all the underground Street Racing.





As such, these games are widely regarded to be the very first in what is now known as the Tokyo Extreme Racer series, that continued through the console generations to the 360 / ps3 era before taking a break, only to be rebooted this year..

Both DKSB2TK&BM and Drift King Shutokou Battle '94 (the first game) notably feature Japanese legend and folk hero ‘Keichi Tsuchiya’ aka ‘The Drift King' - who you would have heard about if you're tangentially interested in Japanese motorsports. He's had a long and storied career, but in short, he was a street racer turned professional race car driver who ‘invented’ / popularised the sport of drifting by doing crazy maneuvers in his AE86.





Outside motorsport he was involved in the anime Initial D as a consultant, which draws its inspirations from his life, and has cameos in the Fast and the future Tokyo Drift. He also used to regularly appear on television shows and DVDs teaching drifting techniques.

In this game he gives you advice on how to drive.

The other guy prominently featured in the title and all over the game is Bandou Masaaki, but there’s less information on him.





Google AI thinks he may be made up for the game, but he's definitely real though because there's pictures of him in the manual. Looking at the bio page in the manual - it sounds like he was a prominent motorsport driver in his own day.

Anyway, back to Zero4Champ…