Developed/Published by: Nintendo
Released: 01/05/1984
Completed: 30/03/2025
Completion: Finished 10 courses–there’s no ending.

Another early NES title that seems to go largely unremarked and unremembered, Mach Rider surprises me because since I began working through all the games I own/have access to in (vague) chronological order, this this is actually the earliest raster-scrolling racer I’ve played. I mean, of course in my history I’ve played Pole Position and the like, but I guess I just assumed I’d have had easy access to something more iconic in the genre before this. You can argue that Super Hang-On counts, because the original version of Hang-On was out before this, but it feels like a bit of a cheat. And indeed, I’m now quite baffled that Pole Position wasn’t included in Namco Museum for Switch. 

And now I’m remembering the Pole Position TV show and its banging theme song. Can you believe that it only ran for 13 episodes and it’s completely seared into my mind? I really wished they’d make toys of the cars when I was a wean. Ah well.

(You’re here for these digressions, right?)

To get on topic, Mach Rider is a strange one because Nintendo passed up releasing F1 Race, a much straighter racing game, in the West, and released this as the first racer on the system. But it’s not, exactly, a racing game. In Mach Rider, you play the titular hero in the year 2112 [“Rush Klaxon!”–Canadiana Ed.] who is racing across a devastated future landscape looking for survivors. Your superbike is equipped with four gears and forward guns, and as you race you have to avoid, shoot or bump off course enemy “quadrunners” while also avoiding ice, oil slicks and other debris in the road.

Most unusually, the game has a strangely split design in its story mode (“Fighting Course”) where for some reason on the first level you are racing with energy counting down, and you can’t game over (unless the energy runs out) but the quicker you can finish the level the more lives you earn for the rest of the game, where you can game over. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it might have something to do with the major secret of Mach Rider.

You see, the first time you play Mach Rider–and probably for a bunch more goes, maybe all the goes you ever have of Mach Rider–you’ll notice something. It’s hard as balls. Actually–it’s unfair as… is there a kind of ball that’s unfair? Lottery balls? It’s as unfair as lottery balls (you can use that one if you like.)

I love a rear-view mirror in a video game (who doesn’t remember the one in Rad Mobile, with the Sonic toy dangling away from it) but here you have to really pay attention as you immediately die if you collide with anything that you aren’t at least matching speed with. What this means is that you really need to be taking the courses at full speed because otherwise cars just shoot up behind you and crash into before you can do anything. But if you are going at full speed, when you go around corners you can’t see and react to, say, rocks or barrels in your way, so you just crash into those before you can do anything. It could be said you’re in between a rock and a hard… car.

This feels… rubbish. You can get into a groove of, say, racing along in third gear, going up to four when someone is on your tail, and then slower on corners, but it can’t protect you from completely unseen hazards particularly well, and you will, probably, put the game down in frustration. Because it’s just sort of annoying.

But I mentioned Mach Rider has a secret: a power-up system that I doubt many know about because it features such a (sigh) Tower of Druaga-esque series of requirements:

• To become invincible to on-course obstacles:
  • Shoot and destroy exactly 3 blue drums at the side of the course and then bump enough enemies off course to their death that you end with over 180 bullets (“blocking” enemies gains bullets.)
• Infinite ammo and auto-fire:
  • Destroy exactly 12 black drums on a level that has them.
• All shots are one-hit-kill: 
  • Destroy exactly 6 bomber balls on a level that has them.

Now, I honestly thought this might be made up because the requirements seemed so stupidly hard. But on the first level, you have the ability to practice without fear of game over, so if you just start by slowly shooting three drums and then practice on the course you can eventually unlock the invincibility and then… Mach Rider becomes quite playable!

Now, you do lose these power ups if you die–but you might not have that many lives to begin with, and the invincibility makes the game close to trivial as you can blast through all the levels in fourth gear, only really having to worry about bomber balls, which can still kill you out of nowhere (the main reason you probably want to go out of your way to get autofire–but it’s much harder to get that consistently or consistently early.) 

It’s like the team at Nintendo–or rather HAL, who put this together–couldn’t really work out a way to make the game not frustrating without making it too easy, so they bodged in a system where the pro-strat for Mach Rider is to get really good at unlocking the first power-up on the forgiving first level and then hang onto it for dear life.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter–the game doesn’t have an ending (you do ten levels, then there are ten more, then it just loops) so the game is ultimately only a score attack. But I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game like this before–one where it’s passable if you know one weird trick and absolutely rubbish if you don’t!

Will I ever play it again? I gave myself a cheeky save state after the first ten levels but I don’t see much reason to go back.

Final Thought: Mach Rider is ostensibly named after a toy Nintendo put out in 1972–a hot rod racing toy that they licensed from Hasbro–but I don’t see any meaningful connection between them. It’s possible Nintendo used the name simply because they had the trademark? 

More likely though I think they used it because the game feels so inspired by the always popular Kamen Rider–the Mach Rider even sort of looks like a Kamen Rider, and included a setting inspired by Mad Max (which also featured biker gangs.) One could even posit that “Mach” and “Max” sound a bit alike.

(But that last one doesn’t really work because Mach Rider is transliterated as “Maha Rider” in Japanese.)