Whatever happened to Road Rash 64?

Road Rash 64 is one of those games people remember by the sound of the room. Four controllers plugged into one Nintendo 64, the screen cut into quarters, and everyone shouting at once. A pack of bikers, one road, and everyone fighting for it.

It came out in 1999, and it never got a sequel.

What Road Rash 64 was

Road Rash started in 1991 on the Sega Mega Drive. The idea was simple and brilliant: a motorbike race where you could punch, kick and club the other riders while doing over a hundred miles an hour. Electronic Arts made the games, and the series ran through the 1990s on consoles and PC.

Road Rash 64 was the odd one out. EA licensed the series to THQ, and THQ had its own studio, Pacific Coast Power & Light, build the Nintendo 64 version. That makes it the only Road Rash that EA didn’t make, and the only one on the N64.

It came out in North America in September 1999 and in Europe that December. It wasn’t the prettiest game on the console: GameSpot pointed out that without the Expansion Pak plugged in, the graphics looked blurry and muddy. But the thing that mattered was in the box: up to four players at once, in split-screen, on one console.

Why people still talk about it

Nobody remembers Road Rash 64 for its draw distance. They remember the races with their mates. The single-player game was fine. The multiplayer was where it came alive, because the best opponent in a fighting race game is the person sitting next to you on the sofa.

There’s a reason it stuck with a generation. Most racing games ask you to be clean and quick. Road Rash asked you to be quick, and also to knock your friend off their bike at the exact moment they thought they’d won.

So what happened?

The short answer is nothing. After Road Rash 64, the series made one more console appearance: Road Rash: Jailbreak on the PlayStation in 2000, made by EA, a different game rather than a follow-up to the N64 one. A mobile version turned up in 2009, and that was it.

Road Rash 64 itself has never been re-released. In November 2026 EA did bring Road Rash back, as Road Rash: 30th Anniversary Edition on Steam, GOG and the EA app. It’s a restored version of the 1996 PC game, though, not the N64 one. If you want Road Rash 64, you still need the cartridge.

What it got wrong

Here’s the thing. Go back and play it now and you spend a lot of time in a green field. Hills. Fence. More hills. It’s still brilliant. It just never really goes anywhere.

When we started making our own motorbike racer, we wrote down one line about it, and it stuck:

More interesting than Road Rash, by not being in a green field all the time.

Why we’re making Time Crash

Time Crash is our game, inspired by Road Rash 64. It’s a motorbike combat racer where a pack of twelve riders fights its way down the road, and the road goes through time.

Every course is one place, and portals move the race through that place’s history. You start on a sunny coast road and come out in Paris in 1889 with the tower brand new, then on a skyway over the sea in 2099, then in Neo Giza in the year 3000. There are seventeen different times so far, across six courses. The ground under your wheels stays the same. The sky, the road and the traffic don’t.

The fighting is still the point. You shove rivals into the traffic, get knocked flying yourself, and somehow get back on the bike. Whoever is last when the leader reaches a portal loses a heart. And if you ride too well, the Time Police turn up, though they won’t follow you through a portal.

It isn’t a sequel, and it isn’t trying to be Road Rash 64. It’s what we wished Road Rash 64 had done next. It’s in development for PC, built for controllers and couch races, and we’re showing it coming together on our YouTube channel.

If you’ve got a Road Rash 64 story, or a year you’d want to race through next, we’d love to hear it.