Horizon Chase Aims to Capture the Spirit of 16-Bit Racing

Indie mobile developers love to re-capture the glory days of the 16-bit era with their games. There are innumerable sprite-based 2D platformers, strategy games, and RPGs up for grabs.

Interestingly, this nostalgic deluge contains very few entries in one notable genre: Racing games. There have been curiously few attempts to recapture the magic of games like Sega’s Outrun.

That’s set to change with Horizon Chase, a retro-style racing game coming to mobile from Aquiris Game Studio. This nifty-looking racer has all the trademarks of the ’90s best racers: A real sensation of speed, trees that whip by at a dizzying pace, and cities that sprawl across horizons you never quite reach (hence the game’s name, I suppose!).

There’s no point in racing unless you have a blood-pumping soundtrack to accompany you, which is why Aquiris has hired composer Barry Leitch to supply Horizon Chase’s tunes. Leitch’s previous works include Top Gear for the SNES, so he knows his way around racing music like a pit crew knows its way around a Formula 1 racer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-8-W_NEXYA

Horizon Chase will zoom up onto mobile sometime in the near future.

Nadia Oxford

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In the early aughts, Nadia fell into writing with the grace of a brain-dead bison stumbling into a chasm. Over the years, she's written for Nerve, GamePro, 1UP.com, USGamer, Pocket Gamer, Just Labs Magazine, and many other sites and magazines of fine repute. She's currently About.com's Guide to the Nintendo 3DS at ds.about.com.