Rad Racer

Highway Star (released overseas as Rad Racer) is a pseudo-3D racing game developed by Square and launched for Famicom in 1987. Its soundtrack was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, making it a famous early Square title outside the Final Fantasy series. Players pick between a red sports car and a blue sports car. The game uses a rear cockpit perspective, utilizing raster scrolling and sprite scaling techniques to simulate road perspective and curves. Your mission is to finish each track before the timer runs out. There are 8 themed courses across desert highways, coastal mountain roads, cities and snowfields. The tracks feature bends and elevation changes; you must dodge traffic. Hitting guardrails sharply slows your vehicle and wastes time. A standout feature is native support for the Famicom 3D shutter glasses. Press Select to toggle stereoscopic 3D mode, and the North American release came packaged with paper red-cyan 3D glasses. Instead of competing for position against racers, you race against the clock. The maximum speed can reach 255 km/h, and a secret stage select cheat is included. With energetic electronic background music and immersive high-speed thrills, it was widely included on Subor multicarts and remains one of the most iconic retro racing games on the Famicom.

These are the default keys. Click the gamepad icon 🎮 in the player’s bottom toolbar to rebind them. Gamepads are detected automatically. On phones you get on-screen buttons.

1P

2P

The NES was always two-player — 2P uses the numeric keypad, and NumLock does not matter. No numpad? Rebind 2P to other keys in the 🎮 panel.