SEGA's catalog includes well-known consoles like the Genesis, Game Gear, Saturn, and Dreamcast. But have you ever heard of the Video Driver? Chances are you haven't, and for good reason: this console, which ran on VHS tapes, is part of the Japanese company's "dark past".
There was a time when Nintendo and SEGA competed to be the best in the video game industry. Both companies started developing highly innovative systems for the era, though not all of them succeeded and were forgotten over time. Such is the case with Video Driver, SEGA's VHS-powered console.
How did Video Driver work?
Released in 1988, Video Driver (known as Family Driver in Japan) was a SEGA console consisting of a plastic steering wheel, a sensor, and a small plastic car. The sensor connected to a 4:3 television and only worked with screens between 13 and 20 inches. The plastic car was placed on the sensor, which was attached to the TV screen, representing your vehicle in games. Turning the wheel moved the car left or right along a horizontal track. At first glance, you might mistake it for a driving game accessory, but the novelty was that the console used special VHS video tapes to play.
However, when it came to games, there wasn't much. Only two games were released for Video Driver: California Chase and Road Race, which were included on the same VHS and are essentially the same game with different images. There are also reports of two others called Police Pursuit and Road Racer, but they might be versions of the same game under different names for distribution.
As its name suggests, California Chase was a driving game where you had to chase a black car across the American state. It was basically a live-action movie where you drove along a highway through cities and cliffs, avoiding obstacles like curves, precipices, and traffic.
California Chase was a very brief game because the tape lasted about seven minutes. At the end, a screen showed the total score based on your driving performance. How did the game score you? Through the sensor.
Watching the videos, you'll notice white blinking rectangles at the bottom of the screen. These rectangles are picked up by the sensor as obstacles, at which point the player has to move the car out of the way to avoid impact. The idea was to hit as few obstacles as possible and keep the vehicle centered on the road. Unfortunately, no matter how much you wanted to crash into other vehicles or leave the road, the film continued normally because it's always the same. Only the score at the end varies.
So what happened to Video Driver? Did it suffer the same fate as the forgotten Sega AI Computer? Although the console had worldwide reach (manufacturing and distribution in North America was handled by Tyco, with Action GT distributing in the UK and toy store Gig in Italy), it wasn't popular with the general public, selling very few units in stores before being withdrawn from the market shortly after.
What was supposed to be novel and revolutionary became clumsy and tedious. And it's no wonder, considering that apart from the few games that accompanied its launch, the gameplay was always the same. Something that becomes boring to watch, especially because the film is always the same (a bad film, at that).
Without a doubt, Video Driver is part of SEGA's dark past and remains only in the memories of those few players who had the console at the time. To give you an idea, if it was already very difficult to find one back then, today it's almost impossible. In fact, it's considered a highly valued, sought-after, and revalued item by the collector community.
