Michael Bay to turn Sega 80s classic into a movie: amazing soundtrack guaranteed

Hollywood’s new love for video game movies has somehow convinced Sydney Sweeney to sign up for an adaptation of Sega arcade classic OutRun.

If film companies had any hesitation about going all in on video game movies, after the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, that will have entirely evaporated after the equally lucrative A Minecraft Movie.

We’ve already had a Tetris movie (which was actually quite good) so we can’t make that joke any more, but the latest Sega adaptation seems almost equally nonsensical: a film based on 1986 arcade hit OutRun.

OutRun is a racing game with no story or characters and hasn’t had a new entry in 17 years… so of course it’s the natural follow-up to Minecraft and Mario. It is apparently happening though, with no less than Michael Bay and Sydney Sweeney set to be involved.

After the success of the Sonic The Hedgehog movies, which is arguably what kickstarted the current golden age (in terms of success, if not quality) of video game movies, Sega has been trying to push through adaptations of many of its older titles, including such unlikely seeming ideas as Streets Of Rage, The House Of The Dead, Space Channel 5, Shinobi, Comix Zone, and Eternal Champions.

OutRun has never been mentioned before, although original creator Yu Suzuki did state, in 2019, that he wanted to make a new game. More recently, Sega renewed the trademark for the series, but other than that it’s essentially a dead franchise.

It also has literally no story elements or characters. You played as a male driver with a blonde female passenger, in a red Ferrari. The woman would berate the driver if you crashed, or when you win and get kissed by a different girl handing out a trophy – which is as close as it ever got to having a narrative.

In the original game you were vaguely implied to be driving from the west coast of the US to the east but there was no explanation of why. Immediate sequel Turbo OutRun introduced the idea of a computer-controlled rival in a silver Porsche 959, but the lone driver was never a character.

Some of the more obscure spin-offs, such as the British-made Out Run Europa, had faint story elements, such as chasing thieves that stole your car, but to all intents and purposes the series is a blank slate for the filmmakers to do whatever they want.

Deadline reports that Michael Bay (Bad Boys, Transformers) will both direct and produce, alongside Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, Anyone But You) – although there’s no indication of what role she’ll play.

The scriptwriter is Jayson Rothwell, who has only a handful of credits for a bunch of poorly reviewed low budget movies that we’ve never heard of. So that’s encouraging.

Rather than storytelling, what the game is actually renowned for is its pioneering 3D graphics, that used 2D sprite-scaling rather than polygons; its famous hydraulic arcade cabinet, and its classic video game soundtrack that has been a huge influence on modern synthwave.

The three tracks Passing Breeze, Splash Wave, and Magical Sound Shower, together with the iconography of the red Ferrari and Sega blue skies, are iconic but it still seems hard to imagine the movie being successful enough to justify such big names being attached to it.

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