Legendary PS2-Era Driving Game ‘Tokyo Xtreme Racer’ Returning in 2025

Drop a gear and start spooling your emotional turbos, fellow nerds. The unique, incredible, and distinctly Japanese driving game Tokyo Xtreme Racer is getting a new sequel for the first time since there were only three Fast and Furious movies. This is probably the most stoked I’ve been for a piece of media since the original Star Wars was briefly re-run in theatres circa 1998.

Scroll down for a quick explainer of the game. For those who don’t need any context, here’s the news: Game publisher Genki (which I thought was long out of business) just dropped a teaser trailer on YouTube and an announcement on Steam that a new Tokyo Xtreme Racer was coming with a release date of simply “2025.” The game has an official page, too.

The clip doesn’t show much, but critically, it’s clear that the game is returning to the iconic Tokyo highway tracks we loved 20 years ago, with updated graphics.

The official description of the title is as follows [sic]:

“Tokyo Xtreme Racer” is a racing game set in a sealed-off future Tokyo, where you compete for the fastest speed in your customized cars on the highways that weave through the city, aiming to reach the top.

Drive real cars on meticulously recreated courses, compete against powerful rivals, slip through other cars, and engage in spirit-wracking battles. This is a series with unparalleled appeal.

A new title, “Tokyo Xtreme Racer” now in development please look forward to the release of more information.

Are you freaking out? Because I’m kind of freaking out! I mean, I might be an edge case on the obsession scale … I built an entire CRT/PS2-based sim rig in my basement to keep playing the old TXR games (and Outrun, Gran Turismo, NFS, and others).

What Is Tokyo Xtreme Racer?

If you haven’t played or heard of TXR (called Shutoko Battle in Japan), the description above doesn’t do it justice, so I’ll do my best. The setup is that you’re an old-school Midnight Club-style street racer; you zoom around semi-accurate recreations of Tokyo’s highways populated with traffic and encounter other racers during free-roam.

You engage them in races by flashing your lights, which begin wherever you’re at and have no finish line. Instead, you win by staying ahead of your competitor for a certain span of time. To determine that, both racers start with a health bar, like in a fighting game, and the bar steadily depletes if you’re in second place. The further ahead the leader gets, the quicker the other car’s health goes down.

The rest of the experience is a little more standard racing-game stuff: Winning races gets you money, money can be used to upgrade parts or the car itself, and rivals get steadily harder as you rack up victories.

That explains the game’s mechanics, which are fun, but what really keeps TXR in the hearts of fans is its charm and quirkiness. Rivals all have names, gangs, and avatars that are cute and funny. There’s a lot of vaguely translated Japanese—your nameless and faceless character gets an auto-generated callsign that changes based on your driving style. They’re always something weird, like “happy berserker,” “hell zeus,” “power chain devil,” like racing horse names. You can find more lore about this on Gamefaqs and, naturally, Reddit.

TXR games also have incredible Eurobeat-style soundtracks, repetitive but distinctive, and a funny mix of real and made-up brands. Early titles of the series don’t have licensed cars, but exact facsimiles named with letter-number combos close to chassis code (for example the third-gen RX-7 is named something like “FD7X.” I think “Catz,” a headlight company from the time, is one of the only real brands in the PS2 version of Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero (the first TXR title on that platform.

I always liked the fact that the cars had working horns, turn signals, and hazard lights—even though none of those had any impact or bearing on gameplay. It’s also a lot of fun to play while you’re multitasking.

But the game’s true quirkiness goes even deeper. While you could trigger most race events by simply rolling up to a rival and flashing your high beams, some competitors would only race you if you’d hit some arbitrary milestone (drive a certain number of miles in a car, have a certain combination of modifications). To my immense frustration, those milestones are never disclosed, you’ve got to figure it out on your own (impossible) or get lucky. Naturally, there are guides to decode this now. But back in the early ’00s my buddies and I racked up an embarrassing amount of hours trying to beat the games.

Different sequels and editions of Tokyo Xtreme Racer were available on different platforms. I had TXR:0 and TXR:3 on PS2. There’s also a TXR: Drift for that console that I picked up recently, featuring (you guessed it) drifting instead of highway dueling. Unfortunately, I can’t make much progress with it because I don’t have the time or attention span to invest in video gaming anymore, but casual sessions have been fun.

If you’d like to see some gameplay action but don’t have an old console to dust off, here’s a nice little video that walks you through it:

If you want to stick around even longer, you can watch this clip to see various version of the game and adjacent titles through the years here:

If you scrolled this far into an article about Tokyo Xtreme Racer in 2024, I’m guessing you’re now as hyped as I am about the idea of the title coming back for 2025. I don’t even need any new features, I would just love to see the same game come back with modern graphics. OK, and maybe a few more licensed cars and customization options.

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