Trivia / Thrill Drive

• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Big time, due to series' sheer obscurity outside of Japan, with Crazy Streets (known as Thrill Drive 4 in Japan) in particular suffering from the lack of information and its development being suddenly cancelled after the location test in July 2006. The fewer people that bought its arcade machines ended up converting them into a homemade emulator console.
  • The arcade cabinets of Thrill Drive 1 have reportedly disappeared from all countries, including Japan, as of March 2021 with Thrill Drive 2 presumably set to follow. While it is possible to emulate the first game with almost no issues, it is a matter of time before it becomes impossible to play the second game legally.
  • Thankfully, the arcade cabinets of Thrill Drive 3 are still easy to find in the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia, and the recent discovery that the game runs on Konami Python 2, which is based on PlayStation 2, made it possible to run it on a legitimate console.
• No Port For You: In relation to the above, Shigenobu Matsuyama clarified that he didn't have any plans for releasing console ports of the games.
• What Could Have Been: The location test build of the first game allowed players to run over pedestrians and motorcyclists (after knocking them over with a shunt), incurring a massive compensation amount due to human injury. The development team found the feature too disturbing for an already horrifying game and decided to remove it in favor of having the pedestrians always dodge the player's vehicle no matter how fast they were driving.

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