Uniracers (SNES)

In 1987, Pixar produced the short Red’s Dream where a sentient red unicycle in a resale shop fantasizes about performing at the circus. In 1994, a racing game released on SNES called Uniracers that stars sentient unicycles of many colors with a red one being front and center on the game’s box. While the unicycles in Uniracers are not the same model as Red, Pixar still believed that anyone else coming up with the idea of moving a unicycle around like it was alive was likely taken from their work, suing developer DMA Design and Nintendo with a settlement seemingly taking place before it could progress to true court proceedings. No further copies of Uniracers were allowed to be made and it is now likely a game that can never legally see a rerelease, something that stings even more once you learn that Uniracers is actually a fairly enjoyable racing game.

 

Uniracers, also known as Unirally in Europe, doesn’t seem like a game that would need much justification, a bunch of unicycles racing across candy-striped tracks to see who is the fastest likely explanation enough for most. However, the race-loving unicycles also apparently speak of a legend that their universe was created by the Unigod in order to impress a young goddess, this just one of many details shared in the game’s manual. However, the manual is also so filled with irreverent attitude it can be hard to find important information, so much time spent cracking wise it can be hard to pick up the actually vital information and some of its pages are devoted to weird irrelevant ideas like saying the SNES is actually viewing a slice of the Uniracers reality instead of just playing a game cartridge. Some of that silliness and personality will emerge in the ending should you beat all its challenges and the unicycles themselves are animated well to portray emotions when winning or losing without breaking their models, something that must have bugged Pixar to see. While it can make the manual outright hard to comprehend at points, it might have made the game a bit more fun to find spaces for this kind of wackiness as well.

Uniracers boasts an impressive 45 unique tracks, but when you see them, it might become more apparent how it managed to make so many. Racers are presented in a 2D side-scrolling manner, the track itself mostly comprised of long striped tubes. There are some hazards and other elements to break up the track at times like purple goop to slow you down, booster arrows for extra speed, and some grey spinning blocks that send you backwards if you jump on them, but mostly you’ll be on a road that looks a bit like a candy cane with even the background not changing that much in its appearance. However, the colored stripes of the track are very important, especially because of how fast the unicycle races can be. As you zoom along, the ground beneath you is constantly giving you clues. Red and blue warns you the track will soon change direction, red and yellow warns of upcoming hazards, blue and yellow tells you you’re in the home stretch, and even the size of the stripes might give you clues on how soon you’ll approach what’s being warned about. At high speeds the colors can blur a bit but still are readable thankfully, and since there’s no way to see what’s off-screen ahead otherwise and no level map, you learn to understand the track’s cues if you want to be able to succeed, especially since properly following the track isn’t the only consideration.

 

While Uniracers has its fair share of loop-de-loops and jumps where adjusting your inputs or timing your launch just right help you keep your speed better, one big factor in actually winning a race is incorporating tricks into your movement. Normally, you only need to hold forward in the direction you want to go, but to build more speed, you need to find time to throw in jump tricks. These can be as simple as a quick flip or sideways twist or more risky like slinging your wheel to the side and then back, and while wiping out won’t bring you to a screeching halt, you do lose speed if you tumble around. Landing tricks though keeps building up more and more speed, meaning in many tracks you have to use flat straightaways as a chance for little hops and flips if you want to stay competitive and definitely get in as many twirls and complex tricks when you can get enough air time to attempt them. In fact, while the game has 45 tracks, 9 of those are actually stunt focused tracks where you need to hit certain point totals to succeed. You’ll be judged on the trick variety and will even need to whip out the headstand Mega tricks if you want to clear the harder stunt challenges, but even in the simplest of regular races you do need to find times to boost or you’ll be the one left in the dust.

Despite the 36 regular races all being built from the same striped roads, they can have some distinct designs that ask you to play in different ways. There are drag races where it’s a sprint to the end, lap races on bigger courses, and some more conceptual small ones that might have quite a few laps but require consistent performance to stay ahead. A race course inspired by the infinity symbol for example requires you to keep landing on your wheel but also slip in tricks those few moments you can, but for bigger tracks you can have ones like Switcher where taking the high or low road at the right times will lead to either easy boosting or the constant need to avoid goo traps. Some don’t sound that special like one that puts a bunch of spinning grey blocks and inverted turns back to back, but trying to actually keep up with the course shape can be a tense challenge, especially when the game-controlled racer can handle the shape rather cleanly.

 

While there is competitive multiplayer for two players and even an option to make a racing tour where players hand off the controller when it’s not their turn, the game’s solo play involves competing across 9 tours with 5 courses each. Each tour is represented by a cartoon animal alongside a name like the early Crawler courses with their snail with the more difficult unlockable tours Bounder and Runner turning things up to faster creatures like a kangaroo and ostrich. The first eight tours need to be beat at Bronze, Silver, and Gold difficulty to unlock the final challenge though, these races seeing the opposing unicycle growing smarter about when to take chances to do tricks. While you might be able to beat Bronze on your first try, Silver tracks require good course knowledge and Gold especially will require near perfection, although at least there’s no penalty for losing. When attempting a tour, you can try its courses as many times as it takes and in whatever order you please, although you do need to clear all five before heading back to the main menu or you won’t have your progress saved.

 

The final tour of Uniracers is a rough one, mainly because the game goes from a race against an unicycle that just so happens to be hitting the track at the same time to a contest with a foe who can actively sabotage you. The final five tracks must be defeated despite the enemy racer applying temporary effects whenever you touch it, some not too bad like making the background deliberately distracting, others like turning the track invisible or flipping the display sometimes enough to basically make it impossible to win until you’ve memorized the course, but the Hedgehog Speed one is a good gag where the game suddenly gets very slow, a knock against Nintendo’s then-rival Sega and Sonic the Hedgehog. In fact, the game’s quirky manual humor leaks through a bit when trying to select character names as inputting Sega or Sonic earns you the message “Not Cool Enough”. Hedgehog Speed bringing the whole game to a crawl at least means no one is getting an advantage, but Uniracers’s difficulty sometimes can get so high it is daunting and the final challenge being so contingent on the luck you have with which effect hits you can take the wind out of your sails if you want to see all the game has to offer.

THE VERDICT: While the world of Uniracers doesn’t do a good job of setting apart its tracks visually, the substance of each course leads to quick exciting races that will push you to master their layouts if you want to get all of the Gold medals. Identifying when you can throw in your speed-boosting tricks, responding just right to direction shifts, and getting consistent enough to beat the game’s racers or your friends makes Uniracers a racer that works for quick fun but can also produce some demanding skill challenges where finally nailing all the right moves can be incredibly satisfying.

 

And so, I give Uniracers for Super Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GOOD rating. Uniracers’s rock soundtrack suits the inexplicably effective thrills of a unicycle racing game. The tracks can look basic at a glance, but as you start building up speed, learning the stripe system, and realizing you need to squeeze tricks in every moment you can, you start to realize the potential of the game’s racing format and will eventually find it can be pushed quite far without breaking. Uniracers may still have benefited from elements like a course map at least for reference before a race and some elements like the final tour throwing in odd powers that hamper your training process can feel like the game goes a bit too far with its difficulty at times, but there’s still enough fun to be found in Bronze and Silver for most tours and even the trick challenges can become real stumpers when you reach Gold and need to eke out every point you can within the time limit. Naturally, the game could do with explaining itself better as well, rooting through the forest of humor in the manual to try and get vital details stinging when it doesn’t properly teach you things like certain tricks or obfuscates information like the stripe system by joking around about ones that don’t exist. Once you understand Uniracers well enough though, the racing can provide a sense of speed and control as you start feeling out how a course is meant to be played, and the tours letting you retry as much as needed really helps with the focus on mastery when you do hit Gold competitions. It could have been nice if you didn’t have to finish a five course tour all without exiting, although that again likely ties mostly to the increased difficulty of the last competitions where you might want to step away after for a bit after how intense some can get to clear.

 

Uniracers undoubtedly didn’t deserve to be knocked out of production by Pixar just for daring to bring an object to life in the same way countless works of media have done for inanimate objects, but the fact it is an enjoyable racer with some good ideas to make side-scrolling racing feasible just makes its legal situation even harder to swallow. Perhaps one day Nintendo might sort things out with Disney to bring it back, but Uniracers made its strange concept into something energetic and creative in a way you’d think Pixar should be able to appreciate rather than it somehow being viewed as competition to quash.