Ridge Racer 3D Has 150 Locations, 40 Music Tracks

The latest third-party Iwata Asks interview is with Yozo Sakagami, producer of Ridge Racer 3D at Namco Bandai. While the majority of the session is about Sakagami’s own fascinating past — be sure to read about the chimpanzee that played Pac-Man and how Sakagami applied to Namco instead of Konami because he got their spellings confused — they do talk about Ridge Racer as well.

Sakagami says that the game has over 150 “locations” in it. We’re assuming he’s referring to the number of race tracks in the game (almost certainly including reverse tracks). Sakagami also says that the development team composed 15 new music tracks for the game, so Ridge Racer 3D has 40 music tracks in total.

Amusingly, Iwata even touches upon the game’s visuals, telling Sakagami: “I felt like some people may have been disappointed when they saw the first screenshots you released. I thought they got the wrong idea.”

The game looks better now, apparently, and Iwata goes on to tell him: “Even I wanted to say, "If you could make it look this good, why didn’t you do it sooner?"” It isn’t the most informative interview in terms of the game itself, but an interesting (and highly amusing) read nonetheless.