You Can Finally Drive A Dreamcast, Thanks To Sonic

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is gearing up for a second year of action, and while you can expect new courses, modes, and characters to join the game, the real headline act here is the new cars coming to it. As part of the Sega Consoles Pack, players will be able to tear around courses while driving a four-wheeled Sega video game console, with each vehicle expertly blending the design of that classic gaming hardware into a lean-and-mean racing machine.

The new cars are based on the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive for anyone who lived outside the US), the Sega Saturn, and Sega's final home console, the Dreamcast. According to the Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds development team, the idea was to incorporate design elements that would instantly remind players of each console into their respective vehicle frames, like the rounded form of the Dreamcast or the angular silhouettes and subdued tones of the Saturn. The team even went so far as to recreate the Dreamcast’s Visual Memory Unit using original reference data from that era.

"Rather than directly recreating the hardware itself, we translated rounded forms into fenders and nose sections, while angular lines became body panels and hoods, adding the sense of speed expected from a racing machine," the development team explained in a PlayStation Blog post. "While preserving recognizable colors and components from each system, we also designed around the game’s front-and-rear combination mechanic, incorporating the fun of pairing consoles and controllers into the vehicles themselves."

The end result is a design that instantly clues you in on which console informed its design, while still looking like it can burn some rubber on the track. Sega said that the "Genesis Tower" proved to be challenging and required considerable experimentation so that it wouldn't interfere with various visual elements, but it managed to nail the design in the end.

In addition to the Sega Console cars, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will also get a new Duel Mode that is designed to offer a different experience from the standard 12-player races. Each race is a one-on-one showdown, and it will require players to think strategically as they jockey for pole position against their rival.

Released in 2025, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has steadily grown with more content throughout its first year. Alongside Sonic and the rest of the Mobius crew, the game has also seen some interesting crossovers announced, like a team-up with the nihilistic mecha anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you're interested in checking it out, you can grab the game on PC for $22 at Fanatical currently.

Disclosure: GameSpot and Fanatical are both owned by Fandom.