Well I stumbled over an interesting story, that naturally ended up in an article to write.
This one’s pretty odd, but the tl;dr version is that Pixar sued DMA Design. They’d created a game on the SNES which featured a unicycle. That’s it. That’s the extent of the copyright infringement Pixar claimed.
Back in 1987 Pixar had made a CG short which featured a unicycle, and so all those years later…they got weirdly litigious.
If you’re curious, I found this a super interesting story to cover!
This game is still one of my snes favorites. Banger soundtrack. Easy to pick up and put down - and was a perfect example of “easy to learn, but hard to master.”
I still recommend it to people who play retro games to this day.
Pixar are such douches. Uniracers was a god damned masterpiece and one of the most fun, if rarely heard of, games on the SNES.
Agreed, I played it on my retro handheld a couple weeks ago and it still holds up alright. They manage to convey a lot of emotion through those little unicycles.
Wow, that’s pretty crazy. I at least had no idea this happened. I did not own the game personally but I know we rented it a few times and it was surprisingly fun.
Unicycles was an awesome racing game.
also if you’re curious, uniracers/unirally is worth playing. at least for a while. the controls are weird, but also weirdly intuitive.
Not just the controls, but the entire game design is utterly unique. It’s a breakneck 2d racing game where you can only see about 1/4 second ahead of you (or less). You navigate jumps and turns by reading the color of the track. It becomes surprisingly intuitive. It’s such a fun game that I wish could be on NSO to see some wider popularity.
Ohhh I love this one. Fun fact: every sprite in this game was made by hand.
I had a friend who owned this game. We used to play it all the time. Good memories.
I had this game and was fortunate enough to play with a friend the tracks for highscores. Meaning we beat the scores and times and swapped games to play. Later on the internet, I was disappointed that people didn’t like this game, because it’s unusual. It’s high speed and people say that they don’t know what is coming and randomly crash. But the track parts coloring schemes shows you what will come next.
It’s a simple game by design. Hold left or right to move, jump and in the air, do stunts. If you land on the wheel after stunts, then you get a speed boost (or bonus points in the stunt tracks). Even the angle on landing has influence how you keep momentum. I highly recommend to play this game with a friend. It has a 2 player mode with split screen, but unfortunately no multiplayer interaction, you don’t even collide.
I had no idea. I remember hiring it from blockbuster and thinking how 3d the graphics were. I don’t think I ever saw it on the shelves in a store though but I did spend more time in blockbuster than the stores.
