Secret Shelf: New Star GP is the arcade racer speeding back to the 90s

Name a single console generation that didn’t have its own iconic racing game. We’ll wait.

The racer, much like death and taxes, is an inevitability in gaming, now more than ever. We’ve seen every corner of what the genre can offer at this stage, with the simulation racer arguably having been perfected by Gran Turismo 7, and Forza running rings around its competitors in popularity and practically taking itself on a new vacation with every new colourful instalment of the Horizon series. It’s not just the 2020s living it up on the track, either, with F1 games and the iconic Need for Speed and Burnout franchises owning the track at one time or another, making it easy to reflect on the chance to get behind the wheel throughout gaming history and feel like we’ve done it all. So where do we go next?

Ask New Star Games, and they’ll tell you backwards. Maybe we’ve seen it all, and maybe we’re running out of corners to turn in the racing genre, so why not go back to yesteryear, a time when the possibilities felt endless and untouched? It’s this question that has left us with New Star GP, a racing game that pits the complex strategy of Virtua Racer against the arcade stylings that put fun ahead of all else, and against all odds, still tears into first place.

New Star GP is the racing game you wish you had as a kid

New Star Games aren’t new kids on the block at this point, and in many ways, it’s this that has led them to the firm grasp on the throwback title that they now have, especially in New Star GP. Working predominantly in mobile up until now, New Star Games has prospered in developing throwback sports titles that look as though they could have been the best games on offer on the Game Boy Colour - and now, they’ve got their sights on the arcade era with a throwback racer that seeks to prove that newer doesn’t always mean better.

“What we wanted to do was just do something that we really enjoyed playing,” says New Star Games community manager Mark Baldwin in conversation with GGRecon. “A lot comes down to simulations, and they’re a bit too realistic, and they lose a little bit of the fun element. So with the reemergence of retro these last few years, it’s like ‘perfect, we’ll do a retro arcade racer, but we’ll also put our own kind of unique spin on it, and make it so it’s actually really, really quite deep.’”

Deep it certainly is - the game’s focus on speed and tearing out ahead is its immediate snap, but it hides plenty under the hood, demanding that players routinely check in with engineers to replace tyres in mini-games, keeping an eye on weather and traction all the while. It’s a demanding balance, but against the odds, New Star has managed to keep the game fun while still injecting enough simulator-adjacent features to keep it diegetic with racing’s current draw. It’s got all of the fixings of a game that makes a splash in the modern racing world, but a glimpse at the game doesn’t point to forward motion - rather, it puts things in reverse. New Star GP adopts an old-school aesthetic that looks as though a game’s essence was developed for the arcade and has leapt through time to the current generation, and given how remarkable the consistency of visuals are in the game, Baldwin has one hell of a revelation for us.

“Would it surprise you to know that we’ve only got one artist?” he asks. Yes, actually, it would. “It’s the proper old-school arcade classics, stuff from the SNES, and that kind of stuff. The old school graphical styler and gameplay was something we wanted to put in first, and then we built everything on top of that."

New Star GP has changed a lot to get here

Indie development implies, to a certain degree, newness. After all, as indie creators get more eyes on their work and more offers come their way, it’s fair enough to see hard-working developers take to more immediately established companies - but this doesn’t always have to be the case, and it’s seen more clearly than anywhere else in New Star Games, a team that has been proudly Indie despite critical successes, earning a BAFTA for their 2013 sports title New Star Soccer and powering on through myriad sports titles. Despite their critical success, though, they’re proud to be the small team that they are, and are grateful for the game’s community after it launched in Early Access.

“PC gamers… they want to modify things more, don’t they?” Baldwin says. “They’re more involved in that as opposed to console, and our background is mainly mobile as well, so you’re kind of used to: you put it out, that’s it. But on PC it was a long time since some of those main PC games [that inspired New Star GP], and it was a bit of a reminder that, actually, people want a bit more, and we were quite open to that, to be honest. The whole experience of going through Early Access has been really good for us as a developer.”

It’s this Early Access period that led the game into a more arcadey route, and it feels very much as though that was the New Star GP’s destiny. Its balance of complexity and simplicity on two very different levels during gameplay helps the game to feel not only individual enough to create an exclusive experience, but also tether itself to the stylings of similar games of its aesthetic era. It’s a thin line to toe, but New Star Games has managed it.

Taking to the road

New Star GP is another game in a long string of sports titles for New Star Games, but this one feels different. After spending so long developing for mobile and the odd PC port, this feels like the boldest step that the BAFTA-winning team has taken yet, and at no point during gameplay does it feel undeserved.

The bright flashes of colour and the visceral speed balanced with the hefty considerations of pit-stops help to create a game that never skimps on realism but insists that fun is the focus at all times. And if all goes well, it won’t end here, either.

“I’ve already got ideas for a sequel,” Mark tells us. “And the kind of things we would like to add to the game. If it’s successful enough, we would like to do extra DLC, maybe go back a little bit further in history.”

“We’re a very small team, very low overheads, really,” he adds. “For us, it’s about making sure that we get really nice comments back. If you look at the Xbox demo that we’ve done of the game, nearly all the comments there are really encouraging and really positive. [...] So obviously we would love it to be a big hit, for loads of people to be playing it, but if it’s successful enough that we can keep on making another one, and keep on doing them, that would be really nice.”

There might be a certain “let’s try to keep the lights on” element to the hopes for New Star Games’ success, but there’s little doubt they’ve earned more than that with this bold leap to console development and their spin through Early Access. Racers rarely feel this alive in a sea of similar experiences in the modern age, and though the small team has done its time with its smaller projects, this feels like the start of their brand new horizon. Here’s hoping they’ve equipped the right tyres for the road.

New Star GP launches on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC today.