Metropolis Street Racer Original Promo Photos Found

You may recall a few months ago we featured the extremely rare prototype issues of the UK's Official Dreamcast Magazine. These mock-ups were produced by Dennis Publishing as part of the pitch process to secure the license from Sega Europe, and as we know now it ended up as the successful bid. These bespoke magazines are part of a jaw-dropping Dreamcast collection curated by fellow collector and blogger Blue Swirl, and recently he managed to find another fascinating and unique part of the Dreamcast's history: the original promotional negatives and slides produced by Bizarre Creations and Sega for Metropolis Street Racer.
These images were used in pretty much all of the promo materials for the game, including the cover of both the PAL and NTSC-U releases. As documented in his own blog post from January 2016, the Vauxhall VX220 used in the images didn't actually have an engine so was towed to the various nighttime cityscape locations used as backdrops:

"Apparently the car used in the photoshoot didn't have an engine so had to be dragged to various shooting spots. In one of the slides you can see some of the rigging at the rear of the car, I'm guessing it was pulled backwards and snapped with a slow shutter to give the illusion of speed."
- Blue Swirl

You can also find further confirmation of these claims on the site of Rosco, the artist who actually worked on this project for Sega Europe. These images may not seem like much, but to know that the original slides and negatives are still in existence and now in the hands of a Dreamcast collector like Blue Swirl is very reassuring. In essence it means that they'll not only be enjoyed as the slice of Dreamcast history that they are; it means they'll be preserved for posterity for years to come.

Source: Blue Swirl (all images used with permission)

3 comments:

RJAY63 said...

Thanks for sharing these Tom. One thing I would like to see again would be the MSR T-Shirt that was given away with the game. I only ever saw it once; a guy in Sega Park, Southampton wore one back in late 2001.

Also wished somebody had saved the MSR Rankings & ghost cars from Dreamarena. Spent ages trying to find an archive of those, but no joy! :(

Tom Charnock said...

Yeah that would be cool. Alas I doubt any of that data still exists anywhere :(

RJAY63 said...

It's a shame as the internet rankings from other racers like Sega Rally 2, Ferrari F355, Daytona USA 2001 and Vanishing Point are preserved in some way. The fact MSR's online functions were held behind Dreamarena probably made it very difficult to archive, although I knew it was possible to access Dreamarena via your PC (if you knew how) and some even resorted to making VHS copies of webpages! I doubt anyone did that to capture MSR's ranking though.