Petrol Panic! 6 of the best gas stations in Dreamcast games

For a relatively brief period in late 2021, the UK transformed from a miserable, grey, rainswept dystopia into a miserable, grey, rainswept dystopia that had no petrol at the vast majority of its filling stations. Many reasons were put forward for this phenomenon, but the general consensus was that some shitty 'news' websites were hungry for clicks, so they told everyone to start panicking and go and buy some fuel before it ran out...even though there wasn't actually a shortage. 

What ensued was an embarrasing display of idiocy on a national scale, with people fighting over diesel and miles long queues at forecourts. Meanwhile, Hexxus from Fern Gully was rubbing his oily hands at the prospect of another few decades of humans acting like assholes because they couldn't put some 4* in their Vauxhall Cavaliers.

Oddly, Crazy Taxi features no gas stations. I know, I've looked.

Anyhow, It occured to me - while I too was sitting in a 14 mile long queue for petrol, incidentally - that there are numerous games on the Dreamcast which feature equally queue-less petrol/gas stations. And here, for your pleasure is a rundown of six such virtual establishments. It's worth noting that none of the petrol/gas stations here feature a digital queue of Crazy Taxis or Afro Thunder punching people on the forecourt. Which is a crying shame, if you ask me.

San Francisco Rush 2049

It's actually quite a push to think that people will still need petrol stations in 2049 - surely electric vehicles will be the norm then? That said, one of the cars in Rush has an actual rocket engine on the back. Either way, If you travel to the Haight course in San Francisco Rush 2049, you'll stumble upon this double Shell garage that has perhaps the largest forecourt canopy ever constructed. Furthermore, the pumps appear to be emblazoned with acid faces, so maybe they aren't fuel dispensers at all, and are in fact tiny portaloos inhabited by local drug dealers.

Summary: Massively over engineered roof canopy, poor vehicle access, bizarre signage on pumps. Could be a front for more serious gang crime in the wider San Francisco area.

18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker

18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker is a game in which you drive trucks with 18 wheels, while pretendng to be an American. Unless you are an American. And a pro trucker. It's a passable arcade to Dreamcast port that is much less impressive when played on a 14" CRT television in a damp bedroom as opposed to on a huge multi-displayed big rig arcade machine with all of your nonexistent friends cheering you on. But enough of my childhood. On the first stage of the arcade mode (Key West), just after you come off the freeway theres a lovely little Texaco on the right offering various delicious fuels for a bargain price. Also, just beyond said petrol station there's an advertising board with a typo. Which is nice.

Summary: Nice looking, well kept and tidy Texaco branch. Intelligently located next to a busy arterial route. Occasionally an overly aggressive rival trucker buying beers will call you a 'greenhorn' and throw a cup of piss at you.

The Great MSR Missing Persons Poster Hunt - Part 2: We Found Them!

Some time ago - in September 2017 to be precise - we published a story here at the Junkyard about a lesser known mystery involving Metropolis Street Racer, something hitherto only known about by a very small number of people. During that period I was on a bit of an MSR streak, posting multiple articles about the game, so you'd be forgiven if you missed the post in question.

Titled 'The Great MSR Missing Persons Poster Hunt,' it told the story of a chap named Grant, who had been friends with one of the artists, Mark Sharratt, during the development of MSR. For convenience, here's what Grant told us back then:

The back story is that one of my best mates 'back in the day,' was a guy called Mark Sharratt. He was working for Bizarre Creations and was one of the lead artists for Metropolis Street Racer and even got to travel to San Francisco and Tokyo as part of research for the game. He took photos of my friend, brother and myself and then secretly scanned them into the game, uploading them into the game as 'missing persons' posters, of which two were hidden in San Francisco and one in Tokyo (if I remember correctly). 

As it is with most people, friends move and lose contact over time, so unfortunately I cannot get the exact locations of the posters. I think you would be the first person to point out the missing posters if you did include them in your story, as they have been a secret between friends ever since the game came out all those years ago.

Basically, Mark took photos of Grant, his brother and their friend (on a Gameboy Camera by the looks of things), turned them into fake 'Missing' posters and secretly placed the low res scans into the final version of MSR, presumably without permission or alerting anyone to their existence. We only knew the exact location of one of these elusive posters...until now, that is.

I must admit that I had been meaning to scour MSR even more than I already have over the past couple of decades to try to find the other two posters, but we literally had no clue as to where they could be squirrelled away within Metropolis Street Racer's sprawling labyrinthine courses (other than Grant's dim recollection that two were in San Francisco and one was in Tokyo); and I was fully expecting to have to go meticulously around every circuit in those locations, looking at every facade and down every alley in the hope of catching a glimpse of the infamous posters. Alas, it seems that somebody else has done at least some of the work for me, as a second Missing poster has now been found!

Yes, just as Grant alluded to, the second poster has been found in the San Francisco area...on the very same circuit as the first poster! Kudos for this discovery goes to Dan Murray, who contacted us on Twitter to let us know he had made the amazing discovery:

@TheDCJunkyard Hey, remember this post? Well, after 3 years, I found another poster. It's on the same track as the previous one. https://t.co/528M3vi3tj pic.twitter.com/u02diJSy33

— den (@dan_murray19) March 29, 2021

What's amazing to me is that I had already been around the same circuit (in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, on the Gough North track) multiple times while searching for the initial poster found...so how I missed the other one I have no idea! Here's the poster and the locations of posters 1 and 2 on the map, along with a better shot of the first poster:

So yes - massive thanks to Dan Murray for reigniting this search. It gets better though, oh yes. While searching for the second poster that Dan had found on the very same circuit, I inadvertantly stumbled upon the third and final one too! It appears that the Tokyo link was a red herring after all, and Mark Sharratt had hidden all three of the Missing posters in the same place, and there they remained, hidden in plain sight for the best part of two decades! So here, we present to you the third and final Missing poster (and location), locked in time:

Due to the fact that I took these shots using the DCHDMI, we can now even make out the text under the mugshots, which reads 'last seen 31.12.99' which is the British date format (Bizarre Creations were based in Liverpool), and this all marries up with the fact that Mark Sharratt is listed as the artist responsible for the San Francisco environment in the MSR credits. Video of locations below:

What we'd love to see is the people in these photos (who must all be adults by now) recreate these poses for a new set of missing posters...we'll see what we can do! For now though, another Dreamcast mystery is solved, and there's nothing more satisying than that.

An artist's impression of a red herring.

What do you think? Is this one of the best Dreamcast Easter Eggs ever, or are there better ones still yet to be discovered? Let us know in the comments!

Related MSR themed articles:

• The Bizarre Creations MSR Development Diaries
• Some MSR details you may have missed
• The Bugs of MSR
• An MSR Treasure Trove
• MSR original promo photos found

Every Dreamcast game featuring a Toyota Celica...because why not?

I recently bought a Toyota Celica. When I showed a picture of it to my sister, she asked if I was having a mid-life crisis. I enthusiastically replied that I'm having a whole-life crisis, but that the purchase of this automobile had nothing to do with it. I just happened to see it going quite cheap and was looking for a replacement for the old diesel estate that had trustily transported me and all my Dreamcast crap to countless gamings expos over the years. So yeah, I'm now a member of the Celica owner's club. Not an actual club - although I'm sure something like that exists for conscientious drivers who like nothing better than adding gigantic spoilers, furry dice, diamond encrusted wheels and go faster stripes to their cars.

I've blanked out my number plate so ne'erdowells don't do ne'erdowell stuff with it.

After owning the Celica for a couple of weeks, something odd slowly dawned on me as I mindlessly played various entries in the racing genre on Dreamcast. No, it wasn't the realisation that nothing even comes close to Spirit of Speed 1937 in simulating the thrills of driving a real race car. It was actually something far less interesting to pretty much everyone who isn't me: the Toyota Celica features in quite a few Dreamcast racing titles...and I'm not just talking about the famous GT-Four rally car either. 

The Celica GT-Four as seen in Sega Rally 2

No, I'm specifically talking about the seventh generation Toyota Celica coupe, the final model Toyota released before killing off the iconic marque in the mid 2000s. A car that - for me at least - has taken on baader-meinhof properties since I started driving one. Seriously - I see them everywhere now. I suppose the answer as to why the seventh generation Celica appeared in so many Dreamcast games is quite obvious when you really think about it though.

The real deal...

The Celica - and specifically the seventh generation model (pictured) - was Toyota's flagship coupe slap bang in the middle of the era of the Dreamcast (the seventh generation Celica was produced between 1999 and 2006), so why wouldn't it appear in so many Dreamcast games as a mid-level sportster? A mid-level sportster with outstanding fuel economy, light weight and outrageous road handling, I should add...but that's a topic for another website entirely.

...the digital deal

Anyway, join me, dear reader, as we look at all the titles on Dreamcast that feature the seventh generation Toyota Celica, and a few that feature the iconic GT-Four...

Metropolis Street Racer

Bizarre Creations' seminal driving game has a surprising number of real world vehicles you can sample the delights of, and though you start small with some fairly low-specced runabouts, as you progress through the chapters more and more powerful cars are revealed; their well-rendered showroom blankets thrown off to reveal the glistening virtual paint beneath. The Celica featured in Metropolis Street Racer is ranked with a modest 4.0 CPF (Car Performance Rating), meaning it's not quite the top end of the stable, but does the job for the chapters in which it becomes available. 

MSR's vehicle selection screen is pretty cool

It's the favoured 190bhp model used in MSR

It handles well (like most cars in this game to be honest) and has a decent top speed. The model is very faithful too, although it does lack the interior details seen in some other games listed here. Due to MSR's lack of any real tuning or visual detail options, you can't really change much apart from the tint of the windows, the colour of the paint and the registration plate, but that's OK.

This is taken from the 'Exhibition' mode

Doing a bit of sightseeing in London of an evening

Metropolis Street Racer's Celica is a fine representation of the real thing, and as you'd expect it features the standard 6-speed gearbox found in the real vehicle (7-speed if you count reverse), but to be honest you'd kind of expect this level of authenticity in a game where the developers measured the actual height of curbs in London to make sure everything looked as accurate as possible. It would have been nice to be able to add spoilers or change the alloy wheels, but that wasn't really a thing with any of the cars in MSR, so I'm happy to give it a pass on that front.

A Strange Bizarre Creations CD Appears...

We've covered Metropolis Street Racer with alarming regularity in the recent past, looking at some cool locations and trackside details you may have missed; the mystery of the hidden missing persons posters and finally the treasure trove of development images and press releases we were sent by a mysterious benefactor. If you've never heard of MSR, it's a racing game set in three cities around the world and spawned the seminal Xbox series Project Gotham Racing. Also, what are you doing here if you've never heard of MSR? Go and play it!

Anyway, said mysterious benefactor has once again bequeathed The Dreamcast Junkyard with a fairly esoteric item related - we think - in some way to Metropolis Street Racer, and here it is:

As you can see, it's a CD case. The cover shows a bunch of car keys with a Dreamcast logo on the keyring, and the date '30.03.99,' which equates to the 30th March 1999 by UK date standards. Or any standard come to think of it, there only being 12 months and all.

The spine of the case has a sticker with 'Invitation Cover 9.3.99' written in biro (bit of an inconsistency there, Columbo fans):

The CD-R itself has 'Invitation Cover 9/3/99 Bizarre Creations Confidential' written on it in marker:

The back of the case is empty so there's no other detail as to how or why this thing exists, and delving into the contents of the CD itself, there aren't really any other clues to work with:

There are Quark Xpress, PhotoShop and TIFF files, along with a TrueType font file; and the image files are basically just the image from the font cover - a bunch of car keys and the date 30.09.1999 (well, the PSD file does - the TIFF is free of a date). Note: I can't open the Quark Xpress file because the last known person to use Quark Xpress vanished up his own backside 9 years ago and has never been seen since.

Quite what this date means and what the 'invitation' is for, I'm not totally sure but cross referencing this date with the MSR development diary we published a while back could shed some light. See, the penultimate entry in the dev diary is from 29th January 1999, and this passage references an upcoming demonstration of MSR to some 'Sega VIPs':

"Last week was the week of the big telly. We have to demo the game to some Sega VIPs next week, and showing it on a little 15" monitor or a 14" portable TV wasn't really showing it at its full potential. So we went out and got a HUGE 29" TV, which really makes it look cool! Matt (the Lead Coder) has it weighing down his desk and giving him eyestrain at the moment!"

The dates don't line up perfectly, but there in the same ball park so I'm guessing that the artwork on the CD-R, plus the use of the word 'invitation' has something to do with the previewing of MSR to various Sega bigwigs.

So, not the most Earth-shattering of items and nothing as exciting as the confidential press disk (from which the image above is from - see here), but I'm sure you'll agree that it is pretty interesting to see something like this which was never intended for public consumption. Thanks go once again to the nameless benefactor supplying us with all these goodies!

Related articles:

• The Bugs Of MSR
• The MSR Development Diaries
• Some Interesting MSR Details You May Have Missed
• The Great MSR Missing Persons Poster Hunt
• MSR Playable Alpha Discovered

A Metropolis Street Racer Treasure Trove

OK, this is the third Metropolis Street Racer related article I've posted here in the space of a fortnight, but this time I think you'll thank me for it, rather than shake your head in disgust before falling to your knees and screaming at the sky as dark, ominous thunder clouds gather and threaten to unleash a maelstrom of biblical proportions. After the preceding articles about some of the more interesting track side details to be found in Bizarre Creations' epic racer; and the follow up article detailing the hidden 'missing persons' posters dotted around the San Francisco and Tokyo circuits, comes this third instalment in which I will showcase some images and documents I'm pretty confident have never previously been published online.

A few days ago, I was contacted by somebody on Twitter (a person who wishes to remain anonymous) who asked if I was interested in a Dreamcast-related disc. Naturally I was, and a few days later the disc turned up in the post with no letter and no return address. Very strange, I'm sure you'll agree. Being the kind of person who risks infecting his computer with malware first and asking questions later, I threw the disc into my drive and explored the shit out of it with wanton abandon. I was met with things, most wondrous things...but mainly a treasure trove of Metropolis Street Racer screenshots, artwork, logos, shots of the game's wire frame models and development screens, as well as some press releases and a developer interview.

Personally, I have never seen a disc that looks like this before. I've seen all manner of GDs and prototype discs in my time, but never one of these blue and white Sega Europe branded 'confidential material' discs. That said, I do know that several collectors in the community have these, and their contents vary wildly, and some even contain the Dreamcast SDK on them.

There's over 250MB of stuff on the disc, and for something produced in 2000 that's pretty hefty. On closer inspection, it appears to be the type of high quality, pressed CD-R that would be sent to magazines of the era or other media outlets, and the documentation included reinforces this theory. However, for the preservation of your sanity's sake I'll only be reproducing some of the most interesting stuff here, so the main developer interview and some of the previously unseen wire frame/development screens and hi-res computer generated artwork. If you really want to see the press releases etc., then let me know in the comments.

Are you ready? OK - let's kick things off with some nice shots of the 'behind the scenes' stuff...

The Great MSR Missing Persons Poster Hunt

Once again, I start this post with an apology. Mere days ago I wrote about the hidden delights in Bizarre Creations' fantastic Dreamcast-exclusive racing game Metropolis Street Racer; but I thought that this new discovery needed its own post. That's because it's never previously been discussed online, and also because I need the help of the community in solving this particular mystery. So, at the risk of this turning into an MSR overload, let's go.

A while back, I was contacted by a member of the Dreamcast Junkyard Facebook group who claimed to have been photographed (along with his brother and a friend) and had his image hidden inside MSR's game world. I have to admit I was skeptical, until this gentleman - known as Grant - offered photographic evidence and an explanation of why he and his sibling were secreted away inside one of the Dreamcast's greatest games. Grant...over to you.

Hi Tom,

The back story is that one of my best mates 'back in the day,' was a guy called Mark Sharratt. He was working for Bizarre Creations and was one of the lead artists for Metropolis Street Racer and even got to travel to San Francisco and Tokyo as part of research for the game. He took photos of my friend, brother and myself and then secretly scanned them into the game, uploading them into the game as 'missing persons' posters, of which two were hidden in San Francisco and one in Tokyo (if I remember correctly). 

As it is with most people, friends move and lose contact over time, so unfortunately I cannot get the exact locations of the posters. I think you would be the first person to point out the missing posters if you did include them in your story, as they have been a secret between friends ever since the game came out all those years ago.

- Grant

Pretty amazing right? This is the first time these missing persons posters have ever been covered online, representing yet another surprise in the storied history of the Dreamcast. They were literally sneaked into the game without Bizarre Creations knowing about them, which is inconceivable in this day and age. These posters have literally remained a secret for 17 years, and they still kind of are...

Some Metropolis Street Racer Details You May Have Missed

Yes, I'm writing another post about Metropolis Street Racer. I simply refuse to apologise for it, and that's because this is a game I adore. The world of MSR just feels so tangible, so credible and so authentic, and not least because Bizarre Creations spent hundreds of hours accurately modelling the three cities in which the vehicular challenges and races take place. However, there's a little bit more to the sterile, simulated reality of Metropolis Street Racer than first meets the eye.

While London's Horse Guard Parade and San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf may look very close to the real thing as you whizz around in your sports car, if you stop to take a closer look you'll discover some rather interesting - and sometimes suprising - extra details that you may have otherwise missed.

With this in mind, let's buckle up and go for a little joy ride, and investigate some of the finer details you may have overlooked scattered throughout the world of Metropolis Street Racer...

Metropolis Street Racer: The Development Diaries

I do occasionally find myself browsing old websites via the Wayback Machine, and they usually tend to be websites linked in some way to the Dreamcast. Whenever I flick through the manual of an old game and spot a URL, I have an urge to just go and have a look at the contemporary online presence the developer or publisher had. I know I've waffled on about my affection for the Wayback Machine on multiple occasions but there's just something so fascinating about trawling the long forgotten sites of old, sites that date from before the internet was as ubiquitous as it is today. I mean, even fridges and dishwashers can connect to the internet these days, but back in the early 2000s just getting online was an arduous process - even if you had a Dreamcast. 

Anyway, due to my insatiable thirst for the widely forgotten, I found myself looking at the Bizarre Creations website when I noticed a tab for a development diary. Weirdly, it is now only accessible by using the 'console friendly' (read: Dreamcast compatible) version of the site, but upon clicking it I was met with a fascinating insight into the development process of one of my favourite Dreamcast games. Here, buried in time being read by precisely nobody was a glimpse into the past. Anecdotes about nights out on the town with other Dreamcast developers of the era, office politics and even some fascinating tales of pranks played in the MSR engine by the programmers (I'd kill to see the 'MSR with rabbits' that's referred to!). I had never read any of this before, and I thought it was worth preserving and sharing with like minded fans of Metropolis Street Racer. 

Naturally, what makes this even more poignant is that Bizarre Creations, even after the critical and commercial success of later titles such as Project Gotham, no longer exists. So, read on and get ready to be whisked back to 1998 and the inner sanctum of Bizarre Creations' Liverpool offices...

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)