Rad Racer NES

Rad Racer is Square’s 1987 racing game, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi — who would direct the original Final Fantasy the same year — and programmed by Nasir Gebelli, with music by Nobuo Uematsu. You race against the clock across eight courses, most modeled loosely on real-world locations, weaving through slower traffic while managing a nitro boost meter.

Its most distinctive feature is a 3D mode, activated with an included pair of red-and-blue anaglyph glasses, that adds a pseudo-stereoscopic depth effect to the road — an unusual hardware gimmick for an NES cartridge at the time. Despite being seen by some critics as derivative of Sega’s earlier arcade racer Out Run, it sold nearly two million copies and remains one of the best-remembered straight racers on the console.