On a long enough timeline, every game is a PC game

A few weeks ago, I saw someone, somewhere, mention Scud Race, a Sega racing game I had never played. I hadn't played it because it was one of Sega's Model 3 racers and, unlike Daytona 2 or Sega Rally 2, it was never ported from its origins in an arcade machine to a home console. If I wanted to play it today, I'd have to pay £1600 for a second-hand machine, hire a crane to hoist it into my second floor apartment, and make my child give way by moving his bed into the refuse room downstairs.

Except, not really, obviously, because I could always just emulate it.

Ninety minutes later:

Emulation is a delicate subject, or at least it ought to be. I want developers to be fairly compensated for their work, and that means I want people to support game development by paying for games. I also love games consoles and want manufacturers to be able to produce and experiment with hardware at scale. Yet I also believe that games ought to be played, and this is the only practical way to play Scud Race in 2026.

Supermodel is a long in-development open source emulator for Model 3 arcade games. It's a little less user-friendly than some other emulation projects, although it's become easier recently with the addition of a GUI, but it's remarkable that it exists at all given the relative obscurity of Model 3 chips when compared to home consoles.

In fact, every step of getting Scud Race up and running felt like being gently carried by generations of helpful fellow travellers who had forged the path ahead of me.

Where to find the games? Surely this must require delving into the grubbiest corners of the– oh wait they're on the Web Archive. Every or nearly every Model 3 game is on there as part of their preservation mission. Okay.

Supermodel's GUI is relatively new, but even when the emulator itself required a command-line interface to run, another helpful soul had made their own UI for it. Whichever UI you use, it's helpful for setting your resolution, tweaking some graphics settings, deciding whether you want to fake a network connection to try to get some multiplayer going, and selecting your input method. On the latter front, the same person who built the third-party UI has also produced a set of default configuration files for all the common Model 3 games to get around some common issues with getting them to run, and included pre-baked ini files to get PlayStation and Xbox controllers working with the games.

This is how, 90 minutes after I learned it existed, I was playing Scud Race with my Xbox pad on my PC, thirty years after it was first released and 28 years after Sega stopped producing its cabinets.

I'm not about to tell you that this is a hidden gem or that it's secretly the best Sega racing game. It is good though, particularly if you miss Sega's blue skies. Model 3 games still often look visually impressive and Scud Race's sense of speed is, at 60 frames per second and upscaled, enough to make me dream of having £1600 to burn. I'd like it more if it wasn't so damn hard. That difficulty is partly because it's designed for a wheel rather than an analogue stick or arrow keys (and maybe I'll dig out my Driving Force wheel to correct for that), but I suspect it's also just more punishing than your average modern racer.

I just love that this is playable at all. It requires a staggering effort from these fan communities to keep a game like Scud Race alive, and there's no money in it for anyone involved, and little glory. This is fandom at its most pure and positive.

It feels silly or maybe even naïve to point any of this out. I have no grand point to make and I'm sure, if you're reading this, that you're as familiar with emulation as I am.

Yet I worked for over a decade for PC games websites where mentioning emulation was practically forbidden, while emulation has always been one of the things I love about the PC. We are the secret warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones, but every crate is stuffed with another piece of videogame history. That doesn't mean that I'm about to start linking to ROMs, but old games, games that otherwise can't be played in any practical way, games where there's no other method of financially supporting the developers anyway? They're PC games.