Post by lemmyk2008 on Aug 9, 2022 23:19:00 GMT
Hello members of the LMW forums, I have come here to discuss a piece of lost media that I have stumbled upon and have been searching for for the past year: Taito's Laser Grand Prix from 1983. I came across it when I discovered a YouTube video titled "nobody here" from 2009, which was one of the first vaporwave songs ever made. The video is linked below:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw
The video features a nighttime skyline of a city with a rainbow road similar to the one found in the Mario Kart series imposed over it. The track moves, however, there are no cars, stats, or anything else. The trance-inducing visuals are set to a slowed down, reverbed, and looped section of Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red. This video was posted by a channel called "sunsetcorp", and its creator, Daniel Lopatin, would go on to become one of vaporwave's most important artists under the names "Chuck Person" and "Oneohtrix Point Never". What intrigued me about this video was the origin of the footage. I originally thought it had originated from one of the many Mario Kart games, but upon searching all the tracks from Super Mario Kart to the one in Mario Kart Wii , none of them matched the video. I naturally went to the comment section for answers, and the top comment at the time was from a well-known YouTube animator named "Xploshi". They (not entirely sure on their gender) stated that the video of the rainbow road with the city skyline came from an "extremely rare Taito arcade cabinet from 1984 known as Laser Grand Prix where cars and other sprites would be layered on top of video footage of strange abstract roadways like this one". Upon searching up the name of the game, I did indeed find the original footage from which the rainbow road came from in a video titled "TAITO LASER GRANDPRIX / タイトー レーザーグランプリ", linked here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIDGIFFAZpQ
However, the video was just the laserdisc without the overlayed sprites (hence the spiratically placed crash and game over animations, as the disc would jump between parts of the disc depending on what part of the game you were on) and there no other were was no footage (or decent quality screenshots for that matter) of the game running with the pixel art assets. I was able to find an image of the flyer that had screenshots with the sprites, but they were in really bad quality, however it did prove that the cars and other things were supposed to be there. There isn't much info about the game online, only a few entries on arcade databases, an imdB page, and a Japanese Wikipedia article, and an image of the cabinet from an old eBay auction (though it was a converted machine, meaning the PCBs were swapped out for a different game, meaning it's no longer an LGP game, just a different game in the shell of an LGP machine), all being very bare bones with just the most basic information. I did come across a page on a site named Dragon's Lair Project ( a site dedicated to laserdisc arcade games) that was very helpful. It had archives of the laserdisc footage (although it's worse quality than a class Zoom call, which makes me question where the higher quality disc rip from the previously mentioned YouTube video came from. I think there's no point in messaging the video's poster, GMIX6809 about it, as he's been inactive for the past 3 years), pictures of the flyers which contain screenshots of the game with the overlayed sprites, and 2 news articles, one saying the game was pretty good, and the other saying that it was the worst thing since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on NES. A download for the game's ROM was available, so I obtained it hoping to get the game to run. However, upon attempting to run the game in Daphne (a laserdisc emulator) and Mame (an arcade game emulator) while being absolutely sure to do it properly, the game wouldn't start correctly to my dismay. However, putting the game ROM files into a program like YY-CHR or Tile Layer Pro did reveal some sprite data, but due to the fact that the ROM uses .bin files (binary files), the sprites are only rendered in 2 colors, making it very hard to interpret them. After contacting the ROM dumper, a guy named "italiandoh", he confirmed that his dump was not 100% complete and couldn't run on any emulator. I attempted to email Taito about this matter and found a guy on UKVAC named Alpha1 who claimed to have the original laserdisc about the search, but have gotten nothing but radio silence from both parties. I have come here to inquire about it as this site is much less niche than the forums of UKVAC and DLP, and I believe that this mystery could be solved rather quickly if there were just a few more eyes on the search, as so far, this has been a 1 man operation. If anyone wants to help me on this search in any way possible, feel free to reply. Your help would mean everything to me.
-lemmyk2008
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw
The video features a nighttime skyline of a city with a rainbow road similar to the one found in the Mario Kart series imposed over it. The track moves, however, there are no cars, stats, or anything else. The trance-inducing visuals are set to a slowed down, reverbed, and looped section of Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red. This video was posted by a channel called "sunsetcorp", and its creator, Daniel Lopatin, would go on to become one of vaporwave's most important artists under the names "Chuck Person" and "Oneohtrix Point Never". What intrigued me about this video was the origin of the footage. I originally thought it had originated from one of the many Mario Kart games, but upon searching all the tracks from Super Mario Kart to the one in Mario Kart Wii , none of them matched the video. I naturally went to the comment section for answers, and the top comment at the time was from a well-known YouTube animator named "Xploshi". They (not entirely sure on their gender) stated that the video of the rainbow road with the city skyline came from an "extremely rare Taito arcade cabinet from 1984 known as Laser Grand Prix where cars and other sprites would be layered on top of video footage of strange abstract roadways like this one". Upon searching up the name of the game, I did indeed find the original footage from which the rainbow road came from in a video titled "TAITO LASER GRANDPRIX / タイトー レーザーグランプリ", linked here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIDGIFFAZpQ
However, the video was just the laserdisc without the overlayed sprites (hence the spiratically placed crash and game over animations, as the disc would jump between parts of the disc depending on what part of the game you were on) and there no other were was no footage (or decent quality screenshots for that matter) of the game running with the pixel art assets. I was able to find an image of the flyer that had screenshots with the sprites, but they were in really bad quality, however it did prove that the cars and other things were supposed to be there. There isn't much info about the game online, only a few entries on arcade databases, an imdB page, and a Japanese Wikipedia article, and an image of the cabinet from an old eBay auction (though it was a converted machine, meaning the PCBs were swapped out for a different game, meaning it's no longer an LGP game, just a different game in the shell of an LGP machine), all being very bare bones with just the most basic information. I did come across a page on a site named Dragon's Lair Project ( a site dedicated to laserdisc arcade games) that was very helpful. It had archives of the laserdisc footage (although it's worse quality than a class Zoom call, which makes me question where the higher quality disc rip from the previously mentioned YouTube video came from. I think there's no point in messaging the video's poster, GMIX6809 about it, as he's been inactive for the past 3 years), pictures of the flyers which contain screenshots of the game with the overlayed sprites, and 2 news articles, one saying the game was pretty good, and the other saying that it was the worst thing since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on NES. A download for the game's ROM was available, so I obtained it hoping to get the game to run. However, upon attempting to run the game in Daphne (a laserdisc emulator) and Mame (an arcade game emulator) while being absolutely sure to do it properly, the game wouldn't start correctly to my dismay. However, putting the game ROM files into a program like YY-CHR or Tile Layer Pro did reveal some sprite data, but due to the fact that the ROM uses .bin files (binary files), the sprites are only rendered in 2 colors, making it very hard to interpret them. After contacting the ROM dumper, a guy named "italiandoh", he confirmed that his dump was not 100% complete and couldn't run on any emulator. I attempted to email Taito about this matter and found a guy on UKVAC named Alpha1 who claimed to have the original laserdisc about the search, but have gotten nothing but radio silence from both parties. I have come here to inquire about it as this site is much less niche than the forums of UKVAC and DLP, and I believe that this mystery could be solved rather quickly if there were just a few more eyes on the search, as so far, this has been a 1 man operation. If anyone wants to help me on this search in any way possible, feel free to reply. Your help would mean everything to me.
-lemmyk2008
