Andrew Elmore

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I thought it might be useful to just have one central site that links out to everything else so that I always have a "home", digitally speaking. I'm using Jack's template.

An old, edited photo of me playing guitar and yelling into a microphone.

Nice to meet you. I'm trapped in your computer.

I'm a Seattle-based game developer specializing in visual design (brand as well as UI/UX) and music composition.

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A Brief Overview of Ridge Racer

  • [Originally written as podcast correspondence for Cane And Rinse. This review has been slightly edited for context and formatted to fit your screen.]
    • A promotional render from R4: Ridge Racer Type 4.
    Having been born the same year as Ridge Racer's arcade debut, one of my earliest memories is of seeing the PlayStation port running at my cousins' house. The vibrant colors, energetic music, and blistering speed certainly captured the attention of my stimulus-craving toddler brain. But there was something else captivating me that I didn't have the words for at the time, of course. Ridge Racer has a phenomenal sense of place that has always been deeply compelling to me. I want to stay at that hotel on the beach and watch the sun sink into the sea. I want to grab dinner at "Italian Tomato" and watch the high powered racing machines fly by the windows and disappear into the tunnel at the end of the road. I want to take a walk along the ridges with a camera and take pictures of that suspension bridge. I want to sit on the side of the road and play Galaga on that giant screen hanging on the building in front of the starting line. I love Seaside Route 765's little intricacies, from the shutokou highway section, to the mysterious cars heading the opposite direction in that first tunnel. To this day a part of me wonders where they're going every time I drive a version of that track. I love the way the track has been remade and re-interpreted over and over through the years. But that's a Ridge Racer hallmark, isn't it? Content repeated, remixed, and re-contextualized with each new release. I see how people that aren't already fans of the series would see that as a severe issue, but for me it only contributes to the very specific identity of the series. To speak of gameplay, there are a few different eras of Ridge Racer. The first few games can be a bit difficult to get used to, as their feel is very unique. The PS1 games in particular are very thoughtfully built around the d-pad. The longer you hold down a direction, the sharper the steering angle becomes. Drifting involves slipping your car's rear end out sideways and letting it get pulled around an invisible rail of sorts, then letting go of the wheel completely and holding the accelerator and watching the car magically get pulled back into place. If you time it incorrectly you stand to lose a lot of speed, but if you let the car pull itself back into place, you'll keep zooming at hilariously unrealistic speeds. I love it so much. Because of that invisible rail, you can spin your car the opposite direction and do impossible 360 flatspins while drifting, it's as exhilarating as it is gleefully stupid. Video games at their finest. I need to address the elephant in the room that is R4: Ridge Racer Type 4. The game is a towering presence of form and function. Arguably the singular magnum opus of the arcade racing genre. R4 is a beautiful expression of class and speed. It takes all the pomp and circumstance of the gratuitous amounts of money inherent to motorsports, and creates a dreamlike exaggeration of that atmosphere that's baked in perpetual sunrises and sunsets, scored by some of the most extravagant acid jazz ever crafted. R4 is an intricate study in art direction and aesthetic development. As a visual designer for video games, I can't help but stand in awe of the menus and UI, the way they so elegantly hold together the game's entire mood. This is the kind of Ridge Racer game where the cars have AKIRA-style red light trails as they fly sideways around hairpin corners up and down mountains, or along the waterfronts of a commercial port, or across the cobbled streets of a cartoonish approximation of a vaguely European city of indeterminable age. Namco made the conscious choice to manually overhaul the way the game controls, and its kinesthetics are staggering. The drifting mechanics are much more intuitive. They flow in and out. They're built entirely around feel instead of mechanical execution. The car is an extension of your hands, especially in the first-person bumper cam view. The game was also developed for the joGcon, a controller with a big thumb wheel in the center that's equipped with powerful force-feedback. It's a strange way to experience the game, as it allows you to feel the resistance of the road, and the g-forces of your car in your hands. It's a fascinating way to remove layers of digital abstraction and put your physical body more directly in conversation with the whole experience. Namco's neGcon also works for R4, as it does for every PS1 and PS2 game in the series, though in my opinion the amount of direct control it gives you makes the game far too easy, and it's already arguably the easiest Ridge Racer game. I was so enamored with R4 that I found myself overrun by inspiration, and spent my 2018 crafting an audible love letter to the game with an album I released in December of that year called Real Racing Roots 2019. It's 17 tracks of music inspired by R4, because I wanted there to be more music out there that sounded like R4's soundtrack. The soundtrack was so good that I found myself incapable of ignoring the urge to make more music in that vein. Thankfully that record found something of an audience, and I was able to (digitally) meet some of the kind folks from Namco's Sound Team and have some conversations where I was able to directly thank them for the massive impact their work had on me as an artist, as a game developer, and as a person. To briefly touch on some other series highlights: I love Rage Racer's grungy aesthetics and dedication to huge waterfalls and delightfully impractical hill climbs. It's the only Ridge Racer game I prefer to play in manual transmission, the way I normally prefer to play almost every racing game. I love Revolution's commitment to being even more colorful and sunset-obsessed than the first game--it feels like a spiritual successor to OutRun to some degree. I love the way all of Ridge Racer V's courses overlay on top of each other to form a whole city, and for being the very first PS2 game to go gold, it's a magnificent display of the system's power. The lack of anti-aliasing that was a complaint in reviews of the time have helped it to age with remarkable grace, it scales very well to modern displays now with razor sharp pixels. I love that the PSP games are a beautiful love letter to the entire series, even if the nitrous boost mechanic kind of threw the rest of the series out of whack for the foreseeable future. I love that Ridge Racer 7 is just a Director's Cut of sorts for Ridge Racer 6, but runs at a gorgeous 1080p 60fps on the PlayStation 3, a rare treat for the hardware. It's also still got a few folks playing online at any given moment, which is fun! Even if they're all much better than me, of course. I would love to see Ridge Racer make a return, I feel like my very heart belongs to these games in a way that's difficult to parse. It's easy to be cynical about the idea of a Ridge Racer 8, but the masterful revival of Ace Combat a few years ago gives me hope that there are people within Namco who really, truly understand what these games are. They are, after all, sister series to some extent. There are plenty of allusions across both franchises insinuating they may take place in the same universe, and here in the real world it certainly feels like they grew up together. They shared a lot of artists and musicians and production staff, it's hard not to feel like the fates and histories of Ridge Racer and Ace Combat are closely entwined. Here's hoping Ridge Racer returns with a mighty entrance some day soon.