Sega Hang-On

Before Hang-On, every arcade game was played with fingers: buttons, joysticks, trackballs, spinners. Hang-On asked: what if the player's whole body was the controller? The deluxe cabinet put the player on a full-size motorcycle replica with a spring-loaded axle that translated body lean into steering angle. Tighter corners required further lean. The twist-grip throttle and brake levers were real motorcycle parts — so real they kept breaking under 12-hour arcade days. Suzuki originally wanted a gyroscope for acceleration tilt, a 50cc engine for authentic sound (rejected due to exhaust), and a fan linked to the throttle for wind. The taikan concept spawned Space Harrier, Out Run, After Burner, Power Drift, and the 360-degree rotating R360 cabinet.

Directed by Yu Suzuki at Sega R&D1 (the nucleus of what became Sega AM2). A colleague brought Suzuki a torsion bar concept and asked him to design a game around it. Suzuki proposed the entire concept on a single densely-packed sheet of paper. Mechanical engineer Masaki Matsuno designed the motorcycle cabinet. Hiroshi Kawaguchi composed four rock tracks including the iconic main theme 'Theme of Love,' using PCM-sampled drums for the first time in a Sega arcade game. The arcade board used two Motorola 68000 CPUs with Sega's Super Scaler sprite-scaling technology.

Hang-On was a phenomenon. Approximately 20,000 legitimate units sold worldwide by early 1991, plus an estimated 20,000-30,000 pirate units. Each deluxe cabinet cost approximately $6,700 USD. The game was the highest-grossing arcade video game of 1985 in the United States and the highest-grossing arcade game of 1986 in both Japan and the US. US machines earned so many coins that coin mechanisms had to be modified for higher-value coins. Sega's US arm could not keep up with demand. The game is credited by multiple sources with helping pull arcades out of the 1983 industry downturn.