Uploaded October 2023 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago

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S.T.U.N. Runner is a futuristic driving/racing game with shooting elements originally released in arcades by Atari Games in 1989. The arcade version ran on a modified version of Atari's Hard Drivin hardware and featured fully polygon 3D graphics, which were quite a revelation at the time though not the first arcade game to do so. The Atari Lynx would receive a port developed in-house by Atari Corporation in 1991, which is the port that I cleared for this run.

This game is known for being one of the best arcade ports done on the Atari Lynx back in its heyday, which is saying a lot. Obviously, the Lynx was not capable of delivering an entirely 3D port of this game. Instead, the programmer, D. Scott Williamson, opted to utilize the Lynx's sprite scaling to give off the illusion of 3D. This turned out to be a brilliant move, as this ended up much better than even the Amiga port. The game pulls off the pseudo-3D perfectly and the game manages to give off a great sense of speed, albeit with a little bit of slowdown at times but nothing that hurts the game overall.

The gameplay here is a mix between a racing game and a shoot em' up. It looks like a precursor to F-Zero with the futuristic car hovering about the ground, the boost pads, and the tunnels that are reminiscent of the pipes you'd see in F-Zero X and GX much later. Like in RoadBlasters, you can shoot at enemies by pressing A but unlike that game, you can even shoot ones that are above you by holding down while firing. Also from RoadBlasters is the option to skip to a later stage at the start with a certain amount of bonus points. However, you can easily outscore that 200,000 pt bonus from starting on Stage 11 if you just start from Stage 1. You can earn shockwaves by passing over enough green stars in a particular stage. The shockwaves are your bombs: they clear the screen even taking out the grey armored cars that can't be shot down. These are very helpful, especially near the end, and you can carry up to six of them.

The stages appear to be pretty faithful as well except for one change: the Ultimate Challenge can be finished in this version. In the arcades, it is supposed to be impossible to finish with the amount of time you're given so you're just supposed to go as far as you can. That is not the case here. Also, this version is really easy, especially if you're playing via emulation and are able to see better than you would on an unmodded Lynx. Then again, the arcade version is not known for being brutal either, as even the original did not have much RNG nor did it have the fuel system of something like RoadBlasters that is rigged against the player. Most of this game is a cakewalk until you get to the Ultimate Challenge, which is the only real difficulty spike and is not that easy. However, I was able to stockpile enough shockwaves and hit just enough boost pads early on to get through it. If you don't beat the final stage on one try, it does result in a Game Over with an ending screen without the fireworks, so I'm assuming that's the bad ending.

Despite the easy difficulty, there appears to be some potential for score play in terms of killing enemies, hitting boost pads, finishing as fast as possible, not losing shields from getting hit, and grabbing those green stars. It plays extremely well and holds up today.

One small note: I did use external autofire off of my Qanba Crystal (which I've modded into a mixbox at this point) but there's a pretty low shot limit in this emulator (which is probably true for the real thing) so it ends up not giving me a real advantage because I wasn't even close to the normal 15HZ that my fighstick would usually give me. You can sustain the same rate of fire with your fingers or thumbs tapping manually, which I try to avoid nowadays in order to take care of my hands. In fact, I almost 1CC'd the game on a cheap Anbernic handheld with no autofire, but my right thumb was cramping a bit after losing on the final stage.

00:00 Intro
00:19 Stage 1
00:53 Stage 2
01:37 Stage 3
02:30 Stage 4
03:29 Stage 5
04:29 Stage 6
05:37 Stage 7
06:27 Stage 8
07:12 Stage 9
08:03 Stage 10
09:13 Stage 11
10:05 Stage 12
10:54 Stage 13
11:54 Stage 14
12:46 Stage 15
13:52 Stage 16
14:50 Stage 17
15:53 Stage 18
16:48 Stage 19
17:34 Stage 20
18:28 Stage 21
19:25 Stage 22
20:19 The Ultimate Challenge

#atari #atarilynx #arcadegames #drivinggames #classicgaming #handheldgames #racing #atarigames