Top Gear 3000 Super Nintendo SNES gameplay
1Top Gear 3000 Super Nintendo SNES gameplay
Top Gear 3000, later released in Japan as The Planet's Champ: TG3000 (プラネットチャンプ TG3000), is a racing video game developed by Gremlin Interactive and published by Kemco for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It is the third game in the original Top Gear trilogy, and the last in the series to be developed by Gremlin. 3000 heavily resembles the previous Top Gear 2, but is set in the distant future.
Placing this game a thousand years in the future allowed the developers to plausibly include futuristic and improbable technologies, and abandon the relative realism of Top Gear 2.
Car upgrades were more extensive than in Top Gear 2, and "weapons" were featured for the first time in the series. Upgrades included a nuclear fusion engine, a cobalt-titanium armor kit, and a liquid polymer gearbox; weapons included a device to jump over cars, a warp device, and a magnetic attractor to steal kinetic energy from other cars.
Due to the capabilities of the new chip DSP-4 used for this game, it was the first game in the series that was possible to split the track in two different directions with different lengths, sometimes intentionally making one route much faster than the other. Top Gear 3000 was the only game in the history of the Super NES to use this chip.
The introduction states that anonymous benefactors and funders have created a massive galaxy-wide racing campaign at the outset of each millennium, and reward the winner with "riches beyond belief".
The instruction manual gives a more detailed dystopian story. The year is 2962 (and not 3000 as shown in the title of the video game). Five centuries before, World War XVII devastated most of the colonized planets of the Milky Way. The Galactic Conglomerate of Unified Planets, controlling the Bureau of Reasonable Entertainment, has maintained an era of calm and peaceful co-existence through the systematic suppression of any radical thought or action that may "stir up" the teeming masses of citizens populating the twelve star systems under their jurisdiction. Anything remotely resembling "fun" has been analyzed and sterilized.
Outlaw thrill seekers that have too much money and not enough excitement in their lives to keep them occupied turn to The Top Gear 3000 Challenge. Once every millennium, the richest, bravest, most skilled drivers risk it all in this car race through the planets of the Conglomerate.