Racing Musume

~ the last words ~

DMM announced Racing Musume on 19 August 2015 and opened pre-registration the same day. The headline the Japanese press ran with was that this time everything from sports cars to lawn mowers was going to be turned into a girl, which tells you both what the genre had become by 2015 and how hard this particular entry was leaning into it. An open beta ran from 3 September. The finished thing opened on 21 October in the browser and on Android, rebuilt from the beta with the fighting reworked.

What earns it an entry is the thing it refused to do. This was a racing game in which you never raced. Your title in the game was kantoku, the team's director, and the job was bolting parts onto the car girls so they would win without you. Fuel and repairs were your problem too. There was a sponsor panel where you sent one of them off to stand around for a set number of hours and collect money. The race happened and you watched the result.

Music came from Super Sweep and from ZUNTATA, which is Taito's in-house sound team and a name that carries real weight with people who played arcade games in Japan in the eighties. Nothing here was built to travel. It ran on DMM, a Japanese platform with a Japanese account behind it, in a genre whose entire comedy depends on recognizing which car each girl is.

~ the record ~

~ naming a lawn mower ~

The game printed the real model code in brackets after each girl's name, which makes the jokes checkable rather than vague. Two forms added on 9 May 2016 carried the tags LP400-AS and R32. LP400 is the Lamborghini Countach, and the name in front of it is built from the characters for bull and horn, the bull being the badge on the front of every Lamborghini ever made.

R32 is the Nissan Skyline GT-R, and the name in front of that one uses the characters for prince and open sky. The Skyline was not originally a Nissan at all. It came from the Prince Motor Company, which Nissan absorbed in 1966 and whose name survives now mostly as trivia and as a badge collectors argue about. A free-to-play browser game put that into a gacha character's name in 2016 and expected some fraction of its players to catch it.

~ a real kart race ~

On 26 February 2016, to mark the iOS version going out, DMM rented a kart track in Tokyo and had the Japanese games press race each other for it. 4Gamer, which was one of the outlets driving, wrote up the result and noted that it had turned considerably more serious than anyone had planned for. On 14 March the game ran an in-game event named after that race, so the fictional cars competed under the name of a contest their journalists had actually held.

The last event anybody wrote down was called Bakuso de Future, a pun on Back to the Future, which went live on 19 July 2016. Service ended on 27 September, seventy days later. The staff account on Twitter is still there, renamed to say that operations have finished, and it is the last piece of Racing Musume left switched on.

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