At the turn of the 1980s, Data East wasn't much of a big player in the Japanese video arcade market, having mainly released clones of recent titles like Space Invaders. Their clone Astro Fighter triggered a legal fight with Taito over claims of IP violation due to its similarities. Thankfully such a fate never hung over HWY Chase, despite its obvious resemblance to something like Galaxian from the year before. Rather, this kit-bashed take on both SEGA's Monaco GP and Namco's aforementioned early shooter would itself usher in the DECO Cassette System, the earliest successful inter-changeable arcade board/PCB architecture. On top of that, it's just a fun, thrilling thing to play in small bursts.

How appropriate that this humble but well-executed blend of endless racing & combat should arrive in a similarly minute form factor. Arcade operators no longer had to swap boards in and out of the cabinet housing to switch programs. Now you could let the DECO tape loader read data for a couple minutes and then your game's up and running! This brought many technical difficulties and cut corners with it, as many North American arcade techs and owners lamented, but this groundbreaking, relatively low-cost platform paved the way for SNK's Neo Geo MVS and other successors. Preserving said tape games in MAME has been a struggle, with some notables still left to recover and make playable. So it’s good that this early genre hybrid, predating Spy Hunter and other better-known examples, is as easy to run as I’d hope.

HWY Chase itself must have made for quite the system seller. You've got the usual suspects: chunky but colorful Golden Age pixel designs, formations of enemy vehicles to blast through, and a highway full of hazards both innocuous and truly threatening. Data East's developers had already made some important strides from their earlier non-DECO games that year, with this title having multiple screens in multiple settings to keep the action well-paced and varied. For example, going from a sunlit paved road, held back by well-armed four-wheelers, to a dark, headlight-lit tunnel with autos trying to collide with you never gets old. It's really that most simple but elaborate kind of composite hybrid you'd hope for at after the '70s' pure and repetitive game loops. Hitting high scores, dodging both bullets and blowouts...pair that with solid audio and busy but detailed graphics for one hell of a debut.

It wouldn't be long before Data East pushed beyond these comfortable limits to make innovative software like Flash Boy or even something unusual like Manhattan. Still, I'd give this a go if you're looking for a more unusual but accessible riff on the big boys' static shoot-em-ups from that period. Before works like Scramble and then Xevious radically changed notions of what an STG could be, this was more than enough to keep the cabinet busy and hone your reflexes on. I've found myself revisiting a couple times already.