The eternal moonlight, the rustling palms, the neon lit structures beaming the landscape with a subtle purple technicolor vapour, and the two synth tracks on loop conveying the elemental, raw emotion in a visceral fashion, embodying the little zing in what is otherwise a dystopia. Every one of these little fragments invigorated the abstract purple fire called Outrun. When you look at the inspiration for Outrun, like the stuff Kavinsky was into, it's an entire feeling. An abstraction devoid of description, an emotion in your heart and mind yet not a single word on your tongue.

When Outrun was created, the game designers were not going for another racing game. They went for a driving game that is wrapped around the music. You pick the station, you go for a drive and if you're good enough, by the time the song is over, so is the game and you win.

The game itself was very representative of the 80's fantasy - fast cars, a fast lifestyle, beaches, palm trees, whatever. It wasn't a hard game, it was a fun drive, an experience. It was as much about the three songs you could choose as it was the feel of the drive or the look of the game.

It managed to encapsulate a lot of different things at the time from Miami Vice to Blade Runner or anything else.

When you look at the sort of things that were influencing the game's creators (and sound designers), you see that it's firmly rooted in funk, jazz and progressive music, expressed in the synthesised music of the time. These people were taking leisurely drives, listening to T-Square, Casiopea and Shakatak.

Outrun - its just something you know when you see it.

A balance between living in the now enjoying the moment and something dark and dystopian.

Immaculate Drag is not the high powered, adrenaline-fuelled exhilaration of Outrun. Instead, its a limbo. Something that you get lost into, to disappear. Not to live, but to ponder. Its a place that seems almost entangled in itself. No wind and no breeze. Just warm days and cool nights, with every street seemingly leading back to the seaside resort from which you began, and the swivelling luminosity of the lighthouse in the distance, at the end of the rhetorical, urban tunnel.

What the lighthouse itself is supposed to be, is up to you. Perhaps its just another beacon, spinning around like a mad marble. The ghosts of your past shall never leave you, the city was merely your escape from what you left behind and were too afraid to confront, for there is nothing but misery that awaits. Or maybe its just another junction, like one of those streets leading all the way back to the seaside resort until the cycle repeats itself when you wake up. Or perhaps, its something else entirely. Not quite the end of the line, rather the illumination of a new chapter in your life. Maybe the ghosts will leave your chest as you take in one final immaculate drag of nicotine into your lungs and blow it into the dawn, never to take another whiff ever again.

This game, it spoke to me like few others have before. A limbo at Ocean Drive in the lost cultural iteration of the 80's, and sweet sweet synthwave vibrating into my ear drums. A humble price for less than an hour long escapist fantasy worth a run at least once.

Job well done, Discrete Infinity