Demolition Racer: No Exit

24 Mar, 2026

Something I've kinda neglected throughout my life is that I love racing games, but I haven't actually played very many. It's kind of an unfortunate consequence of my gaming habits and the consoles I've owned (pretty sure I'd be a Burnout diehard now if those games appeared on Gamecube/Wii), but it's something I realized I need to make amends for after revisiting and 100% completing one of the first games I ever remember really liking as a child, Demolition Racer: No Exit on SEGA Dreamcast.

(This game absolutely rules.)

Now I ought to be specific here, if you saw the title and thought, "Hey, Demolition Racer, I remember playing that on my Playstation!", I need you to know that No Exit on Dreamcast is quite different and improves a lot on the original version on Playstation/PC. I imagine it's often confused for a basic or maybe slightly enhanced port, and while there is a lot of overlap, I assure you that the two games are different enough that No Exit probably should've been titled Demolition Racer 2.

Both games do share nearly identical intro cutscenes, though, and maybe that's because it's fucking iconic. Seriously, stop reading and watch that real quick, it's easily the best intro cutscene to any racing game ever. Everything you need to know about the game gets packed into a minute long montage: this isn't a boring sim racer where you have to follow the rules, this is a game about adrenaline, heavy metal, and crashing cars into other cars. It also, I'm realizing, does not actually feature any gameplay footage, rather, just stock footage of real life car crashes and demolition derbies, but I mean, who cares, you're going to be seeing the game in a minute anyway, why not treat yourself to something fun that'll get you pumped up to start playing?

(Collision is certain! Collision is certain!)

Getting to the gameplay, while it of course has a classic Demolition Derby mode if you wanna see big piles of cars smashing into eachother, the main meat of the game comes in the form of the titular Demolition Racing (unhelpfully titled Head to Head Demolition in the mode selection menu), where you face off against 15 other cars on a full sized racing course, and will be scored not only by how well you place in the race, but also how much damage you do to other cars. If you got into first place right away and stayed there for the entire race, you would probably lose, since how well you place increases the multiplier for your final score. You need already have a pretty high score to begin with in order for the multiplier to get you into a high ranking, so dealing damage to other cars counts for quite a lot. This leads to some interesting strategization where you may for example want to slow down and let some cars get ahead of you, so you can then in turn try to score hits on them in order to build up your points.

It can at times be kind of frustrating to hit other cars during races as the cars don't really have much weight to them in the game physics. It helps keep things fast but sometimes when you're trying to bump into other cars you'll get a lot of near misses, grazes, and weak hits. Getting a good smash into someone else does feel satisfying, though, and if you're lucky you can get insta-kills by either T-boning someone (hitting their side at a perfect right angle), or landing on top of them resulting in a Death from Above. They're pretty tricky to pull off, T-boning someone during a race is practically impossible as you'll rarely if ever be put in a position where you'll be able to hit someone like that, and Death from Above, well, you'll have to manage to land your car on top of someone else, and it's not like you really have air control (though sometimes you can get a freebie by respawning on top of someone else, which is always fun). They're worth tons of points so if you're able to pull one off during the career mode, you'd better make the most of it.

(Image credit sega-dreamcast.com)

Speaking of the career mode, known as "Demolition League" here, that is the main singleplayer mode, and how you unlock all the extra content. There's no story or frills, in fact, outside of the intro cutscene and boxart, there's never really any indication that you're playing as people driving cars and not like, just, the cars themselves fully autonomous. I guess maybe the "T-Bone" and "Death from Above" instakills imply that there is a driver who gets killed? Anyway, each demolition league is a series of demolition races or traditional demolition derbies, which you have to complete in a row. At the beginning you only need to make 3rd place (in total score, not position) in order to advance, but the requirement goes up to 2nd and then 1st place, though fortunately you can retry missions you fail as many times as you'd like. You can get upgrades between matches by collecting Pitbull coins throughout the levels, featuring the symbol of the developer Pitbull Syndicate (that has apparently been co-opted by neo-nazis? yikes), which you can then spend on improving your armor, handling, engine, or just get extra points for your next match (never worth it and doesn't seem to stick, unless you've gotten all other upgrades I guess). For some reason, the NPC cars can also collect the coins even though I'm pretty sure they're completely unable to use them, which prevents you from getting them and is extremely frustrating when it happens. You're able to save to the VMU mid-league and resume later, though re-loading seems to reset your upgrade progress, so I'd recommend just sticking it through from beginning to end each time.

Back when I was a child I never really played the career mode, so it was satisfying to finally complete it. It's a pretty decent challenge and overall doesn't take that long to do, and I even got to unlock some funky cars that I had never seen before, such as a three-wheeler car. As a child most of my time in this game came from fooling around in the multiplayer mode and painting the cars. I always made them blue and black, which were my favorite colors at the time, and I always used the skull and crossbones logo, of course. Though as an adult I can't help but notice there is a "69" alongside all the other regular numbers. Heh.

The soundtrack is a big part of the experience, too. Though you might assume from the intro that the entire thing is heavy metal, just as much or perhaps even more of it is techno. The game features music by artists such as Cirrus, Empirion, Fear Factory, Junkie XL, and more. The tracklist between the original and No Exit are largely the same, though No Exit adds some tracks by Coffee Boys but unfortunately/fortunately loses the tracks by Tommy Tallarico. Listening to them, you're not really missing out on much, and given the guy's track record, it's likely that he didn't even write the songs anyway. Overall, the entire musical selection is great, I would highly recommend you listen to all of it (or experience them by playing the game), but if you want a quick sample, the tracks Break the Madness by Cirrus and Full Metal Contact by Fear Factory are probably my two favorites on the soundtrack.

(A lot of tracks from the album Back On A Mission by Cirrus are featured in the game, and the whole thing is an absolute banger. Image credit Cirrus/Spotify)

While we're speaking on the differences between No Exit and the original Demolition Racer, probably the biggest one and the one that surprised me the most is that, in the original, there can only be one type of car in game at a time. Whatever car you select to play as, that's the car that all the enemy racers are as well. I guess it would've had to be a limitation of the PS1 version, but the PC version is the same as well. It's bizarre, even though it technically doesn't really change that much, it feels wrong. Part of the fun of a game like this is seeing all sorts of car designs, so having each match be restricted to a single car type is pretty boring. Oh, No Exit also has a bunch of different powerups that take the form of colored boxes. The blue box is a shield, red gives you a vampire health steal effect, green repairs some damage, white gives (or takes away) points, orange gives you a turbo boost, and the grey box is TNT that explodes. I had to double check to see whether or not these exist in the original as they're not nearly as prominent in gameplay, it's only the TNT (which isn't really a powerup anyway), repair, shield, and points. I don't really like the points boxes, they subtract or add points based on whether the box has a + or a - on it and it can be rather hard to tell which is which during the heat of the race. Maybe it depends on your display, but I have a pretty big CRT set and I often struggled with it.

It's kind of a shame that whenever I look up this game online I can pretty much only ever find people talking about the PS1 version when the one I love is the Dreamcast version. The original does have a couple unique tracks and extra FMV cutscenes, but as a game, I feel like it's really not much to write home about, at least in my experience jumping backwards to it from the enhanced port/sequel (not sure where else to include this but it also has an unfortunate confederate flag in one of the car logos that No Exit doesn't have... how did we get two hate symbols in one article?¹). I think the Dreamcast release suffered from unfortunate timing, it launched only about 5 months before the console itself was officially discontinued, and given the number of brand new copies floating around (I got one off eBay for about $18), I have to imagine it did not sell particularly well. It also, for whatever reason, did not get brought to PS2 or any other console, so it's just languished in obscurity, largely overshadowed by the PS1 game that more people played. I've been trying to find games that scratch the same itch, for a while the only one on my radar was Wreckfest, which leans too heavy on the realism with sluggish physics, making it not really that appealing to me. The closest I've come across so far is TRAIL OUT, a russojank spiritual successor to the FlatOut series. Sure, it's still pretty different, and for some reason has a big focus on a story that's honestly not that good (and has dodgy voice acting), but smashing cars feels good, and the destructible environments are a fun addition that you wouldn't really have been able to do back in the day. Right now I'm trying Burnout 3, which is a blast, though still quite different. Maybe at some point I'll do some write-ups on other racing games I've been trying, because there's plenty I need to check out.

Oh, I almost forgot, Atari acquired the rights to Demolition Racer in 2023, though they likely do not currently have any plans for the series. If you'd like, go vote for Demolition Racer and Demolition Racer: No Exit on the GOG Dreamlist, maybe it'll get their attention, and hey, if you work at an indie studio that makes car games, maybe try pitching something to them. I fear the music rights may be complicated, but surprisingly it seems that most of the artists who worked on the game are still active, with a notable and unfortunate exception in Cirrus.

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