Tokyo is a wonderful, bizarre place, and it’s crawling with our most prized automotive fantasies. Driving a Nineties Japanese Domestic Market-spec sports car on the country’s winding mountain roads is one of those dreams. For the last few years, Sega—yes, they still exist, you Dreamcast ditchers—has run a driving simulator with real cars clamped to hydraulic stilts.
On the first floor of Sega’s Joypolis, a arcade/theme park/crepe shop on Tokyo Bay, there are three cars from the cult manga and video game series Initial D. Each is decked out to exacting anime specification: The yellow third-gen Mazda RX-7, white Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 and a blue Subaru Impreza WRX STI. (The latter, a Type R Version V. Not that we’re nerds). Screens fill the windshield, while the steering wheel and pedals are the very definition of “drive by wire.”
The video below is three years old, we know, and it shows the old Stage 4 Initial D game. But the Joypolis Stage still looks to be open, and for 600 Yen (five bucks), what could be better than hopping in a right-hand drive RX-7 and pretending to beat the tofu delivery boy next to you? It’s what you’ll need to do next time you’re in town.
