I have lovely, blue sky memories of Sega Rally, and I’m not the only one. Over Jump Rally is a fan-created homage to Sega’s forgotten arcade racer built in Unreal Engine 5, and there’s a demo available now if you want to get your wheels dirty.
The demo recreates the Forest stage, and there’s a video with some side-by-side comparisons below:
Over Jump Rally is the work of Alessandro Schiassi, a VFX who has been posting about the project in a thread at Sonic Fan Games HQ. Schiassi says he’s used the project as a platform to learn how to use the Unreal Engine, and thought recreating Sega Rally, a game he loves, was a good start because “it has just 4 tracks and 3 cars in total.”
Schiassi does also mention grander ambitions. “I’m planning on completing the Forest track with a basic Time Attack mode, releasing it as a playable beta for free, and seeing what’s Sega’s response,” he writes on the forum. “If they decide to bless the project and make it official, I’d be honored to complete the whole game and perhaps add some extra features. Worst-case scenario, I just use all the assets for some cool cinematics with the beautiful OST as a background…”.
Sega giving the project their blessing seems unlikely, although the demo available to download now does contain an original piece of music created by Johnny Gioeli, who contributed to the soundtracks for several classic-era Sega games.
The Over Jump Rally demo is 13GB and available to download via MediaFire. I gave it a try and had some difficulty with it, performance-wise, although it ran better once I tweaked a config file (which a readme text file explains how to do). It is barebones, but still a lovely fan project.