Alpine Racer

Alpine Racer (アルペンレーサー, Arupen Rēsā) is a racing sports video game developed and published by Namco for arcades. It had a limited release in December 1994, It ran on the Namco System 22 arcade hardware. The player uses a handlebar controller to move a skier down a course situated on a snow covered mountain, the objective being to make it to the end of the course without falling off the slope or colliding with obstacles. It features three different courses to select, alongside a standard race mode and a time attack mode where the player must pass through gates to replenish a time limit. It was an arcade hit, among the top five highest grossing dedicated arcade games of 1996 in both Japan and the United States. The arcade success of Alpine Racer led to a wave of similar sports games capitalizing on its success during the late 1990s.

Alpine Racer spawned a series of sequels and remakes. Alpine Racer 2 was released in 1996 for arcades, featuring three selectable skiers, new courses to race on, and a multiplayer mode made possible through linking multiple cabinets together. A spin off snowboarding video game, Alpine Surfer, was released the same year. A PlayStation 2 sequel was released in 2002, Alpine Racer 3, adding new gamemodes, selectable characters and other additions to the core gameplay, in addition of including Klonoa as a playable guest character. A sequel for Japanese mobile phones, Alpine Racer EX, was released in 2007, followed by a "widescreen" version the same year. Namco Networks produced an iOS remake of the original Alpine Racer in 2009, which was subsequently ported to the Zeebo the same year. A second arcade sequel, Super Alpine Racer, was released by Namco Bandai Games in 2014. In 2004, Harvard University sleep scientist Robert Stickgold used Tetris and Alpine Racer to study the relationship between learning and sleep. He determined that patients who played Alpine Racer before sleeping, including those who suffered from anterograde amnesia, dreamed of skiing.

The arcade success of Alpine Racer led to a wave of similar sports games capitalizing on its success during the late 1990s, from companies such as Sega, Namco, Konami and Innovative Concepts.