Uniracers

User Summary

The game Uniracers was developed by DMA Design and released in North America in 1994. (In Europe on April 27, 1995 as Unirally). Uniracers is a racing game where the players control unicycles and have to perform stunts and tricks to gain speed. The game got generally positive reviews.

In the game it is important to use the moments the Unicycle is in the air as efficiently as possible by performing as many stunts as possible. This give the unicycle more speed. For maximum acceleration it is also needed to have a wide variation in the stunts performed. With every failed stunt (where the unicycle doesn't land properly back on it's wheel) the player looses speed. The color of the track gives information as to whats coming ahead, or what stunts (not) to perform. The game consists of 9 tours of 5 races. Every tour has two race events (from A to B), two circuit events (a number of laps) and one stunt track (score points performing stunts). In every event the player competes with one opponent and can obtain a Bronze, Silver or Gold rank depending on the results. The graphical style of the game is minimalistic but unique and fits to the high-speed nature of the game.

The player can choose from 16 differently colored Unicycles, and a name can be set for each of them. The game support 2-player gameplay using a split-screen mode. On top of that the game supports a League-mode where up to 8 players can compete in a tournament. Each match in the league is a one-on-one race.

Pixar successfully sued DMA Design after release of the game, claiming the concept and unicycle design was taken from their film Red's Dream. As a result the game production was terminated after the first batch of 300,000 copies.