Genki has announced a brand new Tokyo Xtreme Racer game, the first non-mobile game entry in the series in almost 20 years. But the company has a long history in racing games, going all the back to the Super Famicom and Super NES.
Genki developed several racing games for Nintendo's 16-bit machine, mostly motorcycle and F1-type racing games, but they also created the game that started the whole Shutokou Battle/Tokyo Xtreme Racer series, Shutokou Battle '94: Drift King. It features the "Drift King" himself (hence the title), professional race car driver Keiichi Tsuchiya, along with "car tuner" Masaaki Bandoh. A sequel followed in 1995.
The English Wikipedia article for the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series includes Wangan Dead Heat/Highway 2000 for the Sega Saturn; the Japanese Wikipedia article for the Shutokou Battle series does not. I do not count it as part of the series, despite the fact that it takes place on Tokyo highways.
So we move on to the next game for PlayStation, from 1996, simply titled Shutokou Battle in Japan and Tokyo Highway Battle overseas. This is where the series made the transition to 3D. Oddly, the game seems to have been mostly developed by another company called CAPS. Yet Genki developed two 3D racing games themselves that came out the year prior, Hang-On GP and the aforementioned Highway 2000. (And BTW, the Saturn version was by Natsume's Osaka office, then a subsidiary called Osaka Natsume.)
This was followed later in the year by Shutokou Battle Gaiden: Super Technic Challenge: Drift King e no Michi, also developed by CAPS. Again, CAPS is not credited, technically (though their name is clearly written on the speedometer), but it is mostly the same team that worked on Tokyo Highway Battle. Genki is only credited with supervision here.
I don't know the full story or the circumstances behind it, but in May 1996, CAPS president Tsutomu Hagiwara headed up a new Genki subsidiary called Doda. Doda would carry on the development of racing games for Genki. CAPS, meanwhile, would make their own series of racing games called Option Tuning Car Battle. These never left Japan.
Doda developed the next game in the Shutokou Battle series, Shutokou Battle R, released for PlayStation in 1997. This marked the final appearances by Keiichi Tsuchiya and Masaaki Bandoh in the series.
The series found international success when it came to the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. While previous games were more conventional, lap-based racing games, Tokyo Xtreme Racer (Shutokou Battle in Japan, Tokyo Highway Challenge in Europe) added some grit and a degree of freedom to the proceedings. The player is now on their own to roam the highways and find rivals to challenge. Doda developed this and the sequel.
Genki acquired and dissolved Doda on May 31, 2000, less than a month before the sequel was released in Japan. More sequels and spin-offs followed, now developed in-house. Then for a long time, nothing happened other than a couple of mobile games.
In 2008, after poor sales, the original Genki became insolvent and was dissolved. (I don't know if they actually filed for bankruptcy.) The current entity known as Genki was actually spun off from the old one. I don't know if anybody from the old days is still kicking around, but the company has continued to work on the Wangan Midnight series and those mobile games, so that's something. We'll just have to wait and see how the new game turns out.
(This post leans very heavily on videos by Classic Gaming Player, so thanks to them.)
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