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Ace Driver: Victory Lap Heads to Consoles on October 22

Vince MaglayaPublished 4m ago2 min readBased on 8 sources
Ace Driver: Victory Lap Heads to Consoles on October 22
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Namco's 1990s racing sequel is getting its first home release, and it arrives on Thursday, October 22, 2026. Hamster Corporation announced Ace Driver: Victory Lap as the latest step in its effort to bring Namco's early-1990s polygonal arcade games to home consoles. Polygonal means the games are built from 3D shapes, a big step up for arcade machines of that era.

The game is the sequel to Ace Driver, which arrived a year after the original. The first game came out in 1994, ten months after Namco's Ridge Racer. Hamster released the original on its Arcade Archives line in May, and its release page lists the new game's digital release date as October 22.

Arcade Archives is Hamster's range of classic arcade games, sold as downloads for home systems. Victory Lap comes in two versions. The standard Arcade Archives release is priced at US$14.99 for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. The Arcade Archives 2 version costs US$16.99 and is slated for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2, according to Gematsu.

Victory Lap adds two more circuits to the original's tracks. It also includes a Championship mode, where players race all three courses in a row. The Arcade Archives 2 version adds a Time Attack mode, which challenges players to beat the clock, and support for variable refresh rate, a display feature that can smooth out motion on screens that support it. Both versions keep the High Score and Caravan modes that appear across the Arcade Archives range.

The original's history is a little more tangled. A Time Extension report from May noted that the game runs on Namco's System 22 arcade hardware and that a PlayStation port was once in development. That port was never released. Victory Lap is the first time the series has reached home consoles.

For fans of older arcade racers, the appeal is simple. The game gives players three courses to learn, a championship to finish and a clock to beat. Those who want the full set can pick the version that matches their console.

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