Thirty-two years is a long time to wait for a race to start. Moto X, a motocross racer built for the Super Nintendo back in 1994, was finished, polished, and ready to ship — then its publisher pulled the plug at the very last second. This Friday, October 16, it finally gets a proper digital release on Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, courtesy of retro publisher Ratalaika Games.
British studio Software Creations teamed up with Trimark Interactive in the mid-’90s to bring Moto X to the SNES, according to ComicBook.com. The game was done. Done! And then Trimark backed out of publishing at the eleventh hour, and Moto X simply vanished — no release, no reviews, nothing. It might as well have never existed.
It stayed that way for nearly three decades. Then PIKO Interactive, the retro publisher that seems to exist solely to give lost games a second chance, dug it up and put out a limited physical SNES cartridge in 2023. Great for collectors; no good for the rest of us. Those carts were never exactly easy to come by.
This week’s digital release changes everything. Ratalaika is selling Moto X for $5.99 USD — roughly $8.50 CAD, pocket-change territory and honestly the sweet spot for a curiosity like this — making this the first time the game has ever been properly, widely available. The Xbox version even supports Smart Delivery and Xbox Play Anywhere, so one purchase covers both console and PC. Nice touch.
So what are you actually getting? A dirt-bike racer with obvious Excitebike DNA: 250cc, 550cc, and 750cc machines racing across obstacle-filled tracks, with power-ups scattered through each race to turn the tables. There are three skill levels, each with five tracks plus a bonus level — 18 races in total — and two-player split-screen for settling things the old-fashioned way: on the couch, yelling at each other.
Check out the trailer below:
The timing of it all is kind of perfect. Extreme sports games were absolutely booming in the mid-’90s, and a dirt-bike racer with jumps, power-ups, and split-screen would have fit the SNES library like a glove. Instead it became one of those “whatever happened to…?” footnotes — the kind of game that ends up on unreleased-game lists like the one Games That Weren’t has been keeping about it for over a decade. Now it finally gets to find out what it might have been.
I’ll be honest — I’m grabbing it day one. Not because I expect a lost masterpiece (let’s keep expectations in check, friends), but because supporting rescued retro games is how we get more rescued retro games. Are you picking up a piece of 1994 motocross history this Friday?
Sources: ComicBook.com, GoNintendo, GameNewsPlus, Nintendo Life. None of the sources mention any generative AI involvement in the game or its re-release.