Fans have successfully managed to bring the Ubisoft Montreal game Speed Devils Online Racing back online, after years of effort, as reported by Dreamcast Live.
According to a new blog written by PCWZRD13, the effort to restore the game's online functionality was the work of the Dreamcast community members Shuouma and flyinghead.
As PCWZRD13 reports, Shuouma had originally started working on bringing the game back online in 2017, but Speed Devils proved to be a bit more stubborn than other Ubisoft titles like POD SpeedZone and Monaco Grand Prix Online that shared the same server code, with a missing piece preventing players from initiating online matches. As a result, Shuouma put the project on hold for 8 years, before flyinghead came in and identified what had been missing from the equation.
Speed Devils Online Racing, in case you're unaware, is an online version of the 1999 game Speed Devils, which itself was an altered version of Speed Busters for PC. It was released in the year 2000 and removed the main championship from the original game, with players instead only having two options available to them from the main menu: an online and offline mode.
The online mode includes support for up to 6 player online races and sees players embarking on a career, with the aim being to earn driver points and money to advance their reputation and purchase new vehicles.
Meanwhile, the offline mode is fairly barebones in comparison, offering players the opportunity to take part in arcade races against the computer or use their ghost data that has been saved to their VMU.
For years, those who own a physical copy of the game have only been able to play this fairly limited offline portion of the game, but now, thanks to fans, it looks like the rest of the game is finally available again to those who want to get online and race.
You can see some footage of the game's online mode below, courtesy of the Dreamcastic YouTube channel: