One of the retro-themed racing games to make its way to Kickstarter and find startling success is Drift Stage, from indie developer Super Systems Softworks. The game has been slowly moving through development since being Kickstarted back in 2015.

Well, in their last update over on the Kickstarter page, the developers informed backers that they’re still alive and that the game is 95% complete. They also informed backers that they wanted to make sure that the game was in tip-top shape before heading into Early Access on Steam, writing…

“The current version is about 95% done, and only needs some minor debugging and menu work to be complete.”

 

[…] “We need a high level of content and polish to pull off a successful Early Access launch, and we only get one shot at it.”

They also said that following this year’s E3 they would plan on pumping out a release date for the game.

Some other big news also included the revelation of a fully featured design and livery editor for the cars.

As you can see, it’s possible to put custom graphics on the cars, resize the images, change the colors and even create professional looking sponsors.

The custom livery feature is made pretty easy. The team has designed it so that if there are decals not present in the default selection, you can open up the ‘MyDecals’ folder and simply plop the pngs into the folder containing the decals you want to use.

With the core game nearly complete and prepping for Early Access, it won’t be long before we finally see a working, public version of Drift Stage drifting onto the Steam store. The game has a lot of potential to become a sleeper hit amongst retro enthusiasts and new-school gamers looking for a throwback game to the original Ridge Racer and San Francisco Rush or Cruisin’ USA. Hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer for an official date on when Drift Stage enters Early Access.