The primary rule of a great pop song: always leave your audience wanting more.

Run for no longer than three-and-a half minutes, repeat the chorus no more than three times – just enough to be catchy and memorable, not so many times that it becomes annoying.

It’s a rush of blood to the head, an injection of pure upbeat energy that makes everything else simply stop for the duration. The primary rule of a great arcade game: follow the rules of the great pop song. Ridge Racer always had it nailed. If the straights are the verses, the corners are the chorus – the build-up and the anticipation, followed by the emphatic and joyful release.

And Ridge Racer Revolution is the exemplar of that concept, a three and-a-half minute explosion of colour, excitement and optimism that acts as an adrenaline shot to the heart. And yet Revolution is often seen as the black sheep of the PlayStation quadrilogy, lacking, ironically, the revolutionary aspects that the following two games – Rage Racer and R4 – were praised for.

Instead, it was viewed as little more than a data disc expansion to the original, a small number of new courses and a new soundtrack. There’s an element of truth to that claim, of course. The insane handling model, apparently developed by alien beings with no understanding of Earth physics. The willful disregard for visual realism, eschewing the trend for increasingly naturalistic textures in favour of huge blocks of colour.

The absurd soundtrack of happy hardcore and gabber-influenced lunacy. All were present three years previously when the series first hit the arcades and, as such, it’s perhaps easy to understand why Revolution was dismissed by many. It’d be a valid criticism if the game was a simple update, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, Revolution is Namco’s gloriously willful Spinal Tap moment, Ridge Racer: One Louder. It takes the formula already laid down and intensifies every single ingredient.

It’s a game for the fans, by people who were themselves fans – at every point you’re aware that the primary motivation behind its creation was the simple desire, on the part of the development team, to play something exactly like this. And, like certain Nintendo classics, there’s the feeling that no matter what you try, no matter what tricks you try and pull off to beat or break the game, its creators got there before you and left you a present.