Is the Ridge Racer series dead?

As many people know the Ridge Racer series has been around since the early 90’s when the very first arcade title was released back in 1993. The Ridge Racer series is one of Namco’s longest running video games franchises ever especially considering the fact that the series will be 30 years old in 2023. As far as the 3D racing genre is concerned the original Ridge Racer title had paved the way for the line of Gran Turismo and the Forza series before they both began to attract mainstream attention within the gaming world. The Ridge Racer series has been arguably overshadowed during the past two decades or so by games like Gran Turismo 4-6, Forza Horizon I-IV, Race Driver: Grid, Need For Speed: Most Wanted and many others. While Namco put out a variety of solid racing titles including R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, Ridge Racer 7 and Ridge Racer Unbounded from ‘99-‘12 we have yet to see a Ridge Racer 8. At one point we were supposed to get a Ridge Racer 8 game exclusively for the Nintendo Switch before it was ultimately cancelled back in 2019. The last major installment within the Ridge Racer series that we got was Unbounded which came out for PS3 & Xbox 360 in 2012.

It should be noted that Ridge Racer 7 came out back in ‘06 and seeing that we may never get a RR8; it leads many people to believe that the series is officially dead. On a commercial level the Ridge Racer series has never been able to match the level of commercial success that Sony’s greatest Gran Turismo games had achieved during the late 90’s-early 00’s. Some would argue that the Ridge Racer series best days were during the 99’s when the series was still fresh. The first two Ridge Racer arcade titles from ‘93-‘94 are considered to be classics while Type 4 from ‘99 was arguably one of the best installments within the entire series. Its almost a crime Namco never remastered the original two Ridge Racer games or Type 4 considering how popular they were during their respective time periods. Even though, Namco’s has never officially confirmed that the Ridge Racer series is dead they never revealed any plans to re-release RR8 for the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X. However, it would definitely be nice if Namco did release a new Ridge Racer game or remaster some of the older titles for the series 30th anniversary in 2023.