Top Gear 3000, later released in Japan as The Planet’s Champ: TG3000 (プラネットチャンプ TG3000), is a racing video game developed by Gremlin Interactive and published by Kemco for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It is the third game in the original Top Gear trilogy, and the last in the series to be developed by Gremlin. 3000 heavily resembles the previous Top Gear 2, but is set in the distant future.
Comparison to series
Placing this game a thousand years in the future allowed the developers to plausibly include futuristic and improbable technologies, and abandon the relative realism of Top Gear 2.
Car upgrades were more extensive than in Top Gear 2, and “weapons” were featured for the first time in the series. Upgrades included a nuclear fusion engine, a cobalt-titanium armor kit, and a liquid polymer gearbox; weapons included a device to jump over cars, a warp device, and a magnetic attractor to steal kinetic energy from other cars.
Due to the capabilities of the new chip DSP-4 used for this game, it was the first game in the series that was possible to split the track in two different directions with different lengths, sometimes intentionally making one route much faster than the other. Top Gear 3000 was the only game in the history of the Super NES to use this chip.
