I bought this with the PlayStation 1 on launch day in the UK, I went halves with my brother to be able to afford it. We both finished the game that day since it’s only really a single track. It has multiple difficulties, and on the higher one an extra section of the track opens up. You then have “extra” difficulties where you drive the track mirrored. We ended up playing the demo disk that came with the PlayStation quite a lot too, I was very impressed with one where you’re controlling a dinosaur.
Ridge Racer had a loading screen at the start where you play the first level of the Galaxian arcade game. If you can manage to shoot down all of the enemies before the game loads then extra cars get unlocked. Since we didn’t actually buy a memory card with our console I couldn’t save the unlocked cars and had to complete it every time if I wanted to use them.
There is one more car you can unlock after that, when you get the extra mirror races there is a black car waiting for you on the time trials race. If you can beat it then you can drive that car. It’s by far the best car in the game, but by that point you’ve finished everything. It’s fun to race at ridiculous speeds though.
The whole thing felt like such a huge jump from the Mega Drive and SNES that my brother and I had up to that point. I don’t think we’re ever going to see leaps like that again.