Zero4 Champ (series)

Zero4 Champ (ゼロヨンチャンプ, zero yon chanpu) series is a racing video game franchise created by Yutaka Kaminaga of Media Rings in 1991. Hudson Soft -now a member of Konami group- licensed it for Drift Champ, the latest episode planned by Work Jam, developed by Tamsoft and for a mobile phone game developed by Profire, both were released in late 2002.

Zero-Yon
In Japan, street racing sometimes occurs on long straights in industrial areas, which are used for drag races. These are known natively as 0-400m (meters) or Zero-Yon (ゼロヨン) races. Yon is Japanese for "4".

Overview
The series' touge racing, aero parts tuning and anime-based "Story Mode" made it similar to other popular franchise like Initial D and Wangan Midnight. It has also some RPG and simulation adventure (the player does part-time job to get money) found later in Shutokou Battle series titles such as Kattobi Tune and Racing Battle C1 Grand Prix.

Featured cars are sports grades from Japanese makers including Toyota MR2-GT (SW20), Mazda RX-7 Type RS (FD3S), Mitsubishi Motors Lancer Evolution VI (CP9A), Subaru Impreza WRX STi (GDB), Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec (BNR34) and Honda NSX Type-S Zero (NA2), all of which are import scene classics.

Series timeline

 * 🇯🇵 1991.03.08: Zero4 Champ (ゼロヨンチャンプ), PC Engine HuCard
 * 🇯🇵 1993.05.03: Zero4 Champ II (ゼロヨンチャンプII), PC Engine Super CD-ROM2
 * 🇯🇵 1994.07.22: Zero4 Champ RR (ゼロヨンチャンプ ダブルアール), Super Famicom
 * 🇯🇵 1995.12.25: Zero4 Champ RR-Z (ゼロヨンチャンプ ダブルアール・ヅィー), Super Famicom
 * 🇯🇵 1997.06.20: Zero4 Champ DooZy-J (ゼロヨンチャンプ ドゥーヅィージェイ), PlayStation
 * 🇯🇵 1997.06.20: Zero4 Champ DooZy-J Type-R (ゼロヨンチャンプ ドゥーヅィージェイ タイプアール), Sega Saturn
 * 🇯🇵 2002.11.21: Zero4 Champ series: Drift Champ (ゼロヨンチャンプ シリーズ ドリフトチャンプ), PlayStation 2 (Hudson Soft)
 * 🇯🇵 2002.12.24: Go! Zero4 Champ (GO!04チャンプ), Mobile phone i-mode 504i (Hudson Soft / Profire)

Zero4 Extreme
In June 2005, a fan flash game Zero4 Extreme (ゼロヨンエクストリーム) was made available online for free by Kuruma.