Road Rash is a 1991 racing and vehicular combat video game originally developed and published by Electronic Arts (EA) for the Sega Genesis.

The game's programmers Dan Geisler and Carl Mey were hired by EA to create a banked road effect for Mario Andretti Racing, then being developed as an NES title.

When the NES hardware proved incapable of rendering the desired effect, focus shifted to a motorcycle racing game for the more powerful Sega Genesis.

[5] The racer can be ejected from their bike if they crash into an obstacle (such as cows, deer, cars and trees[6]) or if they run out of stamina (shown in the bottom-left corner of the screen) due to fights with opponents.

The bike will be wrecked if the meter fully depletes, which ends the player's participation in the current race and deducts the cost of a repair bill from the racer's balance.

[7] Motor officers make sporadic appearances throughout the game's tracks, and can also end the player's participation if they apprehend the racer following a crash, which deducts the cost of a fine from their balance.

[11][12][13] In its tentative steps back into the console market, EA focused on genres that were determined to be strategic, namely sports and racing titles.

Preliminary development began on an NES title named Mario Andretti Racing, and programmer Dan Geisler was hired by the company at this time.

[13] Technical director Carl Mey, who had just been laid off from Epyx following its bankruptcy, was also hired by EA and was given his first major project of creating a "banked road" effect for the game.

[12][14] Producer and designer Randy Breen, who was previously involved with Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, was influenced by the difficulty and tedium of that title to create a racing game with more accessibility and entertainment value.

[12] Because Andretti was set to follow a similar formula to Indianapolis 500, Geisler, Breen, May and co-designer Walter Stein began a brainstorming session for a different type of racing game that would not necessarily adhere to realism.

After Mey and Geisler rejected QuadRunners as potential racing vehicles due to Andretti's dirt track setting, Breen suggested motorcycles.

[11] The game's title originated from Breen reminiscing to the group about riding his own bike on Mulholland Drive to meet with friends and thinking to himself: "Man, if you wiped out here, you'd get some serious road rash".

Geisler claimed that the Genesis's memory capacity could have allowed him to create 802 miles of unique roads, and that he could have accurately mapped out the entire coast of California.

He remarked that the development team would refer to the game as "Randy's Sunday Ride" behind his back, and that "Road Rash needed more balls to sell than a simulation of someone following the speed limit".

Breen cited additional influence from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner and "other cartoons where the villain gets beat up", adding that "even though it set you back, it was still fun to watch".

[13] Due to the game's violent content, EA was unable to secure official licenses from existing manufacturers, and so created soundalike brands in their place; "Panda", "Shuriken", "Kamikaze" and "Diablo" are respectively derived from Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Ducati.

[19] Road Rash was converted for the Game Gear and Master System by Gary Priest of Probe Software, with music adapted by Greg Michael.

"[30] Paul Glancey and Tim Boone of Computer and Video Games respectively described the game as a "beat 'em up on motorbikes" and "Super Hang-On with fists and clubs thrown in"; both reviewers noted that the graphics were convincing in their creation of the illusion of speed in spite of the fairly simple visuals, and Glancey added that the aggressive nature of the gameplay "broadens the enjoyment you get from Road Rash a great deal and makes you wonder why no-one thought of it before".

[25] Mark Bruton of Mega Zone said that the game's "vividly realistic" settings were complemented by the "excellently detailed" graphics and multi-level parallax scrolling, and was amused by the biker vocalizations, which were "very funny in a sick way".

Neil Jackson of Amiga Format found the violent gameplay to be "just all-out thrash fun" that would "annoy everyone from the road safety crew to the Mary Whitehouse brigade", but added that the game "sounds like a kazoo [and] looks like a moped on an 8-bit".

[13][14] EA attempted to capitalize on Road Rash's success by repurposing its game engine and mix of combat and racing for the 1994 inline skating title Skitchin'.