[4] Sega Touring Car Championship received mixed reviews, with critics generally commenting that it has a remarkable sense of speed and realism, but that those factors also make the game excessively difficult.

[5] The Saturn port includes an unlockable fifth track,[6] allows players to create customized cars and save them to memory,[7] and uses a split screen for multiplayer modes.

Before creating the department, I explained the concept to AM3's manager and then to Higashi Suzuki, the head of amusement machine development at Sega.

[9] To research the game, the staff watched videos, read magazines and books, attended races, and in some cases rode as passengers in real Touring Cars driven by championship drivers.

[11] Mizuguchi recounted that acquiring the rights to use the numerous sponsorship stickers which appear in the game "wasn't so much difficult, more like time consuming.

[10] During the final fine-tuning stage of development, race driver Naoki Hattori "test drove" the game and gave advice to the AM Annex team.

On this ultimate version, the player physically select his car, seat in the Toyota Supra, AMG-Mercedes C-Class or Alfa Romeo 155 and watched on a huge widescreen through the vehicle's windscreen.

He elaborated that the game requires extreme precision to avoid crashing during turns, and the unforgiving difficulty means the player must often find ways to shave fractions of a second off completion times.

[21] The Saturn version received mixed reviews, though most critics regarded it as a major disappointment given what a high-profile release it was for the console.

While reviews widely remarked that Sega Touring Car Championship has a lack of slowdown and overall sense of speed which is virtually unprecedented for a home console racer,[18][19][22][25] they also said that the controls are overly touchy and never feel quite right even when the player takes the time and practice needed to adjust to them.

GameSpot complained at the small number of tracks and the lack of licensing compared to competing racers, and summed the game up as a mixed bag with merits which are not enough to justify putting up with its shortcomings.

Additionally noting the amount of polygon glitching and the rough textures, they deemed it "possibly the weakest arcade-to-Saturn conversion to date, bar the godawful Sky Target.

"[24] GamePro similarly criticized the rough, low-resolution textures, and additionally dismissed the music as "17 indistinguishable dance mixes".