The Synthwave Outrun — 1984 in a Browser Tab
Endless straight road through a wireframe canyon. The sun is a giant pixelated half-disk on the horizon. 110 BPM 4-bar Am-F-C-G with FM sax. CRT post-pass. Pure Outrun aesthetic.
What this is
An endless straight road into the synthwave horizon. Procedural wireframe canyon walls in glowing magenta. The sun is a giant pixelated half-disk with horizontal scanlines (classic Outrun look). Sky gradient from deep purple to hot pink. Glowing grid floor extends to the vanishing point. Palm tree silhouettes drift past. 110 BPM Am-F-C-G in 4-bar loop with bassline, arpeggiated lead, FM sax with vibrato and dotted-eighth feedback delay. CRT post-pass: scanlines, chromatic aberration, barrel distortion, noise, vignette. Dodge oncoming neon cars. Score = distance.
Why this is mind-blowing
Synthwave as an aesthetic is precise — fail any of the elements and it just looks like a generic 80s pastiche. The model nailed all of them. Visual + audio + post-processing all align. This is a Kavinsky album cover you can drive through. From one paragraph.
Build a first-person synthwave driving game in Three.js. Endless straight
road through a procedural wireframe canyon (low-poly terrain rendered as
glowing magenta wireframes via custom GLSL line shader). Pixel-art sun
on the horizon — giant half-disk with horizontal scanlines, classic
Outrun aesthetic. CRT post-processing: scanlines, chromatic aberration,
subtle screen curvature. Procedural synthwave music via Web Audio:
bassline + arpeggiated lead + 4-on-the-floor drum machine. Dodge oncoming
cars. Speed builds the longer you survive.Paste this into Claude, Cursor, or Copilot. Change one thing that matters to you.
What I learned shipping it
- Synthwave aesthetic is three things: hot magenta + cyan palette, a pixelated sun with horizontal scanlines, and CRT post-processing (scanlines + chromatic aberration + barrel + vignette + noise). Get those right and you're already there.
- 110 BPM 4-bar Am-F-C-G is the canonical synthwave progression. Add FM sax with vibrato + dotted-eighth feedback delay over a saw-bass walking pattern and you have Kavinsky.
- A 16th-note step scheduler with per-track gain envelopes is the architecture for procedural music. Every demo I'd build would use this exact scheduler.