The best arcade games like OutRun are OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, Horizon Chase 2 and Forza Horizon 5. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made OutRun worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The best version of the formula, with drifting that finally works.
Made explicitly to be arcade racers of this era again.
If the joy of a beautiful road and a fast car is the whole appeal.
A pixel-art love letter to OutRun and Lotus Turbo Challenge.
Low-poly arcade racing with the same clean feel.
Same era of Sega-adjacent arcade driving, with fighting.
The other great arcade racer about atmosphere over simulation.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
Specifically, these are strong answers for OutRun that are not arcade games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like OutRun — 9 picks, no genre filter.
OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. The best version of the formula, with drifting that finally works.
No. OutRun released on the Sega Genesis, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full OutRun list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.