.AR File Extension

Game data file used by the Midtown Madness and Midtown Madness 2 racing games; stores data referenced by the game in a compressed format; includes in-game menus, car models, textures, tracks, and 3D objects.

AR files are referenced by the Midtown Madness games and are not meant to be opened manually. However, the contents of AR files can be extracted using a third-party utility, such as deAR for the original Midtown Madness and deAR2 for Midtown Madness 2. They may also be extracted using a Zip decompression utility since they are saved in the .ZIP format.

Archive of one or more files created by ar, the Unix archiver; used most often to create static libraries used by a GNU program linker.

An AR file is a game data archive used by the video games Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations. Typically, AR files are part of a split archive, comprised of multiple numbered AR files. For example, an AR file may have the name cnz100.ar.00, cnz100.ar.01, etc.

Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations are two later entries in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Both games store a variety of game assets, such as character models and level files, in AR archives.

However, the games use slightly different versions of the AR format. Specifically, the AR files included in Sonic Unleashed are compressed, while the AR files included in Sonic Generations are not.

You can open AR files and extract the assets they contain with Generations Archive Editor (Windows). However, before you can open a Sonic Unleashed AR file, you must first decompress it using QuickBMS (Windows) and an appropriate BMS script. You can find a link to the appropriate BMS scripts below.