The series began as an extension of the Option print magazine, which Inada had established as the bible of Japan's JDM tuner scene. Where the magazine covered builds and specifications, Video Option brought the action to viewers directly: Inada appeared on-screen conducting road tests on circuits, public roads, and at Bonneville Speed Week. In its early years the series did not shy away from illegal activity, occasionally featuring the underground expressway races that characterised Japanese street culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with footage attributed to an anonymous contributor known only as "Chiba Kun."
As the scene evolved, so did the content. The show shifted its focus toward sanctioned competitions — Wangan runs on the Shuto Expressway's Bayshore Route, circuit time attack, drag events, and increasingly, drifting.
Video Option's relationship with drifting defined much of its legacy. As early as 1989 the series co-organised with Keiichi Tsuchiya one of the first formal drift competitions, the Ikaten. The magazine and video brand continued to host Ikaten events for years, building an audience for competitive drifting before it had an established ruleset or commercial structure.
In 1996 Video Option brought the concept to American soil, staging one of the first drifting demonstrations in the United States at Willow Springs International Raceway in California — an event won, unexpectedly, by a Honda Civic. When competitive drifting matured enough to require a dedicated series, Video Option became the exclusive broadcast home of D1 Grand Prix from its founding in October 2000, a series Inada helped to establish alongside Tsuchiya.
The show also followed individual careers. In 2005 the cameras shadowed former D1 judge Manabu Orido across a full competitive season as he transitioned from official to driver. Regular contributors including Keiichi Tsuchiya, Nobuteru Taniguchi, Eiji Yamada, Ken Nomura, Manabu Suzuki, and Manabu Orido served as both guest presenters and on-screen talent.
Beyond competition footage, Video Option developed a signature cast of recurring characters and segments. Chiba Kun, the anonymous contributor, became a cult figure through his exploits in a Nissan Skyline GT-R on the Bayshore Route and his repeated confrontations with police. Kazuhiko "Smokey" Nagata of tuning house Top Secret provided some of the series' most notorious moments, including high-speed runs on public roads in the United Kingdom in 1998 and New Zealand in 2000 that ended in legal trouble.
The Go-Go Daijiro segment saw Inada test unusual vehicles outside the normal tuner remit, such as VIP-style luxury saloons. A segment called D1 Gals featured personalities Kazumi Kondo and Hatsuno Sugaya in comedic automotive challenges. Correspondent Takayasu Ozaku (known as Zaku) provided coverage of campaign girls at events including the Tokyo Auto Salon.
The global appetite for Japanese performance car footage — fed partly through bootleg copies of Video Option circulating in North America, Europe, and Australia — led Sunpro to launch an English-language version called JDM Option in 2004, timed to capitalise on the fanbase that had grown around the Irwindale round of D1 Grand Prix. JDM Option retained Japanese voiceovers alongside English narration and carried content specifically tailored for overseas audiences, including US-based events that did not appear in the Japanese edition. The English-language segment was discontinued from the Japanese version after 2007, and by that point JDM Option had established drifting as a mainstream motorsport discipline in the United States, directly preceding the growth of Formula Drift.
Before streaming and YouTube, Video Option and its main rival Best Motoring were the primary means by which Western enthusiasts encountered the sounds and spectacle of high-revving Japanese performance engines. Bootlegged copies formed an informal education network for an entire generation of import-scene participants worldwide. The series' decade-long documentation of drifting — from the Ikaten through D1GP — provided the cultural and technical template that informed every major drifting competition format that followed.