Racing Simulation | Code Like It's 198x

In June 1985 Acornsoft sold a BBC Micro game by telling buyers it was not really a game. “Technically, of course, it’s a computer game for the BBC Micro,” its advertisement for Revs admitted. “But somewhere in the middle of your first practice lap you’ll realise that ‘game’ has nothing to do with it.” That claim is the whole idea of the racing simulation. An arcade racer asks how exciting driving can be made; a simulation asks how a real car behaves, and lets the answer be difficult. Its designers modelled tyres, suspension and weight transfer, copied real circuits bend by bend, and wrote for players prepared to spend hours finding half a second.

The line runs through a small number of people. Geoff Crammond in England and David Kaemmer’s Papyrus Design Group in Massachusetts wrote many of its landmarks between 1985 and 2002, and Kaemmer’s next company, iRacing, turned the simulation into an online sport.

Fast facts

What it is: a driving game that models a real car’s physics and a real circuit’s layout, and expects the player to learn both.
Beginnings: Crammond’s Revs for the BBC Micro (Acornsoft, 1985); Papyrus’s Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (Electronic Arts, 1989).
The 1990s: Crammond’s Formula One Grand Prix (MicroProse, 1991; World Circuit in America) and its sequels; Papyrus’s IndyCar Racing (1993), NASCAR Racing (1994) and Grand Prix Legends (1998).
On consoles: Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo (PlayStation, 1997).
Online: iRacing, opened by Kaemmer in 2008 with laser-scanned American circuits.
Controls: steering wheels and pedals, with force feedback on the PC from 1998.

Revs and Indy 500

Revs modelled a Formula 3 Ralt RT3 at Silverstone, with “the track’s curves, dips and hills accurately reproduced”, Acorn User reported, and adjustable wings “to change the ‘ground effect’, which helps the car keep grip around corners”. Crammond wrote it with David Hunt, the Formula 3 driver Acorn had sponsored, and Acornsoft’s advertisement carried Hunt’s own notes on Silverstone’s corners, with the gear and revs for each. The racing game entry tells how the simulation branch grew from it.

In America the story usually starts four years later. Computer Gaming World, reviewing MicroProse’s World Circuit in 1993, wrote that armchair racing had only really taken shape with Electronic Arts’ Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, and that before it no racing game had given “a true cockpit feel”. David Kaemmer’s game had one track, the Indianapolis oval, and the magazine’s reviewer, the autocross champion Barry Werger, spent most of his review on the set-up screen: shock absorbers, wheel stagger, camber, anti-roll bars, tyre pressures and compounds. Looking back in 1994, Computer Gaming World’s Gordon Goble remembered the appeal: “Indy 500 featured no gravity-defying loops, no jumps, no ray guns, just one simple oval track. Boring? Only to the uninitiated.” Cutting half a second off a lap was the reward.

Grand Prix and IndyCar

Crammond’s Formula One Grand Prix (1991), sold in America as World Circuit, brought the whole Formula One calendar to the Amiga, Atari ST and PC, each circuit, in Computer Gaming World’s words, “an accurate representation of its real-life self”. The kerbs behaved like kerbs, too: they could help turn the car through a corner or scrub off speed under one wheel. The reviewer thought it had done “what countless other predecessors could not do — provide realism, excitement, and challenge in one neat package”. Its sequels, Grand Prix 2 (1996), 3 (2000) and 4 (2002), are covered in the Crammond entry.

Papyrus answered with IndyCar Racing in 1993. Goble called it “the first racing simulation to join the flight simulators on the 3D texture-mapping bandwagon”, and praised its drafting, the trick of tucking in behind another car to use it as a windbreak: “never have I pulled out from behind the front-running vehicle and felt such wicked turbulence.” The cars got lighter as fuel burned off and handled differently as their tyres wore, and he found it “genuinely surprising how such a powerful machine requires such a gentle touch”. His verdict: “the purest driving game ever let loose on the gaming public”.

NASCAR Racing followed at the end of 1994. “I’m no mechanic,” Goble admitted, but the game made him one. The garage was the way to win: shock stiffness, gear ratios, tyre pressures and camber, weight moved from side to side because NASCAR cars “mostly turn left”, even the fuel load, since each gallon weighed almost seven pounds. Papyrus asked for at least a fast 486, and its high-resolution SVGA mode really wanted a Pentium, and Goble thought it “the best total racing experience ever created”.

Grand Prix Legends

Papyrus’s most extreme game went back in time. Grand Prix Legends (Sierra, 1998) recreated the 1967 Formula One season, the last before wings, with its drivers, its cars and its eleven circuits. Edge found the team visiting town halls for the blueprints of tracks that had since vanished. Kaemmer told the magazine: “We are modelling everything, right down to gyroscopic torques.” His producer, Matt Sentell, explained what was new: “one wheel can leave the ground. Most games only distinguish the car being on the track, or completely off the track, instead of true physics being applied.” In Sierra’s own magazine Kaemmer chose 1967 because the 3-litre cars “had plenty of horsepower” and “some of the most famous drivers of all time were racing then”, and said the team had multiplayer working before the computer drivers.

The result was hard to drive. Computer Gaming World’s review, by Goble again, warned that “even the most skilled sim driver may well find himself several hours into the game before he’s managed to turn his first successful hot lap”, and asked whether realism had “been taken a bit too far”. He still called it “the most astonishing physics model ever to grace a racing game”. PC Zone, surveying the new force-feedback wheels that Christmas, regretted that “racing game of the moment Grand Prix Legends” did not support them at all. Writing in 2021, Motor Sport called the game a commercial flop.

Gran Turismo

On consoles the simulation arrived through a garage rather than a circuit. Sony’s Gran Turismo (1997) had players buy real production cars, pass licence tests and spend their winnings on tuning, and Edge praised it for straddling the divide between simulation and arcade game. The Gran Turismo entry tells its story. Its later influence reached the real pit lane: in 2008 Nissan and PlayStation ran the first GT Academy, a competition to turn the fastest Gran Turismo players into racing drivers. Its winner, the Spanish player Lucas Ordóñez, went on to race for Nissan for ten years, with podium finishes at the Le Mans 24 Hours.

iRacing

Kaemmer’s next venture was an online service. With John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox and a keen sim racer, he founded iRacing in the mid-2000s, and it opened in 2008 with eight cars and 22 North American circuits, laser-scanned so that every bump was in the right place. Its physics began from Papyrus’s last NASCAR code.

Motor Sport reported in 2021 that the circuits were used “as training tools by everybody from lowly club racers to top-shelf pros”, naming Dale Earnhardt Jr. as an early adopter and the NASCAR driver William Byron as one of a generation who learned to race largely on it. When the COVID-19 pandemic stopped real racing in 2020, NASCAR and IndyCar held televised races on iRacing, with professional drivers at the wheel.

Sources

Acorn User issue 35, June 1985, p. 11: “‘Revs’ follows ‘Aviator’ lead” (Silverstone, the Ralt RT3, adjustable wings, Geoff Crammond and David Hunt); Acornsoft’s Revs advertisement in the same issue (“‘game’ has nothing to do with it”; David Hunt’s corner-by-corner notes).
Barry Werger, “The Great Race”, Computer Gaming World issue 71, May 1990, p. 38: Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (David Kaemmer and Richard Garcia, Electronic Arts; the adjustable suspension).
Computer Gaming World issue 105, April 1993, pp. 62–64: World Circuit review (MicroProse, Geoff Crammond; Indianapolis 500 as the first sim with “a true cockpit feel”; the circuits and kerbs; the quotation).
Gordon Goble, “A New Front Runner In Racing Simulations”, Computer Gaming World issue 115, February 1994, pp. 32–34: IndyCar Racing (Indy 500 in 1989; drafting; fuel and tyre wear; texture mapping; the quotations).
Gordon Goble, “Road Hog!”, Computer Gaming World issue 127, February 1995, pp. 146–148: NASCAR Racing (designers Adam Levesque, John Wheeler and David Kaemmer; SVGA; the garage; the quotations).
Edge issue 51, November 1997, p. 36: Grand Prix Legends preview (the 1967 season, eleven tracks, town-hall blueprints, Kaemmer and Matt Sentell on the physics).
InterAction (Sierra), spring 1998, pp. 64–67: Kaemmer on Grand Prix Legends (why 1967; the physics engine; multiplayer before the AI).
Gordon Goble, “Blast From the Past”, Computer Gaming World issue 174, January 1999, pp. 344–345: Grand Prix Legends review (Sierra Sports, $49.95; the difficulty; the physics model).
Warren Chrismas, “Behind the Wheel”, PC Zone issue 71, Christmas 1998, p. 156: Grand Prix Legends without force-feedback support.
Preston Lerner, “The man who made iRacing: Dave Kaemmer’s smash hit”, Motor Sport, October 2021 (web, secondary): Grand Prix Legends a commercial flop; iRacing’s 2008 launch with eight cars and 22 laser-scanned tracks, built on Papyrus’s NASCAR code; John Henry; professional users; the 2020 races. https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/archive/article/october-2021/106/the-man-who-made-iracing-dave-kaemmers-smash-hit/
“History”, iRacing.com (web, secondary): Kaemmer and John Henry as founders; Henry’s Red Sox ownership. It gives the founding year as 2003, where other public sources give 2004. https://www.iracing.com/overview/history/
“iRacing”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): iRacing’s public launch on 26 August 2008 and its use of the NASCAR Racing 2003 Season physics code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRacing
“Ordóñez celebrates 10 years since GT Academy win”, Nissan press release, 4 September 2018 (web, secondary), and “First GT Academy winner Lucas Ordonez leaves Nissan after 10 years”, Autosport (web, secondary): the first GT Academy and Ordóñez’s career. https://global.nissannews.com/en/releases/release-860852d7040eed420ffbaebb220001ca-ordonez-celebrates-10-years-since-gt-academy-win and https://www.autosport.com/gt/news/first-gt-academy-winner-lucas-ordonez-leaves-nissan-after-10-years-5286210/5286210/
Formula One Grand Prix’s release and sequels, and Gran Turismo’s design and reception: see the Geoff Crammond and Gran Turismo entries and their citations.