[ploek]

Oh wow!

For reasons unbeknownst to me, my father had that game for the PC. It was one of two games in our household at the time (The other being "Mario Is Missing!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Is_Missing!).

I played that quite a bit, but I think I spent most time painting the car, because I wasn't any good at the actual racing.

[sokoloff]

Yeah, you have described the essence of the problem. The game was quite realistic, enough that rookie Cup drivers would use the product to get familiar with tracks they'd not yet raced on, but that level of realism made it not so fun for the casual gamer. (It turns out that racing cars at the top professional level is actually hard and not something you pick up in 15 minutes.)

We would go to NASCAR events, weigh and measure car components, talk to the crews/drivers, and most of us even got the first level of competition license (typically 3 full days of classroom and on-track instruction and then 3-6 more days of individual mostly track time) so we understood what driving a racing car near, at, and slightly over the limit was like.

The PSX product introduced a feature that later made it back to some of our PC titles, called "Arcade Mode". It was still racing (in that skill mattered), but arcade mode gave the cars far better braking, allowed them to slide and pivot more but spin out less (by changing tire slip curves), and gave drag reduction to cars that were losing the race. We also introduced the smoky burnout/donut ability which immediately made it into the PC title (but had a bug that caused a smoky burnout to be the fastest way to launch the car from a standing start, which critics [rightly] hated).

At the end of the day, fairly few people are interested in very realistic racing. (Many of the ex-Papyrus team are over at iRacing now and they're on the ultra-realistic side of things.) If you want to sell a mass-market game, ultra-realism doesn't sell as well as fun and engaging gameplay.

The end state of this drive for realism was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_Legends which I worked on some of the early code for, but left before it shipped. Even in the early stages, with the best computer and graphics card of the day, a full set of physical controls (including force feedback steering), it was difficult to drive the car around for a single lap at 9/10ths pace, let alone race them in traffic.

[burnte]

Back then you could still sell PCs as a small shop and make money. I had a guy buy an entire PC custom built just for that game. I remember him and this game very clearly because I was cycling, dislocated my kneecap, and had to go to the ER, so his delivery was delayed. I found him in my driveway when I got home from the ER. he looked at my leg in a brace and said, "Oh, I'm so glad you're actually hurt!" He though I was scamming him and waited for me to see if I was really injured.

[J5892]

Ha. The guy's train of thought was clearly, "If this guy's legs aren't broken, they're going to be."

[siver_john]

I remembered attempting to play this game on my Dad's playstation as a kid and always crashing. Glad I can now blame it on the fact the game was "too" realistic and not my poor skills as a young child. (But let's be honest it was definitely the fact I was a young kid who had no clue what I was doing). This was a fun memory to walk down though so thanks for that!

[mirsadm]

Thanks for taking the time to write that! It's super interesting. Have you stuck with games dev since then?

[sokoloff]

No. If I wanted to stay in games, I’d have 100% stayed with that crew at Papyrus then Sierra and then gone to iRacing with them. Excellent colleagues all around: super talented, super interesting to work and eat/BS with.

I wanted a family and financial security and the game industry wasn’t going to take me where I wanted to go (and I worked on generally successful titles for a successful company; most game devs have it even worse). The Sierra Online acquisition was great; loved meeting and talking about games with Ken and Roberta, but then the subsequent spate of acquisitions just killed a lot of the joy and essence of what made the day-to-day work fun, so that also made it easier to leave.

[InitialLastName]

If it helps, one of those Indycar games got 6-year-old me into a sim racing addiction that has followed me for decades.

I went from driving backwards on track to make crashes happen (thanks for not making rules that stopped me from doing that!), to driving faster than anyone else (because my engine was turned up and I turned down the AI), to actually trying to race as my cognitive abilities (and interest in challenge) improved.

[nwallin]

It was bundled with the matrox millennium, which was the best video card available.

Unbenounced to 14 year old me, the matrox millennium had a flat shaded polygon 3d acceleration capability, which made NASCAR run pretty well if you turned textures off. (which is why it was bundled with the card) I kept textures on because I didn't know any better, and the game ran fairly poorly. Ultimately I never played it very much because the framerate was frustratingly low.

Damn shame. It was years later that I found that out. Of course I was terrible at it anyway, so it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.

Anyway, that's probably why your dad had the game.