Screenshots :.
Grand Prix Legends
Old School
Matt
24-05-2007
"It used to be the bee's knees of racing"
"The cars are the same, it's the colours that make the difference"
"Jimmy Clark - Britain's finest."
As I sat behind the wheel of my spinning red bathtub heading for a painful collision with a lovely piece of redbrick walling for approximately the third time in a half-hour, a thought struck me. ‘This is insanely difficult, and I’m not sure exactly why I’m still playing this’ I muttered to myself as my car contacted aforementioned wall and cart wheeled into a nearby ditch, upside-down and mildly on fire. It had not been a great morning.
Yet I kept on playing. The game? Grand Prix Legends. Developed by Papyrus and released on the PC in 1998, the title presented a simulation of the 1967 Formula One season. Back then, media coverage for each Grand Prix was minimal, cars looked like kazoos with wheels on each corner and the regular risk of injury or even worse hung over the drivers’ heads at every turn. This was not an era for the weak of heart, with cars buzzing past houses, trees and sand dunes with nothing to keep them clattering into the scenery apart from their skill.
Which translates to the player having nothing to separate them from the scenery but their own skill as well. Initially, things didn’t go too well for the majority of GPL players and most people’s first experiences with the game resulted in them facing backwards at the side of the circuit having just spun at the very first corner. The cars, shorn of aerodynamic wings and heart-stopping braking power, felt sluggish and heavy by comparison to modern F1 simulations, needing to be coaxed around whilst balanced on the fine edge of adhesion.
This really was racing without a safety net. Straying mere fractions off the edge of the circuit would spit your car across the road in no time at all, and without safety barriers around the majority of each of the circuits when you did spin you would either end up miles away from the ribbon of tarmac or smacking into some sort of solid object. Completing a single lap without binning it became a beautiful, thrilling achievement in the early few days of play and this was before most players had even tried race conditions.
It did get better, though. As time went on the handling model proved intuitive, allowing virtual racers to learn the characteristics of their vehicles and adapt to them. Gradually mistakes were ironed out and instead of focusing so much on trying to prevent themselves from disappearing backwards through a hedge, people got down to setting some blindingly quick lap times and fighting it out with the opposition AI. As games went at that stage, the AI itself was aggressive and intelligent, whilst also knowing when it was time to relent if it had been beaten.
A racing game is nothing without good circuits, and fortunately Formula One circa-1967 had them in bucket loads. The season opens up with the comparatively simple Kyalami in South Africa, a sweeping, quick track that will test your nerve. From there it’s straight onto the streets of Monaco, as tight and twisting as ever but with a ridiculously quick and narrow chicane after the tunnel. The two major chunks of tarmac gold are without doubt Spa and the Nurburgring though; both are present in their original forms and represent a white-knuckle challenge over miles of twisting road.
For anyone wanting to scout out Grand Prix Legends now, the seeds of your investment (you’ll be looking at eBay I’m afraid) do bear fruit. Predictably for a game offering a brilliantly realistic driving experience and simulating a golden period in a very popular sport, GPL still holds a very strong community to this day. This community has created a number of fantastically detailed mods that will give the original game a huge longevity boost, whilst also bringing it up to a more modern level in terms of graphical power.
Sure, GPL isn’t a pick-up-and-play kind of racer, and its simulation roots mean that it appeals to a smaller demographic, but that doesn’t dilute the quality it packs in. For a game approaching the age of 9, the fact that it still sits comfortably alongside more modern simulation efforts really is a testament to the time and effort spent during the long development period. At the time of release the game clearly proved that, no matter how good F1 was at the time, things were equally as good in the past. Ironically, the best part of a decade later GPL proves exactly the same thing when it comes to video games.
Yet I kept on playing. The game? Grand Prix Legends. Developed by Papyrus and released on the PC in 1998, the title presented a simulation of the 1967 Formula One season. Back then, media coverage for each Grand Prix was minimal, cars looked like kazoos with wheels on each corner and the regular risk of injury or even worse hung over the drivers’ heads at every turn. This was not an era for the weak of heart, with cars buzzing past houses, trees and sand dunes with nothing to keep them clattering into the scenery apart from their skill.
Which translates to the player having nothing to separate them from the scenery but their own skill as well. Initially, things didn’t go too well for the majority of GPL players and most people’s first experiences with the game resulted in them facing backwards at the side of the circuit having just spun at the very first corner. The cars, shorn of aerodynamic wings and heart-stopping braking power, felt sluggish and heavy by comparison to modern F1 simulations, needing to be coaxed around whilst balanced on the fine edge of adhesion.
This really was racing without a safety net. Straying mere fractions off the edge of the circuit would spit your car across the road in no time at all, and without safety barriers around the majority of each of the circuits when you did spin you would either end up miles away from the ribbon of tarmac or smacking into some sort of solid object. Completing a single lap without binning it became a beautiful, thrilling achievement in the early few days of play and this was before most players had even tried race conditions.
It did get better, though. As time went on the handling model proved intuitive, allowing virtual racers to learn the characteristics of their vehicles and adapt to them. Gradually mistakes were ironed out and instead of focusing so much on trying to prevent themselves from disappearing backwards through a hedge, people got down to setting some blindingly quick lap times and fighting it out with the opposition AI. As games went at that stage, the AI itself was aggressive and intelligent, whilst also knowing when it was time to relent if it had been beaten.
A racing game is nothing without good circuits, and fortunately Formula One circa-1967 had them in bucket loads. The season opens up with the comparatively simple Kyalami in South Africa, a sweeping, quick track that will test your nerve. From there it’s straight onto the streets of Monaco, as tight and twisting as ever but with a ridiculously quick and narrow chicane after the tunnel. The two major chunks of tarmac gold are without doubt Spa and the Nurburgring though; both are present in their original forms and represent a white-knuckle challenge over miles of twisting road.
For anyone wanting to scout out Grand Prix Legends now, the seeds of your investment (you’ll be looking at eBay I’m afraid) do bear fruit. Predictably for a game offering a brilliantly realistic driving experience and simulating a golden period in a very popular sport, GPL still holds a very strong community to this day. This community has created a number of fantastically detailed mods that will give the original game a huge longevity boost, whilst also bringing it up to a more modern level in terms of graphical power.
Sure, GPL isn’t a pick-up-and-play kind of racer, and its simulation roots mean that it appeals to a smaller demographic, but that doesn’t dilute the quality it packs in. For a game approaching the age of 9, the fact that it still sits comfortably alongside more modern simulation efforts really is a testament to the time and effort spent during the long development period. At the time of release the game clearly proved that, no matter how good F1 was at the time, things were equally as good in the past. Ironically, the best part of a decade later GPL proves exactly the same thing when it comes to video games.
8/10
