![]() ![]() Faithfully recreating the effects of every single bouncing rock in a video game is a far bigger challenge than doing the same with smooth asphalt.Įven though Kylotonn can create in-game reproductions that are a 1-1 scale for super special stages, such as Turkey’s Marmaris, this simply isn’t feasible for full FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) rally courses. What’s more, rally stages are mostly dirt and gravel. Formula One tracks an average of 20 to 22 turns per lap, he says, while rally special stages can have anywhere from 100 to 300 turns. ![]() Benoit Gomes, the lead level designer at WRC 8 developer Kylotonn, is also quick to point out how much longer and more complex rally courses are than those of other motorsports. “Whereas with top-flight rallying, you’re looking at hundreds of kilometers in real life with routes changing all the time and road surfaces changing and evolving in a single day based on the weather.” “As the major circuits don’t change a great deal year on year, the team is able to constantly refine and improve the work it’s done on them,” says Gowing. Yet the longest Formula One ™ circuit currently in service is Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps ®, home of the Belgian Grand Prix, covering just 4.352 miles. To illustrate that point, the DirtFish Olympus Rally has a total distance of about 252 miles. Ross Gowing, game director for Codemasters, points to a popular saying: A circuit racer sees one corner a thousand times, whereas a rally driver sees a thousand corners once. The team at Codemasters ® – makers of racing game franchises such as DiRT, F1 and GRID ® – understand the difficulties inherent in teaching a player a rally course versus a circuit track all too well. When F1 2019 dropped in June of last year, it came with “a range of livery designs offering players a new level of personalization.” Rally: A Digital Challenge A rally is a whole different ballgame, and drivers such as Pastrana aren’t going to hone many skills with the aid of a video game. A race at Monza is a race at Monza the weather and the competition may be ever-changing, but the track never changes. What makes rallying such a leap from roundy-round racing or even road courses, though, is its unpredictability. This is a vital skill for pro drivers who need to set up for every corner in order to exit as quickly and cleanly as possible.Ĭould a game such as F1 ® make a young enthusiast a better driver before they ever reach the track? Possibly. But several studies have shown that playing video games can increase reaction time in players, which may contribute to better awareness and reaction time behind the wheel. Many studies have been conducted to test what happens to the brain when playing video games, and the results are complex. In 2020, however, this is open to debate. ![]() During the 1980s and 1990s, there was exactly one way to get better behind the tiller of a race car: spend more time behind the tiller of a race car. But nobody was talking about either of them as a way to develop skills for real driving. The advance in just 10 years between these two games was staggering, and they were as popular as video games got in their respective eras. It laid the foundation for games of all kinds to use 3D polygonal graphics (two-dimensional graphics that represent on screen as three-dimensional) allowing more realism than any game that had come before it. While available as a home game on Sega ™ Genesis ™, Virtua Racing’s greatest triumph – like Pole Position – was at the arcade. It’s regarded as “arguably the most important racing game ever made,” according to the book Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton, partly because Pole Position was the first game to feature tracks based on an actual racing circuit.īy 1992, the year that rally driver Travis Pastrana turned 9, the start of a kid’s prime video game years, the state-of-the-art racing game was Virtua Racing. Thirty-one years earlier, when Shepherd had won his first race in 1982 kicking off his long, esteemed career, the top racing game was the arcade hit Pole Position. In 2013 – at age 71 – Morgan Shepherd donned a fire suit, stuck a helmet on his head, folded himself into the window of his Sprint Cup car and became the oldest driver to ever start a NASCAR ® 1 Sprint Cup Series. ![]()
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