My First Racing Game: F1 Race

[RaychelSnr]

It's a slow month for racing games this August, but instead of turning my attention to other sports like baseball or football, I decided to take a look back at a somewhat forgotten title that served as the origin story of my video game racing career.

The first racing game that I remember playing is also the first video game that I remember buying with my own money. I had saved up my allowance and some birthday to money to get F1 Race for the original Game Boy. Going back, I have no idea why I picked this game over any other title. Back then I had no access to the Internet or any gaming magazines, so it was just a blind purchase I guess -- or maybe it was just that sweet box art.

Regardless of why I bought it, I did and fired it up immediately after exiting the Toys 'R' Us and climbing back into my parents' car. I still remember a few of my habits from the game, too. One would be working my left thumb raw by holding up on the D-pad to use the game's boost. The other is that I never picked car A. Car A was faster without the boost, but car B had a higher boosted top speed and carried more boost.

Read More - My First Racing Game: F1 Race

[Dazraz]

Pole Position on the Atari 2600 (old git alert). From what I remember you just drove an F1 style car around a never ending track passing yellow cars on the way. The car sounded like a p***ed off bumble bee while the little jingle before each race had the potential of being an audible torture device.

For me the my first taste of a quality driving sim came on the Commodore Amiga computer system in the form of Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix. Although visually this game has obviously dated, at the time it set a whole new standard of F1 simulation. Indeed in terms of depth it still exceeds many more recent titles.
The game included all the F1 circuits at the time & thanks to an editing function it was pretty straight forward to put the real teams/drivers of the day in the game.
Where the game excelled was in the way it accurately simulated the sport. Something very few racing games ever do. You really felt that there was a real race going on around you with events happening all over the track such as retirements & crashes. How many times is a race game released where your car is the only one that can have a failure or crash out of the race. In fact the game even featured a mode whereby you could switch between drivers during a race. This novel feature was aimed at being a somewhat limited multiplayer mode whereby each player would race with their driver for a predetermined period of time & then play would switch to another player. This did mean that when you weren't driving your car the computer would take over your car. Where the mode really worked is in implementing team tactics. You could change to your team mate maybe to slow up the rest of the field or even try a few dirty tactics to help your race. That said all the F1 rules were in place so black flags would be handed out to anyone doing anything illegal. You could even switch drivers to complete the race in the event that your driver crashed out or had a car failure. This is a option that I would love to see in all racing games. EA Sports did have a feature on the last version of their Nascar series on the PS2 where you could switch between team mates during a race but other than that this is a mode that never seems to be considered in race games.
Grand Prix also had a very in depth car set up option for any budding engineers out there.

Grand Prix set the standard of true racing simulation at the time. Let's hope Codemasters will be delivering something special with their forthcoming F1 title.

[ffyfe7]

My first racing game......man this may take a while. The first I remember was NFS (original or Hot Pursuit) on PS1. I remember when I was 5 my brother and I got a PS1 for Christmas, we ended up running down to the video store and renting NFS. I use to spend hours just listening to the voiceover guy in the car select screen and the racing was fantastic. Then soon after I was introduced to Gran Turismo but I found it too hard (I was about 8 at the time). Ever since I have loved all genres of video games and just today I preordered GT5 and F1 2010 so i'm set in regards to racing games for a long time.

I know that I had played racing games before then but I can't remember (may have been TOCA Touring Cars). Looking back on this I feel quite young. While I may not be up there amongst the greatest racers, I will always run a fair race

[stlstudios189]

Mario Andretti racing was the first won I really remember. I am sure I played pole position on Atari or Nintendo but this game you could race indy and stock cars and kept season standings!!! the season was 6 races long but my brother and I would just play this game over and over.

[RynoAid]

Re: My First Racing Game: F1 Race

Enduro

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aY9bUpW43Kc?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aY9bUpW43Kc?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

[goalie]

haha - i was about to write "pole position" - and then i saw it as the first comment... nice!

[Segagendude]

Re: My First Racing Game: F1 Race

"Pitstop" for Colecovision was my first racer, circa 1983. Kinda resembled an F1 game. Scroll down here:

http://www.videogamecritic.net/colecomr.htm

I'd play that game for hours upon hours, lol.......

[Ermolli]

Re: My First Racing Game: F1 Race

Formula One 99 for the PSX, played it for years.

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/HtaKh3x528k?fs=1&amp;hl=es_ES"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/HtaKh3x528k?fs=1&amp;hl=es_ES" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

[jrp1918]

I remember F1 99. It was on the demo disc that came with my Playstation and I played it a ton. All I did was play that and this rally game (can't think of the name) that I was terrible at. I never ended up buying either game though.