The ‘90s was a high point for motorsport in the UK, both in terms of success and popularity. Looking at the records of the BBC’s cross-sports Sports Personality of the Year award, decided by a public vote, is illustrative. The award was won by Formula One drivers three times in the ‘90s, and only once since. Lewis Hamilton has won the Formula One world championship six times and the award only once, while in the ‘90s Damon Hill won more Sports Personality of the Year awards than world championships. Meanwhile, 1995 was the one and only time that a rally driver made the top three in voting: Britain’s first rally world champion, Colin McRae. The late ‘90s was also a great time for British motorsport video games, not least for Codemasters. They’ve been part of the story of British #1 games almost right from the beginning and have shown a great deal of versatility, but this was the point where they settled into a new direction, and Colin McRae helped them on their way.
I followed his success on TV, the only time I’ve consistently watched rallying. It made for a very different viewing experience to circuit-based racing. It was shown as highlights and didn’t show a developing competition live in the same way, as it would be difficult to without taking up a lot more time. What it could offer instead was more of a wow factor at what drivers were achieving, particularly when it came to views from inside the car as trees whizzed past inches away. In the dark. Meanwhile a co-driver who was audibly being bounced around read out pace notes giving instructions, with preternatural calm. In many ways, this experience was the ideal candidate for turning into a video game, but Sega Rally and V-Rally had only partially done so, presenting circuit racing with rally trappings. Colin McRae Rally takes it a lot further.
Colin McRae Rally still doesn’t go all the way for a perfectly accurate representation. Within each of its rallies it uses fictional, much shorter stages, which I didn’t really think about when I played it back in the ‘90s but makes sense. It has some other clever contrivances too. In a real rally you might be running at various different points in the order. In Colin McRae Rally (at least in single player mode) you are always the last one to go, so if you are in first place you know there isn’t anyone coming behind that might beat you. That’s a necessary one to have a sense of progress as you go along, and it works brilliantly.
I found the difficulty as perfectly pitched as I remembered it — this is not my first time playing it, but that’s probably balanced out by the length of time in between and my dulled reactions. Like V-Rally, I started sliding around disastrously in a Subaru, but this time I soon got control of it. Pulling off perfect handbrake turns around hairpins is challenging but very possible, which feels good. Even before achieving such mastery, I was at least fighting out with inferior cars for the minor positions in the top 16, so every tiny improvement still felt meaningful. Each rally stage is broken down into sections and you get updated at the end of each as to your time; a display on the right of the screen tracks completed sections and how many remain to complete. If you put together enough strong corners to be the fastest on a particular section, that section lights up green instead of red and it’s all very exciting.
Colin McRae’s name is on the box and his voice appears in the tutorial mode, but it’s actually his co-driver Nicky Grist who contributes most to the experience of playing the game, as the voice for its extensive pace notes. Previous rally games had a few different types of corners to notify you of, but Grist provides far more detail than that. I count eight different gradations of corner sharpness (numbered 1-5 and then square, hairpin, tight hairpin) and then there are the warnings not to cut corners and an impressive range of other obstacles, with rocks and ditches and more specific issues all around. Working out in seconds how to react to “Caution, square left into square right through narrow gate” is involving to a level that predecessors hadn’t managed.
The courses provide a constantly changing stream of challenges, in a way that shares the strengths of earlier scripted checkpoint racers like Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 while disguising the artificiality. All of the thrills of using different surfaces from Sega Rally are present but used in a much more complex and expansive way. Doing things like working out to dip a single front wheel into mud to help slow it down and turn more tightly soon feels natural and rewarding. The variety of the game’s tracks also benefits from the real championship introducing gimmicky ‘super special stages’ where two cars run at once on parallel tracks, which practically seem invented with video games in mind.
The attention to detail is great beyond the course design too, from cosmetic touches like the sunlight lens flare to some slightly deeper ones. You race a couple of stages between each chance to repair the car (and save your progress) and sometimes those stages take place at different times of the day. At one point I smashed my right rear light against a post in stage 5 of the New Zealand rally, something that I only registered via the crunching sound of glass. Come stage 6 in the twilight with the lights now needed, the consequences became much clearer.
All of that makes good use of increased processing power and would not have been possible a generation earlier, even if it’s not particularly showy with it. The depth and care that goes right the way through makes for a rich experience that’s friendly to newcomers and works as something deeper. It’s not quite to Sega Rally what Gran Turismo was to Porsche Challenge in terms of vast expansion on a concept, but mostly because Sega Rally was better to begin with. The individual challenge nature of rally also lends itself really well to both that single player focus and taking turns at stages in competitive multiplayer. It’s not surprising that this was the racing game that the most members of my family competed at.
Colin McRae Rally makes the less confident, compromised versions of rallying that games offered before it look baffling in retrospect. It’s also a perfect example of a strong new approach for Codemasters that they would get an awful lot of mileage from.
