Formula 1 is very much an international sport. The 2000 Formula One World Championship saw drivers from 11 different countries compete in races across 15 different countries. It brought in the typical massive worldwide audience. At one level though, Formula 1 has also long been a peculiarly British sport.
Of the 11 teams those drivers did their driving for, 7 were based in the UK, with history and a cluster effect among the reasons why. Teams taking their names from an Italian fashion brand, an Irish entrepreneur, a racing driver from New Zealand, and British American Tobacco all did the actual design and manufacture of their cars in Britain.
Over in the world of Formula One video games, things weren’t too different. On the PC, the biggest F1 game was the latest Grand Prix game, Grand Prix 3, published by Microprose (American) but with development led by Geoff Crammond (British). And for the two big console F1 games based on the 2000 season, it was also the same kind of story as the Benetton and Jordan teams.
In the blue corner, Formula One 2000, the latest in a series I covered the first two games of. Formula One 2000 was ultimately representing Japan’s Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., but developed by a wholly owned subsidiary in Liverpool, soon to be known as SCE Studio Liverpool. For now the developer was still called Psygnosis, as they were when they developed Wipeout and when they published Lemmings.
In the red corner was a newcomer, F1 2000. Published by American giant Electronic Arts, it was labelled up as one of their EA Sports titles and given a similar template cover to all their other games of the time like FIFA 2000. F1 2000 was not developed by an EA studio, though, but contracted out to Visual Science, a developer based in Dundee. Visual Science was founded by Russell Kay, formerly of DMA Design… and one of the main programmers of Lemmings. It’s always fun how many British successes you can trace back to that one game.
Being developed in Britain and being named almost identically are not the only thing the two games have in common. Both had official licences for the championship, with all the tracks, teams and drivers for 2000 (even the previously-reluctant Jacques Villeneuve). So, for instance they both commemorate the time that the British Grand Prix got moved to April against all logic and knowledge of British weather, and spectators arriving at Silverstone by car turned the surrounding fields into a mudbath.
Psygnosis’s series had steadily ramped up arcade options for a while, but it was grounded in an accurate simulation of the sport with the trappings of television coverage. F1 2000 is grounded in… an accurate simulation of the sport with the trappings of television coverage. It gives you vaguely informative radio messages from your team back in the pits instead of Murray Walker on commentary, and in line with other EA Sports games it has some contemporary pop music in the menus (Placebo’s “Every You Every Me” and Leftfield’s “Phat Planet”, already The One From The Guinness Advert), but that’s not much to build a separate identity on.
F1 2000 and Formula 1 2000 is not quite a Racing Point/Mercedes situation and there are some definite improvements and changes compared to its rival. It’s easier to see the track clearly into the distance, and even if it’s at the expense of a certain level of detail, at the speed you go at it’s a valuable trade-off. The game’s array of options and assists to try to get over the inevitable issue that driving an F1 car is really difficult are far from perfect, but the gentle braking assist is pretty nicely balanced. On the other hand, when running into other cars I got some janky physics that would have been an unpleasant surprise even back on the Amiga. Seeing the car of the aforementioned Villeneuve flung across the track by a mysterious invisible force was quite an immersion-breaking moment.
The biggest issue with F1 2000 remains that it doesn’t have anything in the way of unique purpose. It was out first, timely for the start of the Formula 1 season, and that presumably motivated people to buy it instead of (or as well as) Formula One 99, but that’s about it. The situation of having two games with such overlap was surely non-optimal to all involved. And this wasn’t to prove an epic battle over many years like EA Sports football games vs Konami’s, or EA Sports basketball games versus 2K’s, but a rare easy defeat. It wasn’t long until EA’s F1 series was no more, with the exclusive Formula 1 licence given to Sony, before later passing to a British company whose strength in racing games had surely earned it.
Perhaps EA weren’t that committed to begin with. Perhaps Psygnosis/Studio Liverpool, with their history and their backing by one of the few industry players with more weight to throw around than EA, were always in too strong a position to be knocked down from. If Sensible Software or Gremlin Graphics had similar, maybe things would have turned out differently with FIFA. As much as I wasn’t a big fan of FIFA International Soccer, though, it was very obvious that it was at least doing something new. It’s failing to find any such gap that seals F1 2000’s pointlessness.
Top of the charts for week ending 1 April 2000:
UK games: F1 2000 (Visual Science/EA Sports, PS1) 
Japan games: Tekken Tag Tournament (Namco, PS2) 
UK films: Lake Placid 
UK singles: Westlife – Fool Again 
UK albums: Santana – Supernatural