I remember playing Formula One Grand Prix in the ‘90s, a copy supplied by my uncle with an Excel print out of answers to the game’s copy protection. I remember it as a mightily impressive game, but also a slightly staid one, a game focused on the dry factual matters of simulation at the expense of personality. Then I came to play it anew, and hit the intro soundtracked by the most ludicrous, incredible Amiga funk music interpolating the iconic Fleetwood Mac theme to from the BBC’s Formula 1 coverage of the time. That is a long way from staid.
In truth, there is nothing else that compares to the intro music, though touches like finishing a race and then driving a cooldown lap past all of the marshals waving flags are as thoughtfully fun as they are accurate. What the intro does demonstrate, though, are two major elements of Formula One Grand Prix – its accessibility and its debt to television.
Neither of those are the heart of Formula One Grand Prix, which is its exquisitely detailed three-dimensional simulation of racing a Formula 1 car. Cleverly using a mostly static picture of the cockpit for much of the screen, like developer Geoff Crammond’s previous Stunt Car Racer, your narrow window out onto the track never feels like a compromise. The view you get is a long way from photo-realistic, with low framerate and a world of featureless cuboids, but the outlines of grandstands and bridges whizzing by give it a real sense of place nonetheless. The high speed Monza and Hockenheim and the terrifyingly cramped Monaco deliver unmistakeable experiences.
Of course the experience is at least at much about the driving than the place, and that is rendered richly, the speed and braking power suitably impressive and with lots of nuances. When other cars enter the picture things can feel slightly weightless, but there is a pulse-quickening tension in trying to safely maneuver past them. And the fact you can see those rivals in your somewhat working mirrors is a delight even now.
A complex and detailed simulation of a bloody difficult job is by nature a little bit difficult to get into, but Formula One Grand Prix has no time for being exclusionary. Its driving aids can be flicked on and off with the function keys at any moment, taking you from fully wrestling with a V12 beast, manual gears and all, to not even having to worry about braking. You can, if you choose, set it up so you just have to hold down accelerate, steer along a helpful white guideline on the track, and just worry about beating all of those other cars. I don’t know if anyone who wasn’t already into F1 went for it, but in many ways it’s a more welcoming game than the more obviously crowd-pleasing Stunt Car Racer.
Beyond that easy mode, even, you can give up on controlling any car at all and just watch a race play out in front of you, using other key commands to switch from the cockpit views to less practical outside ones and switch which car in the race you are watching. Hidden within Formula One Grand Prix, unremarked, is an F1 TV Director Simulator. I remember playing that, as well. Maybe it’s just another way of appealing to the existing obsessive, but to make a racing model so detailed and then support players to have this much freedom to go and do what they want with it speaks of generosity and confidence.
Virgin Megastore Amiga chart, Zero, April 1992
