Have Your Say: Your First Racing Game

[Paul Jeffrey]

Everyone remembers their first love, and racing games are no different. With such a wealth of content on offer today, can you cast your mind back and remember the very first?

No doubt about it, "sim racing" has advanced practically beyond imagination since those tentative first days of Pole Position back in the early 1980's. With highly polished graphics, detailed physics, multi car grids, online racing and all the other bells and whistles of modern gaming, a sim racer today is spoilt for choice when it comes to the wonderful pastime of driving digital racing cars.

So for our question today I ask, which game (on what platform) was your very fist foray into the world of racing?

Have fun reminiscing and enjoy the weekend!

 

[Robin_NL]

'Turbo' for the CBS Colecovision. You could even buy a wheel back in 1981/82.

Pole Position, REVS(wow!)...Rally Speedway was fun too.(mid 80s)

Cheers
Robin

 

[jp chemisky]

On PC, a little bit later : My first games were :
- Test Drive
- NASCAR
- Colin Mc Rae (1&2 : first wheel experience)

And after that, I came on to the sims :
- GPL
- The fabulous GTR2002 mod for F1 2002 : birth of Simbin ...
- Everyone could imagine the following : GTR, GTL, GTR2 & Power&Glory Mod, AC, ...

 

[The Arj Guy]

Mine was NFS porsche and collin macree...........i love those games

 

[Scrambles]

Pole Position on the C64. My mother tells me that I had learnt to type LOAD"*",8,1 before I could even talk properly.

 

[ronniej]

Pretty sure I had Pitstop II as well, but Gran Turismo on PS1 was very memorable and what started it all....We use to do time trials for money and beer shots etc.

 

[ronniej]

When I say "sim experience", well, it had a wheel and a gas pedal and that was enough to get this ten year old excited. Not much has changed really...

Pure Gold.

 

[Edivad82]

My Sim Career:
-Grand Prix 2
-RAC International Rallye Championship
-F1 Racing Simulation
-Grand Prix 3
-Grand Prix 4
-F1 2002
-F1 Challenge '99-'02
-Gtr2
-F1 2010--->F1 2017
-Assetto Corsa
-Project Cars
-Automobilista

 

[Dave Wild]

Geoff Crammond's F1GP on my newly purchased Amiga 1200 complete with a joystick controller

 

[Nobkins]

Ummm showing my age here....

Pole position on the BBC B Micro. Lots of frantic key tapping involved

 

[throughalens83]

I always used to play on PC.. My first ever game was the legendary GP1, then comes GP2, CART Precision Racing, GP3, GP4, Race - The WTCC Game.
Then I stopped playing racing sims for a while, until I met Live For Speed, which I followed in all its development.
Then comes the PS3 times, with GT6 and its thousands of cars.
In the 2016 I finally bought a serious racing wheel, the T300RS and with it came Project Cars, I liked it, but the physics never really satisfied me, that's way in May I tried Assetto Corsa, and it was love at first turn.

 

[pixeljetstream]

on NES F1 Sensation

But quickly after that GP1 on PC with Joystick, just loved the rhythm of Monaco. Think there were even mods with updated skins/season specs.

Papyrus Indy car racing was also very cool, but the F1 titles had me more hooked.
So will never forget getting GP2 and the insane price/feature set (telemetry etc.). I hardly had the discipline for championships, but wanted to win every race. So I spent a lot more time on the early tracks of the seasons...

The first NeedForSpeed was another game, not so much sim, but great memories. Loved the traffic road racing.

 

[Dave R]

Pole Position (1983) on Commodore 64.

Yes same for me. I'm older than dirt !!

 

[JPL083]

First touch to racing game's? Umm... End of eightie's, Pitstop it was. Ooohh boy... Time flies :| But huge amount of great time's back then, and more was to follow, and still going =)

 

[JPL083]

This was mine

Oh my god... I did have Corvette C4-Version with Pop-up headlight's and all =)

 

[Andy_J]

I have been playing games on computers since the days of the C-64 but my first race game was Nigel Mansells World Championship on my Commodore c-64 I thing. Then I upgraded to a 486dx pc and started on Indycar Racing by Papyrus. And have had every decent racing and flight sim since. I loved the early years of PC sim racing though where every year saw an advance in technology. When decent graphic cards started coming out, the games got better looking too.

I am a bit of a retro Pc gamer though, I even have a spare retro PC that I built running windows 95 and DOS 6.2 just to use some of my old software and games.
Currently loving playing those old classics Nascar Racing 2003 and RBR 2016 mod.

 

[hawkalpin]

Did you used to play Duck Hunt also with the gun ? I was the boss

I didn't have the gun
And I think you confused with Safari Hunt. I got the NES after.

 

[CC]

I didn't have the gun
And I think you confused with Safari Hunt. I got the NES after.

wonder where in my mind I got duck hunt from lol , still sounds correct where i hear it even just looking online and it been Safari Hunt

 

[Ole Andreasen]

Revs! Mid nineteen eighties.

On the breadbox of course (And for the younger audience, that´s the Commodore 64, )

 

[hawkalpin]

wonder where in my mind I got duck hunt from lol , still sounds correct where i hear it even just looking online and it been Safari Hunt

No problem, in the end is all about hunting.

Mine was this...

Loved the South Africa track if i remember rightly

Now I remember the old ROM hacking days... This was made by some Peruvian guys back in the 90s.

 

[fastfab]

Mine was Lotus Esprit turbo challenge on Atari ST.

Then pretty much anything that happen on console or PC.
But the game I remember playing to death are; Ayrton Senna Monaco GP2, Outrun, Virtua Racing, Formula One, Newman Haas Racing, Monaco GP simulation 2, Gran Turismo 1&2, Sega Rally, Ridge Racer, F355, Sega GT, NFS 1& 4 & Porsche, Rally RAC, Rallisport Challenge 1&2, F1 2002, GTR2, Geoff Crammond GP3&4, Colin Mcrae 2, PGR 2, All the Forza games and now Assetto Corsa and Dirt Rally that I have since their first alpha release are my 2 to go racing game.
The 2 biggest jaw dropping moment where when I first saw Daytona Usa arcade in 1994, the game had litteraly 60fps graphics 10 years ahead of its time and the first time I fired Assetto Corsa with the HTC Vive : A long time dream come true.