GTR Is Set For A Revival

GTR Revival.png
For those who have been around sim racing since the early 2000’s, the GTR series of titles are ones which are firmly etched on the brain.

For many, they are the titles that launch them into the world of sim racing in the first place. From GTR and GTR 2 through to GTR Evolution, the titles stood for realism and brought the world of FIA GT racing into our homes.

Join the conversation in the new GTR Revival forum here

For the last several years, there have been rumours, speculation and the occasional screenshot regarding a proposed GTR 3. However, these have been few and far between and have since dwindled into the background once more.

Today, an announcement has appeared which is completely out of the blue. @Ian Bell once head of Slightly Mad Studios and part of the original GTR development team, tweeted the news that he is working on a new title; GTR Revival.

Not only that, there are several other members of the original development team involved too including; Stephen Viljoen, Andy Garton, Stephen Baysted, Henrik Roos, Johan Roos and Vik Klomiets.

As far as the sim itself is concerned, there are no specific details just yet, but Ian Bell has promised that it will be a hardcore, no compromise title.


Will this be the GTR sequel that we have all been waiting for? Share your thoughts with us below as we await more information on GTR Revival.

(This is a developing story, more soon)

Updates

  • RaceDepartment asked Johan Roos (ex-Simbin) for a quote if the above tweet is true and he replied: "Well I do not deny it but cannot comment any further than Ian already has written and that it sounds like one hell of a game by one hell of a crew".
About author
Phil Rose
A passionate sim racer with over 20 years of virtual and real world motorsport experience, I am the owner and lead content creator at Sim Racing Bible as well as a writer here at RaceDepartment. I love all forms of motorsport, especially historic motorsport, but when it comes to sim racing, I will drive anything!
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I'm surprised how many people here feel that he p*ssed in their coffee and wan't nothing less than for his name and associations to fail...

Personally I want loads of eggs showing up... just because!
 
Strange - why would Reiza buy into something that is so broken. Really strange that.
I think you were missing completely what I was getting at.

The madness engine is great and I am more than happy to sing it's praises, it does a lot that other sims don't do, or are only just starting to do. RF2 for example made a big deal about track temperature simulation in their most recent content drop, Livetrack has been doing that - and a better job of it might I add - for years now.

Reiza clearly bought into Madness Engine because they could see the potential, they will have been shown what is 'under the hood' so to speak far more than any of us could understand.

Unfortunately for them, when they started getting into it, features were either poorly implemented with workarounds to get close to what SMS was trying to achieve, or simply didn't work.

Madness engine isn't broken, not was pCars 1 or 2, but several features of it, including ones that Mr Bell would love to sing about at the time, were broken or poorly implemented.

And therein lies the issue. Bell gets on his soapbox, generates a metric tonne of hype, fails to deliver, blames someone else. Goes away, comes back, back on soapbox, and starts hyping again "except for realises this time guys I promise".

I think he does so with good intentions initially, he's clearly passionate about Sims and Motorsports, I can't fault him for that. But right when it gets to the delivery stage he seems to fall to bits.

Here's an idea. Get a bunch of the talent he's clearly able to get on board, get as much work done as you can quietly, maybe only involving investors and carefully picking an appropriate publisher, then right when it's ready to go, and most importantly has all of the features his vision has already implemented, correctly, then start generating the hype. Maybe for once he wouldn't be over promising and under delivering then.
 
I think you were missing completely what I was getting at.

The madness engine is great and I am more than happy to sing it's praises, it does a lot that other sims don't do, or are only just starting to do. RF2 for example made a big deal about track temperature simulation in their most recent content drop, Livetrack has been doing that - and a better job of it might I add - for years now.

Reiza clearly bought into Madness Engine because they could see the potential, they will have been shown what is 'under the hood' so to speak far more than any of us could understand.

Unfortunately for them, when they started getting into it, features were either poorly implemented with workarounds to get close to what SMS was trying to achieve, or simply didn't work.

Madness engine isn't broken, not was pCars 1 or 2, but several features of it, including ones that Mr Bell would love to sing about at the time, were broken or poorly implemented.

And therein lies the issue. Bell gets on his soapbox, generates a metric tonne of hype, fails to deliver, blames someone else. Goes away, comes back, back on soapbox, and starts hyping again "except for realises this time guys I promise".

I think he does so with good intentions initially, he's clearly passionate about Sims and Motorsports, I can't fault him for that. But right when it gets to the delivery stage he seems to fall to bits.

Here's an idea. Get a bunch of the talent he's clearly able to get on board, get as much work done as you can quietly, maybe only involving investors and carefully picking an appropriate publisher, then right when it's ready to go, and most importantly has all of the features his vision has already implemented, correctly, then start generating the hype. Maybe for once he wouldn't be over promising and under delivering then.

Think you're answering to Johnr777 but I agree with both of you
 
It's hard to imagine a new GTR game with the current cars, ugly and slow.

If it is remaking the GTR2 game, well not sure it is worth the effort, as GTR2 is still playable and still feels great, with a complete package of cars and features, and it is now playable in VR.

I'd be interested in a game with several iconics years of GTs : 1996 (maybe the best car entries ever : mclaren F1, F40, lotus esprit, venturi 600, jaguar xj220, lister storm, viper...), 1997 or 1998, 2003 or 2004 (gtr2), 2007 (including the citation cup, so lot of different cars), 2009 (with the entries of the ford gt1 and the nissan gtr, last year of the milticlass racing). It would be also geeat to have IMSA GT years, even ALMS years, and some Japan super GT years. Even "just" 2 years of each continent would be amazing.

That would be a really worthy GTR revival. I'm not impressed by the former developpers of GTR2 being involved, I'm more concerned about Bell's last ambitious work, pcars2, a great game which has never been finished. Pcars3 is another story, it wasn't an ambitous title. The issue is that this guy is a good money maker, nobody can take that from him, but he hasn't any notion of customer service, and he won't change ; if he wasn't able to do it for pcars2, he won't ever do it.

Anyway, wait and see, I'd like to be positively surprised.
 
It wasn’t out of the blue,
Iann bell said on a podcast that “over eight months”
There would be a huge announcement, because then his no-compete clause would end


I was thinking of this podcast as well! And Austin further above confirmed that (as was implied in the podcast) he has been working alongside Ian Bell on this as well.
 
Anyway, to some of you passionately posting about your frustration with Ian Bell and the public comments he likes to make – look in the mirror. Look at the passion and the number of comments in this thread. Clearly, like it or not, his tactics work! He wanted to generate discussion and hype and publicity, and he's clearly accomplished that very well :roflmao:
 
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Yes, physics are broadly subjective and down to taste, but when you've got programmers looking at code and there are notes saying that 'this does this', but it fails to, because elsewhere there are lines missing, or spelt, or simply not referenced properly, incorrectly causing the dependencies on them to fail, then that is by very definition, broken.

FWIW, I think you're pretty much describing all software of any significant complexity. I've never been brought into any project that wasn't trivial that didn't contain some really terrible (and broken) code. What it comes down to his how buggy is it, how significant are those bugs and how poorly is it architected.
 
Looking at this from a sports team angle is probably the more rational viewpoint. I miss the PRC days and the performative theatre of bantering with Ian as well, but once you see inside the machine, your perspective changes a lot.

10 pages in and you'd think Ian Bell was the sole person on the staff at SMS, responsible for everything from coding the tire model to the force feedback, writing the Fast & Furious game's story, & designing the grindy career mode for pCars 3.

The CEO assembles the "roster" in good faith and makes high level financial deals. They are a sports team owner and their "season" is their game's release + post release plan. They are Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, etc.

All sports team owners are going to brag about how good their team is for the upcoming season, just as Ian talks up future projects.

Unfortunately, just as the Indianapolis Colts discovered Andrew Luck was injury prone and maybe not as good as he was in college, SMS found out the hard way that maybe the guy who designed OnRush and Driveclub, wasn't the best free agent signing; despite having a solid resume + references, being friendly, super organized and having an awesome work ethic, he fundamentally misunderstood the assignment of "make a spiritual successor to Shift 2" and left the company with a game suffering from a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas that had no target audience and nobody had any idea how to promote. This is not insider info but something you can figure out just by reading the credits of Driveclub, OnRush, and then pCars 3 in that order.

This is just the nature of team sports and creative projects. Yes, it sucks for the fans, and I fully understand. I live in Edmonton and see the best hockey player in the world on a billboard or poster every other block, only to watch us get knocked out of the playoffs year after year.

Ian by comparison getting funding to make a sequel to GTR 2, with the classic group that worked on the game and some internet turboautist that obsessively nitpicks racing sims (hi), means he's done his job as CEO quite well. And he's done this in a climate where one company run by Russians with connections to Miami fraudsters are running around snatching up racing licenses with next to no intentions of building the games they've announced, and just sort of hope nobody notices.

We now have to put our heads down and make a killer app, but what's on the drawing board is pretty awesome and we put a lot of thought into not falling prey to trends or feature sets that have diminishing returns.
 
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No, we're butthurt because he promised each successive game would fix the broken parts and they never did. I also notice you don't mention PC3 after he abandoned PC2...
Oh yeah, I wasn't touching that crap! :p But it wasn't marketed as a sim from the beginning to me.

I also didn't think either PC1 or PC2 were "broken", not like NASCAR Ignition at least. The FFB tuning was a trainwreck in PC1, and they fixed it for PC2. Not only that, but God's gift to simracing (AMS2) has retained that method of tuning...
 
Picking up on what Austin just posted, i think people wrongly assume Ian Bell "plays" in the same league as Stefano Casillo, Renato Simioni or Marcel O. But the truth is, Ian Bell was a head of a big studio, a much bigger affair than the projects of these other heads of studions. Ian Bell is NOT a programmer, nor does he get involved personally in the details of the product, because there were in the past whole teams, and senior personal to take up that role.

In Motorsports terms, Ian Bell is a Ron Dennis. He comes up with the cash, hires the people available that he sees are most fit for the job, and lets them do their work. Unfortunately, the price to pay for this is that indeed he will be "blamed", since he is the most public figure, but he is not there coding the thing himself, or doing physics, or designing the game progression, etc.
 
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