Let’s talk a little about simracing, pt. 1

I can just feel the rush of enthusiasm in the general reader as they read a sentence like that. Sim racing is one of those genres of an already nerdy hobby that even those who devote hours a day to “mainstream” games turn their nose up to it as being an unfortunate mix of too much real-world wanna-be-ism and esoteric knowledge. Considering that that is the majority opinion of others who already spend so much of their life plunked in front of a screen for their hobby, the mind reels at the perception from your average non-gamer. I can see it in my wife’s eyes every time I start talking about pedals or she sees me looking at data analysis for my game. That glazed, mildly disappointed and completely uninterested look of one who wonders just what it was they found sexually alluring in the person that they’re looking at now, building excel spreadsheets to compare spring rates and damping coefficients for fake race cars.

The simracing subculture is a unique one, mixing the technical prowess of fighting games and the spreadsheets of sports management sims. One thing that I’ve always loved about it is the ostensible connection to the real world that sim racing games provide. To that end, I’ve never been a big fan of arcade racer games. The Forzas, Burnouts and Grids of this world certainly have their time and place and I’m not saying they aren’t fun, but for me they never really held all that much of an allure.

My first real sim game was Gran Turismo, as I’m sure it was for many others of my generation. I recognize now that it still was something of a far cry from the more in depth simulations that were available even then, but compared to the other racing games that I had played (games like Cruising USA), it was a revelation. My older brother (who’s impact on my love of cars in general is immeasurable) introduced me to the game, and it wasn’t long before it became a staple at my friend’s houses. As an elementary school kid in the late 90s, my friends and I crushed the entirety of Gran Turismo 2, including all of the endurance races, with nothing but a d-pad and a couple of buttons. Back then we never even gave a consideration to a wheel and pedals. None of us had ever actually driven a car, and none of us could fathom what the real advantages would be, and again, it was just a game to us. We were just getting to that age where we were starting to get into cars, and had no real basis for what was cool or fast aside from those all-important horsepower numbers. We must have ruined hundreds of cars in that game, buying them and then dumping all of the money into upgrading them into uncontrollable monsters.

There was no way back then to know just what seeds were being planted. Amongst that group of friends that started the voyage with me, there is only me left out on the dweeboid edge of simulated racing. For myself, there was always more Gran Turismo, but also that slew of those aforementioned racing games and others including Midnight Club and Need for Speed (Porsche Unleashed was my personal favorite, there never being Porsche’s in Gran Turismo back in the day). Then there were the rally games like Colin McRae’s Dirt series and Rallisport Challenge. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I discovered the good stuff. The hardcore sims.

First was Richard Burns Rally. Rallying has long been my favorite form of motorsport, without a doubt stemming from the fact that my older sibling's first car was a 1996 Subaru Legacy Outback, and the slowly growing wave of rally fanboyism that came along with loving Subarus. McRae, Burns, and Solberg all winning titles in those blue cars became nearly inexplicable heroes for a bunch of kids from a small town in the middle of Northwest Ohio. Up until that point I had enjoyed rally games but with the caveat that I felt that they just weren’t as serious as Gran Turismo. Even the rallying in GT just never felt like it was right to me. Then, low and behold, one day I discovered Richard Burns Rally completely on accident while browsing NASIOC (the North American Subaru Impreza Owners Club). The game had been released a few years before but had gone basically completely unrecognized, especially in the States. At the time it was also pretty much impossible to get your hands on a copy of it here - you had to pirate it.

What intrigued me about it was that everyone who spoke of it stated in no uncertain terms that it was in fact the most realistic and brutal rallying game that had ever been created, and on top of that, it had a large mod community that kept updating it and adding cars every year. I torrented a copy, and then waded through the process of adding in all of the latest mods and updates, constantly having to refer to babblefish to help translate the massive amounts of French in the documentation. I could hardly believe it when I finally got it working. I was playing with a keyboard instead of a controller, as I had done for most of the other goofy racing games I happened to have on PC. It took about 5 minutes of gameplay, right up until the first time the game told me to think about something called “Left Foot Braking”, to realize that this was something different. This was a game that you would not be able to play without even a vague approximation of real vehicle controls. Knowing then that I needed to get a wheel is when the pitch of the rabbit hole suddenly sharpened deeply.

I’ll return to this topic soon, and when I do things are going to get nerdy as hell.

Until then, keep your rubber on the road.