Grand Prix Legends Preview With New Alpha Screenshots

Just catch a glimpse of John Frankenheimer’s classic film Grand Prix, and you’ll immediately understand why it is the inspiration for Papyrus’s Grand Prix Legends. Based on the 1967 Grand Prix circuit, this sim looks to capture what is regarded as the most romantic, and deadliest, period of Formula 1 racing.

“Racing in the ’60s,” says Papyrus co-founder and chief technology officer Dave Kaemmer, “was largely on tracks that were unbelievably dangerous by today’s standards. The tracks were narrow and lined with trees, houses, and people. Plus, cars couldn’t skid off into track. Generally, if you left the track, there was going to be a big accident.”

The more one looks at that racing era, the easier it is to understand how it translates to a powerful gaming experience. The Grand Prix Legends team realized that in modern racing sims, like Papyrus’s own NASCAR and IndyCar series, the background environment is set away from the track and doesn’t give the player as strong a sense of speed because everything is far away. Grand Prix Legends, with its narrow roads, elevation changes, and close-in scenery, captures the danger that has only been found in arcade-style street racing games like Need for Speed and Screamer.

Unlike most modern, oval-shaped tracks, the close road courses of the ’67 circuit offer a greater challenge, leaving the player little margin for error. Drivers back in the 1960’s didn’t wear harnesses, primarily because they wanted out of crashes in a hurry. As there were no refueling pit-stops, the cars carried 75 gallons of gas and had extremely explosive fuel cells. Kaemmer mentions that more often than not crashes ended in fiery explosions; he says he’s seen some very disturbing footage from the era when drivers were actually thrown from their vehicles.

A gory arcade racer is the last thing Papyrus intends to create, after having spent years developing the top-branded NASCAR and IndyCar sims. Kaemmer has put a lot of thought into racing technology and believes that modern racing games wouldn’t be a great initial test-bed for the real physics his team is bringing to Grand Prix Legends. “Modern cars are very stiffly sprung,” he says. “They don’t really show what’s going on physically with the car. Plus they have a lot of air cam downforce that even masks some of the feel from the car. We decided to do a game with older cars, softer springs and no downforce. So you can see the cars bouncing, and on several of the circuits, one track in particular, they get airborne in several places.”

The new physics model, according to project producer Matt Sentell, will surely supersede anything currently on the market. “It’s truly 3D all the time,” says Sentell with a noticeably fading Southern accent. “So what can happen is that one wheel can leave the ground. Most games only distinguish the car being on the track, or completely off the track, instead of true 3D physics being applied.”

Kaemmer, the sim-minded man behind all of Papyrus’s racing technology, set out to create the most realistic 3D physics system he could and has spent over a year perfecting it. “We are modeling everything,” he says evenly, “right down to gyroscopic torques. So when you jump the car, if you turn the steering wheel, it will make the thing start to turn, just like a real car.”

So why sim the 1967 season, and what makes it the end of the so-called romantic period of Formula One? Sentell explains that there are several reasons. “During ’68 and ’69 the wings came in on the cars, and the corporate sponsorship really got started. Before 1967, the cars were much less powerful, lacked grip, and just weren’t as fast.” The Papyrus team wanted fast, powerful cars and high-powered weight ratios, but not the modern aerodynamics and wings. “If you look back,” Sentell says jokingly, “and ask at what point in racing history were the cars absolutely the most dangerous to drive, it was probably 1967.”

Of course, Grand Prix Legends will also include the sim elements traditionally found in Papyrus racing products. The game will consist of 11 tracks, most of which are European, but there are also tracks in the U.S., Mexico, South Africa, and Canada. “It’s patterned after the ’67 season,” Sentell says, “with just a couple of exceptions to make the game more fun.”

Because it’s been 30 years since the ’67 season, licensing has been something of a nightmare for Papyrus – it had to track down and get the rights to the names of the actual drivers who ran the circuit that year. “It’s not a pleasant thing,” Kaemmer says, “to call someone on the phone and say that you want license their dead son’s name, but people have been very helpful.”

Also, many tracks that the designers plan to re-create no longer exist in their original form. During roadtrips to Europe, the team visited several town halls to get the blueprints for tracks that had since gone bankrupt.

Kaemmer started Papyrus back in ’89 with Indy 500 for Electronic Arts. With the advent of more powerful processors (Indy 500 ran on a 286), Kaemmer has created incrementally better racing titles. “There have been a lot of improvements in the artwork,” he says in reference to Papyrus’s last few projects. “But as far physics goes, this is entirely new.”

Like any other resourceful game developer, Papyrus has traditionally recycled code from its previous releases. “We always carry code forward from one thing to the next,” Kaemmer says, noting that the user interface is based on the one used in NASCAR 2. “But for this title,” he pauses, “we’re building a new engine to support up to eight network players.”

For the level of realism the Papyrus team intends to bring to the game, a new physics model was required to get the kind of gameplay they wanted. “The drivers back then slid the cars around a lot more,” says Sentell. “They spent a lot of time on opposite lock, steering away from the turn because the back end of the car is sliding around the corner. The new physics engine really enables us to simulate this.” While this style of driving is surely a departure from the current Papyrus lineup, Sentell ensures us that once players get the hang of it, “it is truly a blast.”

Papyrus is shooting for 16-bit, 640-by-480 graphics, and it’s going to maximize support for 3D accelerator cards. Kaemmer and Sentell expect that a minimum of a P90 will be required to run the game. At press time, the game was nearing 50% complete and the track designs were still coming together.

Though the game is still in early development, Papyrus will evidently again take the PC racing cultists to a new threshold of speed. But more importantly, this title may have the ability to recreate a poignant period in the sport. It has the potential to capture an ephemeral year of greatness, long ago, before race cars became motor oil billboards moving at 200mph.