As a direct ancestor of iRacing, the ‘Grand Prix Legends engine’ had multiple stock car racing false starts, before eventually releasing as NASCAR Racing 4. The original NASCAR 3, cancelled and replaced by one that used NASCAR 2’s engine, is barely remembered.
Originally known as Papyrus Design, the legendary Massachusetts-based software studio developed highly-regarded simulation titles and published with Electronic Arts, Virgin Interactive and Sierra before their shutdown by Vivendi, owners of Sierra, in 2004.
Co-founded by arguably the father of the modern racing simulation, David Kaemmer, the studio created NASCAR and IndyCar titles that consistently pushed the genre forwards.
Their groundbreaking Grand Prix Legends game engine was used in three NASCAR titles between 2001-2003, evolving to become iRacing after Kaemmer re-acquired former Papyrus assets for his new company.
Join Jon Denton, Tim Wheatley, Simon Croft and guest(s) as they discuss sim racing and racing games past, present and future.
Both NASCAR Racing 2003 Season and NR2002 require a PowerPC system from around the time of their release, but will both run fine on an Intel CPU Mac running a version of Mac OS with built-in Rosetta emulator such as Mac OS X Snow Leopard. You cannot install Snow Leopard on a very recent machine though and Apple have removed Rosetta from later versions of the OS, so unless you use virtualization software such as Parallels it’s basically impossible to run NR2003 on a recent system without Windows.