Better known today as the developer of Skyrim and Fallout, Bethesda once had a well-respected racing game franchise and were deep into development of a licensed Skip Barber Racing title that never released.
Asobo, known today as the Microsoft Flight Simulator developer, created groundbreaking technology for large scale maps that was intended to be used in a high quality rally raid title. It was never released and ended up as FUEL, a post-apocalyptic open-world racing game. What happened?
NASCAR Racing, followed up two years later by its sequel, NASCAR Racing 2, is a 1994 racing video game by Papyrus Design Group.
The game simulated the 1994 NASCAR Winston Cup. It featured many drivers, Gen-4 chassis (Ford Thunderbird, Chevy Lumina, Pontiac Grand Prix) and both Hoosier and Goodyear tires.
Nine tracks were included that could be raced individually or as part of a championship season. A subsequent expansion pack added a further seven tracks, but neither Daytona or Indianapolis were ever released.
Versions
NASCAR Racing was released for PC on 3.5″ Floppy with a separate addon pack, CD-ROM combined in various versions, and also as hardware accelerated builds for Matrox Millennium, NVIDIA NV1 and 3D Blaster VL Bus graphics cards. It was also bundled with a lot of early hardware including wheels, pedals and gamepads.
The Mac version, released in 1996 for Power PC Macs, included an updated 1996 carset as well as a number of other exclusive features such as voice commands, replay export to Quicktime MP4 and an uncapped framerate.