The Wonderful World of Multiplayer Racing

A long, long time ago, back in the first half of the eighties, I played my first racing game. It was called Enduro, by Activision, and my Dad brought it home one day to play on our Atari 2600. He told me I should read the manual, but I knew better: hey, I don’t need no frigging manual! When I was playing the game, I was absolutely convinced that the target was to dodge the cars that would show up from behind. Only when I finally read the manual, I knew that I shouldn’t dodge them when they passed me, but that I should pass them instead. What a revelation.

Then, more then half a decade later, I got this game called Indianapolis 500 for my black-and-white PC. Since I equiped the thing with a state-of-the-art (pun intended) AdLib soundcard, this was the game to have! Amazing sounds, falling metal when you crashed, unbelievable, this was great! Sadly, I was more excited about the falling metal and showing-off my soundcard then about actually racing the thing.

The next step came when, on a rainy Sunday morning, I read some amazing things about this soon-to-be-released Formula One Grand Prix by a lad called Geoff Crammond. I had a Commodore Amiga at the time and this game would be on the Amiga before it would be on the PC, now that was justice! Not much time passed until I got it, and my first total racing addiction was a fact. Many days at school passed while bragging to a friend about my new fastest lap at Mexico, only to be defeated by him a day later.

That was my first experience of multiplayer racing: hotlapping and telling the fastest lap time to my buddy the next day. That’s a latency of about 24 hours one way, so a total latency of 48 hours. But things were about to change…

A few years later, I downloaded the first show-off movie for Indycar Racing by Papyrus. Oh my God, these cars actually had real textures on them! Well, that was about all I noticed about Indycar Racing for the first few years, since it was about impossible to drive that sim using a keyboard. But then, in 1995, I bought my first steering wheel: a shiny new Thrustmaster T2. Now things were really on the verge of changing… real-time multiplayer racing was around the corner!

It was on a Saturday night, the 9th of March, 1996. For me, the world would never be the same again. The Formula 1 GP of Melbourne would be held the morning after, so essentially there were two choices: stay up all night or get up real early. Tim (Tim van Dooremalen) and I decided to choose the first option. But how to get through this night? Our first tiny bit of multiplayer racing, what else! So Tim came to my house in a Ford Fiesta he borrowed from his mother. In it was his racing equipment. We raced Indycar Racing all night, using the null-modem cable I had lying around! Laguna Seca proved the place to be, we were all over each other, passing left, passing right, getting passed, tossing the AI around, boy that was fun! And the latency was a lot better than the 48 hours of a few years earlier…

This night has been in my mind ever since. But it would only get better… soon a new US service called NROS caught my attention – and caused huge disappointment. The Americans were able to race there, but why weren’t we? I was jealous like I had never been… but I could get a taste of it anyway: in the end of 1998, an NROS-enabled demo of Nascar Racing 2 came available for download, which enabled us Europeans to race online at Atlanta. Incredible! 20 cars or so were at the track at once! At the start of my first race I felt real nervous, too afraid to mess up for the other guys. The green flag dropped and GO! In the first corner, there was a big wreck which I could barely escape. I managed to, nevertheless, with a grin from ear to ear, because I had just passed this bunch of wrecks. Only to get booted a few laps later – welcome to the world of online racing, driver!

Again, time passed. I did some online races in Grand Prix Legends, but I never really got into that. Around that time, I was too busy finishing my study. Plus, there wasn’t any cable internet access yet, so it was way too expensive for me to race online regularly.

Until the beginning of the 21st century… in January 2000, I finally got what I had hoped for so long: cable internet access! This would be the final big change in my online racing career. Just a few months earlier I had received my copy of Nascar Racing 3, which was internet enabled. I started racing on Won like mad, only to get crashed all over the place. I knew that many leagues existed in the US, and that the racing in leagues was supposed to be a lot better. But racing at 3AM wasn’t what I had in mind! So I posted a question on the simracing.org board, about European leagues. Old-timer Arve Svenning was able to help me out… no, European Nascar leagues didn’t exist yet, but there was a discussion board called ‘northeuroperacers’ where European racers met. That’s where I learned about the Trans-Atlantic Stock Car Challenge, which raced at acceptable times against American drivers. Cool! So I joined that, only to get hopelessly frustrated by warp, lag and other stuff mainly the Americans in that league were dealing with. Passing heavily warping cars did not fit in my definition of ‘fun’. After the third race or so, I met Steve Levett on ICQ. Sick of the warp, we decided to start our own, Europeans-only, racing league. Since ‘Europeans-only Racing League’ didn’t sound that nice, we called it ‘European Racing League’. Oh well, what’s in a name.

From then on, my second total racing addiction was a fact. Unbelievable, I, the one who thought that Enduro required you to avoid the cars which were passing you, was running an online racing league!

Now cut the crap! What are you trying to tell me!

I’m trying to make us all realise what an incredible bunch of lucky guys we are. Every online driver has his own history into the online racing scene. Mine is just one of them. But we’re all living in a world in which we’re able to race online, to challenge other drivers on the track, to choose from many leagues, to meet new friends all over the world.

Especially in times of yellows, crashes, frustrations, it might be good to once in a while realise the wonderful thing we all have here!