Formula One Grand Prix
Developer(s)	Microprose
Publisher(s)	Microprose
Distributor(s)
Designer(s)	Geoff Crammond
Engine
Latest version
Release date(s)	1992
Genre(s)	Sim racing
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer
Rating(s)
Platform(s)	PC (DOS), Amiga, Atari ST
Media	Floppy disc
System requirements	268, 1 MB RAM
Input	Keyboard, mouse, joystick, steering wheel

Game screenshot

Formula One Grand Prix (known as World Circuit in the United States) is a computer game released in 1992 by MicroProse for the Amiga and PC created by game designer Geoff Crammond. It is often referred to as Grand Prix, MicroProse Grand Prix, or just F1GP, although the game itself was not affiliated officially with the FIA or any Formula One drivers. The game is a simulation of Formula One racing at the time and was noted for its 3D graphics and attention to detail, in particular the players ability to edit the teams and drivers and set up their car to their own personal specifications. Grand Prix's success spawned 3 "sequel" games, unsurprisingly named Grand Prix 2, Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4. These were, however, exclusively PC games. ImageMetadata File history File links Micropose_F1GP_Game_Cover. ... A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates computer or video games. ... MicroProse Software, Inc. ... Video game publishers are companies that publish video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer. ... MicroProse Software, Inc. ... A game designer is a person who designs games. ... Geoff Crammond is a computer game designer who specialises in motor racing games. ... A game engine is the core software component of a video game. ... 1992 (MCMXCII in Roman) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... This is a listing of computer and video game genres with brief descriptions and examples from each genre. ... Sim (simulated) racing is the collective term for computer racing games which attempt to accurately simulate race driving, as opposed to arcade driving games such as the Need For Speed series. ... In computer games and video games, single-player refers to the variant of a particular game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of the gaming session. ... Online gaming redirects here. ... This article is about computer and video games. ... Personal computer and peripherals. ... DOS refers to the family of closely related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible market for the decade between 1985 and 1995: PC-DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, OpenDOS, PTS-DOS, and several others. ... The original Amiga (1985) The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced game console. ... The Atari 520ST Atari 1040STF with SC1224 color monitor The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was commercially popular from 1985 to the early 1990s. ... A floppy disk is a data storage device that comprises a circular piece of thin, flexible (hence floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic wallet. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A computer keyboard is a peripheral modeled after the typewriter keyboard. ... Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ... For other uses, see Joystick (disambiguation). ... A modern road cars steering wheel A modern Formula One cars steering wheel has buttons and knobs to control various functions A steering wheel is a type of steering control used in most modern land vehicles, including all mass-production automobiles. ... ImageMetadata File history File links Grand_Prix_Game_Screenshot. ... ImageMetadata File history File links Grand_Prix_Game_Screenshot. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Notable events of 1992 in computer and video games. ... MicroProse Software, Inc. ... The original Amiga (1985) The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced game console. ... Personal computer and peripherals. ... Geoff Crammond is a computer game designer who specialises in motor racing games. ... The Fédération Internationale de lAutomobile, commonly referred to as the FIA, is a non-profit association established in 1904 to represent the interest of motoring organisations and motor car users. ... Formula One - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Grand Prix 2 (nicknamed by the gaming community as GP2) is a racing simulator released by MicroProse in 1996, with a FIA license that featured the Formula 1 1994 season, with all the circuits and cars. ... Grand Prix 3 is a computer game by MicroProse. ... Grand Prix 4, released for the PC on the October 9, 2002 and is currently the last Formula 1 simulation game released by the developer Geoff Crammond and the Microprose Label. ...

Impact on the racing simulation genre

F1GP is generally considered one of the biggest milestones in the history of the racing simulation genre. Together with Papyrus' Indy 500, which was released about a year earlier, it was the first serious 3D polygon-based (without textures, except some for the scenery in the PC version) racing sim. Geoff Crammond's REVS on the Commodore 64 and BBC home computers also did a great job already, but was too much limited by the relative lack of computer power of the 8-bit machines. Most of the breakthroughs mentioned below can also be partly attributed to Indy 500. It could even be said that Indy 500 beat F1GP in a number of areas (damage, depth of available car-settings options...) But all in all F1GP would have a bigger overall impression and impact because it featured Formula One, and because it offered the player a complete season. Sim (simulated) racing is the collective term for computer racing games which attempt to accurately simulate race driving, as opposed to arcade driving games such as the Need For Speed series. ... Polygons are used in computer graphics to compose images that are three-dimensional in appearance. ... Spherical texture mapping Texture mapping is a method of adding realism to a computer-generated graphic. ... For the hip hop group, see Commodore 64 (band). ... The BBC Micro, affectionately known as the Beeb, was an early home computer. ...

These two simulations were the very first to implement something that resembled real world racing physics, accurate track modelling and car handling that required skills similar to real-world driving skills to perform well. Both were also the first to offer meaningful options to tune the behaviour of the cars. Although not quite on the level of later simulations, the most important stuff like gear ratios, wings settings etc. were there, and, more importantly, proved to make an actual difference when driving. Important were also the functional rearview mirrors and a replay system with variable camera settings that made many jaws drop at the time. Gears on a piece of farm equipment, gear ratio 1:1. ... An airfoil (in American English, or aerofoil in British English) is the shape of a wing or blade (of a propeller or ships screw) as seen in cross-section. ...

For the very first time, players actually recognised where they were on which Formula one track. For the very first time, it made a difference how you entered a corner and how soon or late you accelerated out of it. Unlike lots of previous 'simulations', the 1/1000th of a second precision chronometer made sense and was not just window-dressing. Players could actually feel whether they were driving fast or slow, whether they were burning up their tires or conserving them... Concentration was absolutely required to avoid mistakes and to remain consistent. Together with the 16 tracks and the atmosphere-packed rendition of complete Grand Prix weekends, it made F1GP a totally captivating experience.

Two more aspects worth mentioning are the driving-help and the drivability by keyboard. Geoff Crammond implemented a system that allowed for an almost perfect learning-curve. Depending on which helps were activated, the game covered playability from a pure arcade-racer level up to the most advanced sim-level available at the time. Players could choose to activate help-functions like brake-assistance, displaying an ideal-line to help learning the layout of a track, suggestions for the best gear and others. Perhaps the most impressive achievements in that respect were the steering help and throttle assistance. At the time F1GP was released, analogue steering wheels were far from mainstream. In fact, even joysticks were still mostly digital, and in that respect no different from a keyboard. In order to compensate the strict on-off nature of digital controllers, Geoff Crammond implemented a method to 'smoothen' the inputs. Throttle assistance prevented wheel spin when going on the gas. Steering help smoothened the steering actions (as an indication, one would experience cars steering slightly into corners all on their own when this help was activated). This was a subtle exercise, as it could give the impression of cars driving themselves when implemented too strongly. As experience showed, GC found an excellent balance. Which turned F1GP, and its successors, into probably the only racing games ever that could really be enjoyed and played well via digital input devices. Close-up of a disc brake on a car On automobiles, disc brakes are often located within the wheel The disc brake is a device for slowing or stopping the rotation of a wheel. ... The term throttle may refer to: A type of valve that controls air and fuel flow into an engine, such as a butterfly valve in a carburetor. ... For other uses, see Joystick (disambiguation). ...

As an aside, it is illustrative for the depth of the game that people actually learned to overcome the need for Throttle Assistance and discovered that disabling it and applying the right techniques enabled 'digital' drivers to go faster (at the expense of tirewear).

Critiques

Despite these great achievements, F1GP also contained a flaw that was pretty irrelevant at first, but would later seriously compromise the potential of the game and its successors.

Geoff Crammond wrote the game before the era of DirectX, OpenGL and 3D acceleration video cards. So F1GP was built around a 'proprietary' 3D engine that ran in software. This engine was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 fps on the PC version), and the game would at all times try to render the specified number of frames. DirectX is a collection of APIs for easily handling tasks related to game programming on the Microsoft Windows operating system. ... OpenGl official logo OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 3D computer graphics (and 2D computer graphics as well). ...

The result was that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in realtime. Instead, gametime slowed down. The software itself provided an option to display the CPU-load. When this was higher than '100', the game was no longer working in realtime. This would become known in the community as the infamous slow-motion driving. Since the rendering was obviously dependant on the complexity of the scene, this also meant that one could experience slowdowns of the action only on certain parts of certain tracks, or when there were lots of cars around (for example at the start).

The game did provide options to eliminate trackside details, and in addition one could also choose a lower framerate to avoid the problem altogether. It also has to be understood that gamers didn't have quite the same expectations of framerates as nowadays. So all in all, the actual impact on single-player gaming was not that important.

There are three reasons, though, why it became a serious burden later on:

1. the Grand Prix series would never offer solid network multiplayer possibilities, largely due to this design choice; successors like Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4 offered LAN-play and were even hacked to be playable over the Internet, but would never perform reasonably.
2. even when the first boom of 3D acceleration chipsets revolutionized gaming, the concept was not reworked (too much integrated into the software?) and remained a problem (although less because of the available computer power)
3. the effect could be misused to artificially slow down the action, and exploit the extra reaction time that became available to the player that way. Although irrelevant if one played the game on its own, it caused a lot of trouble for online competitions (see below).

Grand Prix 3 is a computer game by MicroProse. ... Grand Prix 4, released for the PC on the October 9, 2002 and is currently the last Formula 1 simulation game released by the developer Geoff Crammond and the Microprose Label. ...

"Online" gaming and community

F1GP was among the first wave of games that had a busy online community. The first competitions were organized via online services like Compuserve in 1993, jumping over to the Internet once that became mainstream. CompuServe, (in full, CompuServe Information Services, or CIS), was the first major commercial online service in the United States, dominating the field during the 1980s and remaining a major player through the mid-1990s when it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online (AOL). ...

The racing didn't actually happen online. F1GP only offered modem play. Thus, the competitions were based on submitted save-games of races and qualifying laps. These were then used in competitions around complete (or partial) races on the one hand, and so called Hotlap Competitions on the other hand. Often, the races followed the schedule of the real world Formula One competition. A modem (a portmanteau word constructed from modulator and demodulator) is a device that modulates a carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. ... The team qualification may refer to: Certification A process of deciding the running order in many auto racing events This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

The community spawned a host of mods, making the game highly customizable for its time. Liveries, car-performance and the performance of the computer-opponents, camera-settings... could be edited. First attempts at a track-editor emerged, but this would only become reality after the arrival of the successor Grand Prix 2.

Because of the possibilities to edit the performance of the car, or to make other aspects of the game favour the player, there were also a lot of utilities to check for cheats. These could handle just about every possible trick that was available, except one: the mentioned slow-motion driving effect. The game didn't store CPU-load data in any save game file, so there was no way to exclude the possibility that someone maximized the graphics detail on purpose to force a slowdown of the action. Load, in computing, is a measure of the amount of processing a computer system is currently performing, usually in the form of a scalar and as some variation on a percentage. ...

In practice, F1GP was already an 'older' game when online competitions appeared. This meant that most used computers could easily handle the highest detail at the highest framerate. As such, F1GP-based competitions were actually not hit by the slow-mo cheat. Both because the communities were small, and because nobody seemed to reckon the possibility because of the CPU-power surplus. Frame rate, or frame frequency, is the measurement of how quickly an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. ...

Its successor Grand Prix 2 though, was notorious for its high CPU-demands. When it appeared, there were no systems available that could handle it at full detail. Most people had a hard time to find a good compromise between details and smooth framerate, and the majority was probably playing in moderate slow-motion without being aware.

When the Grand Prix 2 community materialized and exploded far beyond what F1GP ever offered, it soon became apparent that some participants in the competitions submitted results that were totally unrealistic. Telemetry-data files even showed typical signs of slow-motion driving but there was no way to unambiguously prove it. Telemetry is a technology which allows the remote measurement and reporting of information of interest to the system designer or operator. ...

This problem kept bugging the community for several years until the utility GP2LAP was developed to monitor and log the CPU load dynamically during the driving.

Magazine reviews

• ZERO 93% "There's no denying F1GP is brilliant stuff."

• CU Amiga 95% "For once, the pre-release hype is certainly justified. So much so, in fact, that F1GP is hard to fault. One of the best games to ever grace the Amiga."

• ACE 930 "A triumph of both programming and design, F1GP isn't so much leading the pack as lapping it."

• Amiga Power 92% "F1GP succeeds on every possible level and dumps on everything else from a great height."

• Power Play (GER) 82% "Ein Rennspiel der Extraklasse"

• Gamer 93% "Each race becomes engrossing to the extreme. Brilliant."

• Amiga Joker (GER) 85% "Mehr als nur ein Rennspiel. Hier stimmt einfach alles. Eine wasch-echte Simulation!"

Cover of Zero from 1991 Zero was a video game magazine in the UK covering home gaming during the late 1980s and early 1990s. ... CU Amiga Magazine was a monthly computer magazine published by EMAP in the United Kingdom. ... Edge is a multi-format computer and video game magazine published by Future Publishing in the United Kingdom. ... Amiga Power (or AP for short) was a monthly magazine about Amiga computer games. ...

External links

• Grand Prix at MobyGames
• Track Editor for F1GP

MobyGames is a website devoted to cataloging video and computer games, both past and present. ...