A Daring Move

Quietly, the rumor mill had been churning. Papyrus was allegedly hunkered down, hard at work on a game that would change the way we all race. It was purported to be a historical open-wheeled simulation, turning back the clock to a time before advanced ground effects, when cars were positively treacherous and drivers either heroic or flat-out crazy. If NASCAR Racing had been a breakthrough, the word was the next game would be a revolution.

And it would have to be. Geoff Crammond's team had already released the long-awaited sequel to 1992's superb World Circuit, Grand Prix II, which quickly soared to the top of the charts in 1996 as perhaps the finest open-wheeled sim ever devised. The game featured stupendous textured graphics, the genre's first fully rendered rear mirror views, astoundingly "human" artificial intelligence drivers, an excellent depiction of wheelspin, and cars that could rise up into the air and flip upside down. It looked and played wonderfully.

Even Microsoft jumped into the competition with 1997's overly ambitious CART Precision Racing, a flawed and buggy, but promising title that in some ways wasn't in the same league as the genre's heavy hitters; however, it sported some likable elements and it did go to show how quickly the field was opening up. As it turned out, CPR needed CPR and was ultimately a one-shot deal. Not to be outdone, Ubisoft let loose with a volley of its own in 1998's F1 Racing Simulation, a game that didn't get nearly the attention that it deserved on this side of the Atlantic. One of the very first racing sims to fully support 3D graphic accelerator cards, F1 Racing Simulation visually toyed with everything that had come before. The environmental effects were particularly impressive, especially the variable weather, animated clouds, and mesmerizing depiction of lens flare. The car models were both accurate and responsive, and the AI was plausibly reactive to given situations. Even by today's standards, the game looked great and drove magnificently.

Grand Prix Legends box art

In the fall of 1998, Papyrus Design Group, through Sierra Sports, released Grand Prix Legends, and armchair racers the world over awaited the critical response. And soon it came. "Stunning," said one. "Amazing," said another. "World Class" raved one headline, while another claimed, "A new era of historical sports sims may be dawning."

And indeed, GPL may well have been Papyrus' finest hour. The experience of driving a Grand Prix Legends car was unlike anything that had preceded it, and for good reason. With its latest and arguably greatest game to date, Dave Kaemmer, Randy Cassidy, et al., had completely scrapped the respected but aging Papyrus physics engine and rebuilt it piece by piece, from the virtual ground up. They coupled it with heretofore-unseen levels of AI, intricate graphics, typically bloodcurdling Papyrus crash effects, and a compelling sense of history that focused on a highly interesting era.

But it was that physics model, constructed not only to truly replicate the four independent contact points of a real racecar, but also to demonstrate the squirrelly handling characteristics of a too-fast-for-its-own-good, mid-60s land rocket, which became the game's main claim to fame. Essentially, Papyrus had removed whatever safety net existed in its prior titles. Kaemmer himself said at the time that, "Driving a 1967 GP car is more difficult than driving just about anything else, and the simulation is more difficult than driving a real car...many people think that it feels like driving on ice."

The TV style replays looked great.

One problem--the game was simply too difficult for the majority of players. As much as Papyrus prided itself on building games appealing almost exclusively to drivers willing to spend hours and days just learning how to come to grips with a dazzling, but incredibly challenging, physics model, in GPL it may have gone a bit too far.

One by one, each media review that bestowed GPL with its deserved accolades and high score also lamented that only the supremely skilled could ever hope to get a handle on the latest Papyrus beast. This alone was enough to convince many would-be candidates that the newest Papyrus effort was simply too tough. Worse still, the game once again floated just above the technology of the day. Reports of incapacitating frame rates abounded. In the end, the combination of treacherous gameplay, sometimes glacial frame rates, and esoteric subject matter severely impacted the sales figures of a product that was deserving of a better fate. Total sales to date are 200,000, though many of those came only after patches and user enhancements helped make it more of a reasonable proposition.

Kaemmer explains, "We focused on the Rendition and 3Dfx chips for Grand Prix Legends because they were the best at the time, along with a software renderer, and shipped GPL at the absolute worst time possible for 3D hardware support. All the drivers were buggy and our software renderer was fairly slow, since we had moved to 16-bit color to best exploit the graphics hardware. I'm pretty sure that no one who bought GPL was able to see the hardware-accelerated version without first having to find and download new video drivers. Maybe we were the first racing game producer to fall off the 3D bandwagon and break a leg."

Here's a crash waiting to happen.

"I think the main reasons that GPL didn't rack up big sales figures are that it didn't run well on most buyers' machines (due to the 3D hardware problem), it apparently wasn't a concept that got people excited, and it was incredibly difficult to play, in that order. One of the engineers at Papyrus, Grant Reeve, wrote a Direct3D renderer for GPL a couple of years ago in his spare time, and quite a few people since have dusted off GPL and discovered what a gem it still is with hardware-accelerated graphics. Word of mouth counts for a lot in this business, and no one will recommend a game to his friends if it doesn't run well on his machine. Unfortunately, the second problem--people weren't jazzed by the concept--needed word of mouth recommendations to overcome. Talk to anyone who has given GPL a fair chance and they will praise it glowingly as being an experience quite beyond mere gaming. It is auto racing, and auto racing is an incredibly exciting sport for the participants, especially back in 1967. The spectators are seeing just a small part of it."

"Unfortunately, we had to change the design of GPL in order to ship it on time, and instead of starting in the equivalent of a Formula Ford, graduating to Formula 2, and only then to a Formula 1 car, we allowed people to jump right in to the F1 car with no training time. It was like putting a novice skier at the top of an iced-over double black diamond and saying, "Have fun!" Needless to say, many people didn't. My regrets are that we didn't postpone shipping until the 3D hardware market settled down a bit and until we had finished the experience ladder design, but I'm pleased that we made it possible to drive on those classic racetracks in some beautiful and exciting racecars."

Even menu screens had a lot of flair.

Nevertheless, Grand Prix Legends was--and quite likely still is--the ultimate in extreme realism. Its fan base remains one of the most devoted of any game from that era, and its long list of updates and patches have kept it current with today's hottest hardware. Still, its comparatively and unexpectedly poor showing did not sit well with Sierra, the company that owned Papyrus and published its products. Kaemmer, an admittedly fanatical realism devotee, remembers, "We had spent quite a bit of money on its development and, of course, you'd like to make that money back. The management hierarchy above us never really understood what we were trying to do, and we didn't see eye to eye on the reasons for GPL's failure. Actually, GPL went on to do fairly decently in Europe over the long run, so it really wasn't all that bad, but the long run is a difficult view to take for a public company and we had already been branded as 'a bunch of purists'--out of step with the marketplace. After GPL, it was a real uphill battle even to do a NASCAR game using the GPL simulation engine. Everyone was afraid that if a five-year-old couldn't drive it, nobody would buy it."

Hence, the next three Papyrus products were not cut from the GPL cloth. Seeing the light of day in 1998 was NASCAR Legends, a game most notable for its take on a NASCAR era sandwiched between the grassroots "stock car" stance of its formative years and the full-blown, purpose-built racecars of today. It was a sport fueled by the muscle cars of pre-gas crisis Detroit and filled with big names such as Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough. With a whole flock of "new" antiques roaming the typical allotment of NASCAR tracks, fans were somewhat satiated.

But when NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition materialized in 1999 and NASCAR Racing 3 appeared in 2000, the series clearly began to show its age. For those in the know, it looked like a classic tug of war between publisher and developer. On the Papyrus side was a team of designers certain they could successfully moderate the undeniably impressive GPL engine to a huge, but now somewhat disillusioned, NASCAR audience. They believed that a NASCAR game built on that physics engine, but with various drivers' aids and other "dumbing down" techniques, would appeal to a wide range of drivers. Meanwhile, Sierra worried that instilling the hardcore realism of GPL into NASCAR would be an undeniably erroneous move. The result was stagnation in the only operational Papyrus series.