SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: Grand Prix Legends 2004

Early reviews agreed that this simulation of the 1967 Formula 1 season was a masterpiece and that it set the bar very high for future racing simulations. Unfortunately they also said that it was a tough, hard and extremly unforgiving simulation.

Some potiential customers may have been frightened away by the reviewers mention of the steep learning curve, or by driving the early original demo and finding the cars to be a bit too much of a handful.

In 1998, we hardly had PC's that could run GPL properly. You needed at least a 133-200MHz speed CPU and either a Rendition or a 3Dfx graphics card.

Having a steering wheel was not the norm back then. It's probably safe to say that steering wheels are much more widespread today if you're mad about driving racing simulations.

My own early start with GPL was in software mode which gave me framerates that were never higher than 20-22 fps and that was just not good enough.

GPL came out of the box in version 1.0.0.0 without force feedback and with default setups that were a bit tricky to master. I would spin out of the pits, completely out of control, trying to steer with a joystick and no driving aids...

Fast forward to today. Any decent CPU will handle GPL.

Today, we're at GPL version 1.2.0.2, excellent force feedback has been added by the developers and better setups were added by Papyrus in one of the very early patches. OpenGL and D3D was also supported by a patch, and the GPL community has been working away for years giving us more than 400 real as well as fantasy add-on tracks and absolutely gorgeous, stunningly beautiful and accurate car shapes and liveries. Even what seemed completely impossible and out of the question a few years back has now been achieved — a complete 1965 carset with it's own physics. A 1969 mod is also on it's way, as well as some other goodies.

There's a very good illustration of the achievments made at the tracks database here. Look for the item on the main page called Evolution 98-03. While you're there, take a look at the slide show as well!

What has also happened in between 1998 and today is that PC-sim'ers are much more advanced and sophisticated. Quite simply, there was nothing like GPL or even remotely close to it back then. It was light years ahead of anything contemporary. In a way, it was the first true sim, and I think that came as a shock to some people.

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