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Everyone loves driving. Some even to the point where they slow down in front of a green light just to prolong this joyous activity. Or maybe they are simply retarded and don’t know how to operate a motor vehicle properly.
Either way, for those who don’t own a car – or one that only goes a measly 220 km/h – racing simulations are a good way to vent their road rage. Alternatively you can shoot people in the mouth but since this blog is rated G let’s forget about the brain splattering for now and stick with the fucking cars. I welcome you to join me on a brief tour through the last 20 year of video gaming to see how far we’ve come.

1988: Grand Prix Circuit
Simple but neat – 2D all the way. Its sister game The Cycles: International Grand Prix Racing incorporated hills and was thus 2½D, so to speak. Those were the first two racing games I remember playing, though I guess I did play something earlier on the C64 my dad used to bring home form work over the holidays.

1989: Indianapolis 500
The infamous Indy 500 was one of the first 3D racing games (for the PC anyway). It featured plain, untextured and unshaded polygon-based graphics, that’s oldschool right there. I think we were running it in CGA on our old 80286 so it didn’t even look as fancy as it does in this picture. Reminds me of LHX Attack Chopper which I used to play with my brother. Those were the days.

1991: Formula One Grad Prix
I got Formula One Grand Prix sort of by accident because the game I really wanted was sold out (I can’t for the life of me remember what it was). Lucky me, because the critically acclaimed F1GP was in many respects a milestone. There hadn’t really been much improvement in the polygon department. Everything is a little more detailed but textures or shading were still largely absent.

1994: The Need For Speed
Having never actually played this game I am not going to comment too much on it. But as you can see, textures (albeit coarse) were commonplace by then, so we were finally getting somewhere. Everything still looks somewhat clunky, though. And yeah, from what I gather it is called The Need For Speed.

1997: Need For Speed II SE
Oh yeah, baby. My friends and I used to play NFS2SE for hours on end, round after round. With the rise of 3D hardware acceleration things like reflections and weather effects finally became a reality. On one particular track your windshield got plastered with bugs. Boy was that cool.

2002: Collin McRae 3
Never played this one either. But the era of hardware T&L had long begun and you can see that photorealism finally seems to be within reach, the cars are already there for the most part. People actually look like people (in a racing game!), high resolution textures, the works. Now we’re talking.

2005: Need For Speed: Most Wanted
My roomie is hooked on NFS:MW and despite its age it look fairly good. I would say we have gotten to the point where the environment is realistic enough not to constantly remind you that you’re in a lousy video game.

2008: Need For Speed: Undercover
As I’ve mentioned a few days ago, NFS:UC is my current guilty pleasure. While I can’t really pinpoint any major graphical improvements over Andrew’s NFS:MW, the overall impression is slightly better. I dare say that we have definitely reached a level of realism where under “racing conditions” you wouldn’t even notice any more details. In that regard racing games are unique and differ from say RPGs or first person shooters in that you don’t have time to actually inspect textures and such, simply because you move too fast and your attention is needed on the road.

2011: ?
What’s next? As far as pure graphics is concerned, I believe we are asymptotically approaching photorealism. Any major increase in computational power (read: better GPUs) will only marginally improve the visual appearance. There will be no more big leaps such as going from 2D to 3D or adding real-time reflections. Even resolution-wise we are pretty much at the limits, HD or beyond should suffice for quite some time. Then again, predictions like that pretty much always turned out to be wrong.
The money is in the details. Imagine realistically behaving gravel and sand, smoke or falling leaves vortexing around your car like they do a wind tunnel (particle systems, anyone?). Think about what could be done with more advanced AI, non-scripted autonomously interacting NPCs are just the start. Pedestrians diving for cover when you bomb down the promenade or other drivers flipping you off or throwing their Bud Light at you after you thwart them, buildings collapsing when you hit a supporting wall, fires spreading realistically… Now that would make driving fun again. There is plenty of room for improvement but you probably won’t see it from just looking at the screenshots any more.

I for one am not holding my breath for anything groundbreaking. Things progress slowly and sometimes they even move backwards: where the hell did my rear view mirror and my horn go in NFS:UC, for christ’s sake? It will probably be quite some time before we see any real improvements that truly go beyond simple cosmetics.

Disclaimer: The first three images were taken from Wikipedia, the rest from MobyGames. Most were scaled down to fit nicely on the page (check the MobyGames logo’s size).