The announcement came this past Spring. My dream. 10-20 years in the making. Something I've been wanting so long that now I may be too old to get much enjoyment out of it.
This year's F1 video game by Codemasters introduced a new game mode: a multi-player career mode. I know that might not sound like a big deal to many people out there, but it really is. Contract negotiations; driver movement; competing R&D. Two human players. Working their way (hopefully) up the grid. Maybe teammates at times. Maybe not. Two. Humans.
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The whole thing reminds me of the coffee table book I acquired at a Hasting's many years ago, Realization of a Dream: The Creation of British American Racing. Unsurprisingly loaded with pictures that varied in quality and subject from good to charming to seamy, the pictures were also a hint that the team and those they employed were not nearly as ready for the elitist environment of F1 as they thought they were. The book travels through the few years leading up to BAR's debut, talking a lot about Pollock, his successful efforts to snag Villeneuve, the hiring of Adrian Reynard, development and testing of the car, the ill-fated attempt to get two differently-liveried cars onto the grid and the bizarre compromise the team settled on, and their debut at the 1999 Australian Grand Prix, where Villeneuve qualified 11th, briefly ran as high as 7th and ultimately lost his rear wing.
The parallels are innumerable: a lofty idea beautifully visualized in the mind, the number of half-steps taken toward the goal, the challenges involved, and the ultimately half-baked result that we are left with. If you grab your binoculars and squint into the future, you can even predict the next decade: the dream becoming more and more realized following a series of buyouts, to the point that the end result is no longer recognizable. Not that you're complaining about the improvements.
Hang on. Let me start over.
I've been a Formula 1 fan my entire life, or as close as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories include watching the San Marino GP of 1994 on that fateful day of Ayrton Senna's death (the earliest time I can recall seeing my dad cry) and tipping my Chinese Checkers pan of marbles around so that the marbles would roughly ride in a loop around the edge, with me commentating the whole way as the red marble (Gerhard Berger's Ferrari, in my mind) would get another inevitable win (eat your heart out, Marbula 1--I had you beat by 25 years!).
Predictably, as an American boy growing up at the tail end of the 20th century, I became interested in video games. Although I only had one racing game that I played much on my SNES as a boy, the OG Mario Kart, I took that game pretty damn seriously for a kid and have never found an equal within that version. Then again, I never played it professionally or did any speedruns of it.
I didn't get my hands on an F1 game until the N64 (F-1 World Grand Prix) and played the hell out of it. As a game from the pre-career-mode era of gaming, it didn't have the ability to create yourself as a driver but did have a solid season championship mode and a good collection of scenarios that allow you to recreate or rewrite events from the 1997 season: think Panis' Bridgestone tire advantage at Catalunya or Fisichella's tragic day at Hockenheim. I also have a vague recollection or a completed season ending with you being shown a monetary figure that was supposed to resemble your deserved salary, based on your results from the year, but I have been unable to verify this on YouTube.
My next generation console was the PS2, and I ended up with two different F1 games for that. First, I owned the solid Grand Prix Challenge, which had polished graphics, particularly the car models, and a very good soundtrack (if not great car/track sound). The game also boasted very polished menus and interface, the first time I can recall an F1 game capturing for me the prestige of the sport, as well as a replay feature along with broadcast camera angles. A great visual experience for its time, and a very good overall experience but for a bizarre lag in controller response.
It was also around this time that I finally found a friend who was interested in F1 and F1 games. Brett and I met during our Freshman year of high school and didn't take long to find each other out. Between a few shared classes and some teachers we couldn't stand, as well as one teacher we loved to death, and a shared interest in motorsport, a friendship rose up. Within a year I had lent him my copy of Grand Prix Challenge in exchange for his copy of NASCAR Thunder 2002, another fantastic game--someday maybe I'll write about that.
Finally, I found my way to F1 Career Challenge (called F1 Challenge 99-02 on the PC). This wonderful EA game (imagine saying something like that about an EA Sports title made recently!) was the final form of the developer's work over the past several years they had held a license to make an F1 game: where the prior few years had been annual installments in a familiar form, F1 CC combined them all into one game with an option of a 4-year career mode of the prior seasons.
In essence, you started in '99 and had the option of changing teams mid-season, as was more common in those days, and again at season's end. The other drivers would move around, liveries would change to represent the different seasons, and even the names of a few teams changed. An incredible game, that was--almost countless storylines you could make for yourself about why you started at team X and ended up with team Z after a stint at team Y, running with a team (say, Benetton > Renault) for the whole 4 years as the historical results from those seasons result in a team that is slowly working its way forward on its own (you had no control or relatively little control over R&D in the game), or any number of other options.
Ultimately, I was hooked on the game, in spite of its weaknesses: choppy graphics during races, less attractive models than those of Grand Prix Challenge, and career mode races that were painfully short with no option to change their length. Add to that the fact that all the seasons you were playing had already happened--the game released in 2003--and it meant that, in essence, you couldn't write history, you could only re-write it. I assure you that matters a lot to some sports gamers, though I'm not sure I could express why in a clear manner.
It was while playing through this mode that I decided I'd love to be able to track my results and look back over my accomplishments. The creation of a simple but functional spreadsheet (and dozens of copies of it) followed me back downstairs to my basement and the spare clipboard I'd found. Copies of this probably still exist amongst my boxes of junk, but I haven't seen it in years.
Over the next few years, Brett and I used a dash of imagination and the multiplayer mode of the game (which didn't have a championship mode or career mode but did allow single races with a full field of cars) to run a few of our own 4-year careers within the game. I'll never forget the first season finale we ran at Suzuka in the '99 setup, with Brett winning from a charging me to beat me in the World Driver's Championship by a lousy two points. Silly? Hell yes. Fun? Also hell yes.
Fast forward to 2006 and Formula One Championship Edition has been released for the PS3. I didn't own the game and didn't have the console until many years later, but I did get to play a bit of it on my friend Brett's console. A very attractive game for its time, it boasted a career mode that went into the future! You began the game by testing for a backmarker team--becoming either the second race driver for the team or becoming the test driver (!) depending on how well you did in the test. Slick stuff, I kid you not; that test driver role that could last for seasons of a career mode, or could crop up again if you took a job with a better team later on, has not been replicated in any other F1 game that I'm aware of. You could, I suppose, continue to be a test driver for multiple seasons before getting a promotion, and from there your performance resulted in potential moves up or down the grid. I don't think the team performance changed from season to season, and as with F1, none of the other drivers ever moved around between teams; if you replaced Massa at Ferrari in the second year of the career mode and then moved to McLaren, Massa would fill the seat right back up.
Along with that, the game featured the new 2.4L V8 engines, the first new F1 game in years that didn't have Ferrari as the undisputed top car in the game, commentary provided by Martin Brundle and a handful of new teams (or new ownership groups and affiliations) that had never been shown in an official F1 game before (Scuderia Toro Rosso, BMW Sauber and Midland), and you had the makings of a very replayable game.
With the introduction of this game into our lives, I was moving on from the memories of the older seasons that we'd played to death and toward the future. The introduction of BMW Sauber along was enough to make a fan salivate with dreams of wins and championships, particularly in the couple years that followed where Robert Kubica briefly led the WDC. My mind raced with options of where we might race, with Williams, BMW Sauber and Red Bull Racing all featuring prominently in my dreams...I would stick with my team for the second season while Brett jumped ship and really started to show me up in S2, etc.
Four years later, F1 2010 was launched on the PS3 by Codemasters, who now had the license to make F1 games. They'd actually begun the prior year with an '09 edition, but one that was only released on the PSP and the Wii (!). For any reader who is familiar with any of the last 11 editions of the F1 20xx series, this game will not seem very different. A five year career mode was included, which was exciting in its time. What's more, teams could get better or worse from season to season! In a long-lost Codemasters forum post, there was a table listing team performance, in very basic terms, showing how well a team like HRT might perform if they could get to the top 3 in the Constructor's Championship over the prior season. In essence, power was quantified as an amount of horsepower, but who knows how accurately, and a description of something like "poor" or "very poor" was listed for handling. Ferrari and Red Bull and McLaren had the highest floors and highest ceilings, of course, but the potential for slow slides to the back of the field made a fan of the game salivate.
Now I had functional changes in team performance from season to season to add to my dreams. The idea was pretty well complete: the ability to switch teams, the possibility of being teammates, R&D tests, and so on. The mind boggled.
For the next decade, the F1 20xx series was incrementally improved overall, with certain years introducing performance or durability improvements, Kinetic Energy Recovery System (the precursor to our current ERS), media interviews, safety cars, larger online multiplayer fields, a wide variety of driver aids, split-screen multiplayer, an R&D tree for team performance, historic cars, and so on. A number of these features have been removed in subsequent versions, sadly. Last year's game saw the introduction of the My Team mode, wherein you create a team from scratch and serve as driver/owner/manager of the team, an astonishingly unrealistic idea that even Sir Jack Brabham couldn't pull off today, but one which lets you touch a lot more of the team with cause, at least.
This year, as mentioned above, the existing Career mode (not the My Team mode) has been expanded to support two players. Brett and I are still good friends and are hoping to be able to get through a few seasons of the mode to see just how good it is. Of course, we're older now...we both work and he has a wife and kids (whereas I just live with my better half and her cat Simba). He's moving halfway across the country next month. We're currently 3 time zones away from each other. In short, it's rough going.
We've found a couple times to sit down and work on it and have gotten through (and I use that word loosely) a few rounds of an abbreviated (i.e. 16-race) season thus far. The results for us, three races in, are bad. Definitely not undeserved, and not unrealistically good (which was my concern). They're real bad.
In a series of posts yet to be written, let alone published, I hope to post updates from race to race with data and charts and the like. On the game side, there area a number of shortcomings we were aware of before getting into it, there have been a number of frustrations that we were not expecting going into the experience, and there are some future frustrations that haven't come into play yet, surely. At the moment we are looking at making some changes to how we have the mode set up to make it more playable.
But the dream is certainly being realized.
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