Formula One Grand Prix

Game review

Grand Prix 1 is the first of a series of F1 races from MicroProse game from the early nineties hadquite good a graphics and a decent physical model fot its time. The game has all the circuits of F1 World Championship series from 1991. You can choose your team and racer, and rename everything. You can race individual races, or race the entire season 1991. Or just for fun to train and break track records. One thing is to control the car so that you stay on track, another thing is to win. It takes training. One of the most important prerequisites for success is the ability to set your car according to profile and track their riding skills. When a person with that little play, can run times comparable to the records of individual circuits, and usually faster. It does not take long to reveal how.

The game Formula One Grand Prix (in the US officially as World Circuit, retroactively referred to as Grand Prix 1) laid the foundation for the most successful series of Formula 1 races on PC to date. The spiritual father of the series was the programmer and designer Geoff Crammond, whose name we saw directly under the name on the box of all the parts.

With Formula One Grand Prix, the developers brought unprecedented innovations to the world of racing simulators in the form of a complex physics engine, sophisticated graphics and an overall approach to creating an "adult" sports video game. Computer rendering of car racing has never been so close to reality. All three successors (Grand Prix 2, Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4) drew on the foundations laid by the first part.

It was essential for the future series that the authors tried to transfer the reality of racing to the screens as best as possible (of course, taking into account the hardware capabilities of the time). Related to this are the possibilities of modifying the machine for each race, such as setting the brakes, pressure wings or choosing the type of tires. All interventions in the car's settings were more or less reflected on the track. It is also interesting that the individual circuits (there were 16 of them from the 1991 season) were created by Crammond based on real models, so the players for the first time virtually drove on circuits that at least remotely resembled those "from TV".