Game:

Sports Car GT (1999)

Duration: 52:20

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Back in 1999, Electronic Arts (or EA as they might be better known as today) published a game called Sports Car GT. They used Point of View to develop the PS1 game. A company who had made some different simulation games previously, but nothing car-related. For PC, they decided to use Image Space Incorporated, who at that time had only ever made one game. A first person, futuristic vehicular combat game called Zone Raiders (which can be bought to this day: https://www.zoom-platform.com/product/zone-raiders ).

As it turned out. ISI would make the PC version of Sports Car GT a great game, while the PS1 version of the game would get poor reviews. Point of View would go on to make more generic sports game and simualtors, like NFL Blitz, Poker and bowling sims etc.

ISI would be kept by EA, as their PC racing game developer, making the PC versions of their F1 games, from F1 2000 until F1 Challenge 99-02- ISI would also make the NASCAR Thunder 2003 and 2004 games for PC. After that, EA lost the F1 license, and decided to not make NASCAR PC games anymore.

ISI went indie, and would release rFactor, rFactor Pro, Superleague Formula 2009 and rFactor 2. Their isiMotor/GMotor physic engine for racing sims, would be the massive market leader for many years. Sports Car GT would use an early version of the engine, it was based on what ISI called "The Cube", but with updated physics, which would go on to become isiMotor1. You can easily see some UI and design-choices in Sports Car GT being carried over, and is still present in rFactor 2 in 2023.

The isiMotor was licensed to other game developers as well, SimBin licensed it, and went on to make GTR, GTR2, the RACE-Series (including STCC), GTR Evo, GTLegends.
Others that have licensed the engine is companies like 2Pez, which released numerous games based on the Argentine racing scene, like Top Race, TC2000 etc. Reiza Studios for Automobilista, Ignite Game Tech for Simraceway, Blimey! (who co-worked with SimBin), Slightly Mad Studios, who used parts of the isiMotor for the NFS games, but also kept parts of it for the Madness Engine for the pCars series and lastly, The Sim Factory licensed the game engine for their ARCA Sim Racing game in 2008. The isiMotor have had a hand in a lot of simracing games over the last 20 years.

With all that history out of the way. This is a part of something I hope will be a small series, with a playthrough of the Career mode in the game that kickstarted ISI's legacy, and what ended up influencing the simracing world ever since.

As I got this game when I was 8 years old. I didn't have a wheel, I didn't even have a joystick. It would still be a couple of years until I got a joystick to use for Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix Legends. Due to this, I will go back in time and play Sports Car GT with a keyboard, just like I did as a little kid back in 1999.


Short PC Info:
Win 10 Pro
Intel i7-10700, 2.9GHz
GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
32GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM
Game is on a Kingston Fury M.2 SSD
1440p, 144hz Monitor.

Music, Intro and Outro: Phat Phrog Studios - Boulevard Cruising
Music on break (if used): Carlos Estella - World of Dreams no choir

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