It's crazy how iRacing took NR2003's base engine and most of Racing Legends' development model and became the probably the biggest simulator of all time. Classic example of wrong place, wrong time.
@@antispeed I mean, to be fair to them, most of the iRacing team developed NR2003, went bankrupt thanks to EA, and then vowed to never let that happen again.
So, yeah, they got someone who believed in them, got an investor for their crazy idea, then went out and made a simulation they believed in. Simple as that.
I've been a software product manager for a long time, and this seems to be a classic example of "feature creep." Professional developers will decide upon a set of achievable objectives and then work towards them. When those objectives are met they will decide upon their next milestones and work towards those. And your own resources must be included in determining how realistic those goals and milestones can be. It sounds like real tragedy is that the West brothers had no real project management skills or experience, which can doom a software development project right from the start.
*"It [the transporter] is currently just the body that has been done, and that is not complete yet."* I remember a collective groan from the community. We've been looking at magnificent 3D models of sway bars, space frames and the internals of dual overhead cam racing engines for a year. These were things that would be wonderful, in version 2. The image of that beautiful transporter, and the plans for it, told us what we were dreading was true. At the beginning of a project, with abundant cash reserves, it's easy to dream big, and broad. We all enjoyed those dreams for a year. I believe the West brothers were sincere. They just couldn't focus on the task. I feel sorry for them, and wish them the best.
The project predated crowdfunding, so there's one reason why the ambitious project was stillborn; a lack of funding. The overarching issue though was the lack of direction and priority from West racing. They had a big plan of how the sim was going to be distributed, blueprints for a Lotus transporter, eager posts about everything the sim would be able to do, but nothing to show for it beyond a few renders. It took a year to show a barely complete car and a couple of 3d renders of a track. I remember being pretty excited about Racing Legends all those years ago, but looking back I'm pretty convinced they had nothing beyond an idea. You would think that after 18 years they'd at least share what they did have, but the images and I think a brief physics test taken from WSC is all we have. They developed a vision of what sim racing would be in the future, but it's probably a mistake to credit West racing with contributing to this. Unless something of substance dating back to 2003 is revealed, all we can take from Racing Legends now is that it was just an idea and little more.
@@zetetick395 Course that means the costs would have been higher and things would take more time to develop in the graphical department... Which is honestly why it got as big as it did, for the time those renders are stunning and in a world of their own. Closest we have to their vision today, in my opinion, is Beam.NG, wonder if the Beam team or the brothers ever tried to get in contact.
I remember this well, checking back on the website regularly, and then sometimes and then finally when they had an actual update and it was render of the transporter I never visited the site again. It’s a great example of how that constricting nature of working within an organisation actually has a purpose, which is to keep the developers on track. They thought they knew a better way and they were wrong.
I also feel like they were way too ambitious for their own good. They definitely needed someone above them to rein them in before they went too far down a path that just wasn't feasible at the time. Unfortunately, they thought they knew better than anyone else and it resulted in the sim never coming out.
@@Jrodsly I agree with both of you. Adding on to this, at what point did the devs not consider some form of community help? By the time they quit, NR2003 would have been around and kicking. Sierra would have released the toolkits they did not too long after, plenty of interest in further modifying NR2003 picked up before iRacing devs nicked that. Surely community interest could have benefitted these two if they had outside help with physics already?
@@joshbrownell1868 I honestly don't know why they didn't go forward with community help since that could've taken a ton of the stress off the folks working on it. Sadly, we'll never know for sure, but I have a feeling that would've been beneficial.
I remember this so well. I developed the first tools to allow modding of SCGT (Sports Car GT - the ancestor of Rfactor!) in 3DS Max. The modding explosion that occurred, as a result, was phenomenal and WSC seemed to be a reaction to that. Great trip down memory lane.
It's really a damn shame that their dreams were never brought to fruition. Just think of the time and money spent on what they thought would be the ultimate racing simulation. My folks had a software development company and we built a "mapper" used for EDI. Electronic Data Interchange, "paperless manufacturing" was the basic idea. It brought in lets say a purchase order from an IBM machine and the mapper reconstructed the data to exit the mapper in whatever computer format that was to receive the purchase order. This was the big 3 american automakers and all of their suppliers along with Caterpillar. We spent 8 years developing code and implementing it into the software that all of those companies ran on. We taught classes on site and had programmers going on site to work out any bugs or any other problems. The big 3 automakers pay their bills at net 180. Yep 6 months minimum to get your invoices paid. We would have 250k in receivables from GM-Ford etc. but you can't spend what you can't collect. What do you do, you sure cannot take them to court or anything. They got big bad lawyers. My mom worked her magic until the IRS came and locked the doors and liquidated the entire company for non payment of the taxes every company has to match based upon each employees with holdings. If your federal withholdings are $124 this week, the company you work for must match that amount and send it in. She sent in the money withheld from each employees paycheck but couldn't afford to send the matching funds as required by the IRS. Their was no criminal charges filed as she never actually embezzled any money. My folks lost everything. House, cars, 401k's etc. The mapper was stolen from us by the company we had worked hand and hand with improving their software, teaching classes on how to use it and the mapper was implemented right into their operating systems source code. I had to give my folks a credit card to live on while my step dad looked for a job. They ended up moving around as his consulting was needed to help suppliers of the car companies. Automotive repetitive manufacturing is his specialty. My step dad is an ultra smart man. He used to pull down six figures doing consulting to improve production etc. He worked with all the little companies that supply the automakers. We have tried to get him to try out for Jeopardy. He could probably give Ken Jennings a run for his money. They have finally retired but he still works at Lowes in the electrical department just to keep himself active. The point to me rambling on and on about things nobody cares about is that I can feel for the West brothers. They poured their heart and soul along with every damn nickel they could scrape up on their dream. Just think about how you are going to tell your wife and family that you are selling the house so you can invest the money into a racing game on the computer. My wife would have flipped her lid.... That would definitely be a hell of a fight to get my wife to go along with selling the house.
And those are the stories nobody ever tells. All you hear is that story of two brothers who started a company in their fathers garage and now they are the worlds biggest manufacturer or something. Nobody tells you about the 1000 other brothers who did just the same, but their story ended a bit differently.
Rich, I feel You and your family. Big Risk.. Done it myself ( but not on that scale).. I'm about to retire so I built a motion sim to make me happy and forget all the stress of trying to dev something new. I have some videos posted if you want to take a look an have a laugh at driving classic cars in a motion sim.. DMAX
This video was gold, but it also had a creepy feeling. The old websites, pictures and renders, a project doomed to death... Reminded me of those creepypasta type of videos. I can't explain the feeling but I know someone out there will understand.
I recall the time at Goodwood 2002, the West brothers gave one of those leaflets to Nick Mason to interest him with, then whilst waiting to get an autograph of that drummer, I asked them for a leaflet which they were happy to give out to me, I still have it knocking about at home
Oh man, this was pretty much the only thing we talked about in rec.autos.simulators back in the day. People defended it and attacked it in equal measure
@Ben T. Sure! There were online leagues back then too you know. I was in a really good European Nascar 3/Nascar 2003 league. Lag was a bit more of a problem back then.
@Ben T. actually, going back further than that, there was a time before the lobby thing was created for GPL and the only way you could race someone was for your dial-up connection to call that person's (which could have been long distance). Thankfully that didn't last too long and the lobby made things much easier.
@@FEBear1 I see more lag these days with ultra fast connections than back then when, at least with the Papyrus games (GPL, Nascar), you could play against 30 or more people with a 56k modem... ;)
Honestly, I think a lot of the sim racing community had written them off before Racing Legends even started because of the World Sports Cars debacle. So much of what we saw with RL was just a re-hash of what had happened with WSC - lots of pretty pictures and writing about amazing features, but nothing that we could actually play. To be fair, they never took money from anybody, so it's hard to get too mad at them.
We need a title like this in modern sim racing. A title that focuses on the classics of motorsports. I’m so tired of GT3 cars. It’s like 90% of the content we get today. That’s auto manufacturers and eSport entities calling the shots right there.
That and the fact that they have to keep up with the times. The old V10 F1 cars in the 2000s F1 games aren't there as "classics" but because they were the current cars at the time
It would be nice to see a modern racing sim centered around vintage/classic motorsports, the closest we've got is Simbin's GT Legends, which is a great game in its own right especially with the mod support. Thankfully Assetto exists.
Automobilista has these classics. Automobilista 2 also has these classics. Reiza deserves more recognition for their amazing achievements on cars, tracks and FFB.
No Blackhole Motorsports stopped years back , along with Racesim Central. I seem to remember lots vanished after many of the bigger modders became official developers like Simbin. Also it was around this period that Car companies started threating sites and modding teams over using their Car names and intellectual property. Around the same time as Racing Legends site came about Image Space incorporated was about to split from EA and start their RFactor SIM with no lecenced cars . Also Live For Speed came out of the blue , in fact some even thought it was the work of the West Brothers , but that was quickly put straight. It was a very interesting time in SIM Racing development and the whole business concept that would be developed over the next decade or so. In these days of Kickstarter and patrons , early access a project like this may have worked , it has for many games since and many none game projects. A bold vision ahead of its time I would say in hindsight. Thanks for the trip down memory lane though.
I would legit love to see a community remake of this. Grand Prix, WSC, Bikes, Pre-War, Dragsters, Stock Car, Land Record, Touring Cars, Junior Formulas, Rally, CanAm, Trans Am, you name it. An all new GPL but bigger, and with that early 2000's PC retro look, and all those brilliant features the West's came to think of. Especially that garage walk-around feature and unique car ownership details.
I followed this game religiously at the time. It was the light that got me through some dark times, as stupid as that may sound. I placed all my hopes and dreams of living out my wildest racing fantasies in this sim. I was super active in the community and checked the website at least daily for updates. I realize now in retrospect, this sim was basically Star Citizen, but for sim racing. Very ambitious goals that could never be accomplished if you had a publisher. I think if they started this same idea today but went with crowd funding, it might actually make it. To this day there is no sim that even comes close to what the West Brothers wanted to achieve. Like I said, Star Citizen is the closest thing, since that game also aims to deliver everything you could want in a specific genre of game. If they started a Kickstarter campaign I'd be the first to sign up.
Man, that was a blast from the past. Not only because of Racing Legends (eagerly awaited every news post back then, and actually revisited the site a few months ago for the first time in ages), but also because of the short clip of Sports Car GT and the Blackhole Motorsports screenshots, a site I visted daily back in the day :)
Wow Racing Legends. Blackhole Motorsports. This is a trip into things I'd entirely forgotten. I am always certain that the game never existed at all. It was literally three or four renders and they sat back and ate crisps all year waiting for a big publisher to fund them.
First, what an outstanding piece of journalism. You told this story brilliantly. I knew nothing about this tale, but it really adds to the history of sim racing. Since there did not seem to be much (any) effort to raise funds, I guess I would like to believe that the Wests just had "big dreams but small means". At least we are left with that image of the Lotus 49 outside the garages, which is a thing of beauty!
Thanks for the kind words. Had they been a few years later I think things like Kickstarter/even easier e-commerce could have been easier. But remember, 2002 was even early for services such as paypal. They did try the online store thing, but I am sure the overhead of those items meant that the money they would actually intake would be very little.
Developpers often act like artists or children, (not kind for them, but u c what i mean) not grounded or structured enough, and often not easy to cope with. This is where they need the good person that they failed to work with. Reading today their “no release yet” messages, they also sound a bit emotional.. and being allergic to some authority didn’t help them. It’s a bit sad..
I should like to add that God usually, it seems, does not give everything to one individual. You may be very gifted in making things happen in the code, but what it takes to pull it all together doesn't come along with that gift of coding. It seems we are meant to work together, as teams. The key is finding the correct keys to unlock all the potentials of every team member. I think these guys just need to find a few good key people to bring it all together. I wish them all the best in their future endeavors.
I wonder if the West Brothers have any relation to Christian West, the guy who made Motorsport Manager? I mean, it’s _likely_ a coincidence, but it would be a pretty uncanny one, especially that one of them is named Chris…
Oh, hey, Tony. Wasn’t expecting to see you here (then again, I don’t think any of us were, haha). Well, thanks for clearing that up, and good luck on MacSpeedee!
OMG! I remember this. It was supposed to be the ultimate racing sim ever, I got swept up in all the hype, and followed this for so long back then, until I eventually forgot about it and moved on. I hadn't thought of it again until I saw this video on my recommended videos. I honestly think this would have been the Star Citizen of racing sims, if Kickstarter had been a thing then. They would have raised a lot of money and ended up with very little, to nothing until like 20 years later when it probably would have been surpassed.
Damn. Sad story. I remember following it around 2003. I now understand a bit more. Thank you. I do own Total Immersion Racing for PS2. It was quite good.
That was definitely interesting. I played TIR quite a bit way back when. And yeah, the breadth of scope, even just in the Sportscars, GTs, and TCs was quite something. But yeah, trying to do Le Mans, ALMS, FIA SCC, late '90s FIA GT1, DTM, SuperGT, British GT, and whatever else, was going to be a tall order no matter how you look at it. Still, it was fun to play. They had a number of mainstays in terms of IRL tracks: Monza, Silverstone, Sebring, Hockenheim (back when it still went out and back through the woods), and a few others. In addition, the fictional tracks they made really were quite good, I felt. Springfield, Talheimring, and Minato City were all enjoyable, and quite satisfying to drive truly fast, but it was certainly a challenge to get that ultimate lap. You had to drive the right line, not only t keep from running out of road, but also to avoid bogging the cars down in some key spots. It was fun, and seeing this, you have to wonder at what might have been.
I was a big GPL fan and got so excited when this was announced. I remember refreshing their website every day and hanging off any news. But when they started talking in detail about the Lotus team bus - I started to become skeptical about whether we'd ever see anything come to fruition...and now the world has just moved on. Great video!
Ah yes.. hopes were high for this one, but most people thought / were afraid the whole project was simply way too ambitious for 2 devs. The pictures released back then made it all even more unbelief worthy to me. Beautiful renderings but the lack of any actual pictures or demos from the sim itself. The mentioned features and ideas were great on paper but totally unrealistic for such a small team. I met one of them on a Grand Prix Legends lan party in Holland, 20 years ago or something. Can't remember if it was Chris or Tony. He was a really nice, bit shy guy. Always wondered what happened to them after this debacle. Hope they didn't get in a too big financial mess after this.
Excellent doc. I think it's interesting how often this seems to happen in sim racing. A small dev team announces some wildly ambitious project that realistically will never be completed, and they string the community along for years. Another great rabbit hole is IDT's Champcar Challenge.
I remember all this and i was also hooked on the concept for a while. But eventually, i switched from GLP to Rfactor around 2004 and i forgot all about racing legends. I somehow had the idea that this concept was transformed into another racing game/sim that is still being used, but i can't come up with the game i had in mind then. I have been a sim racer for ages, but nowadays the community is so spread out because of the number of games out there, i don't enjoy it so much anymore. Rfactor at it's peak had huge amounts of people and online servers and the dedication shown by people was just amazing. Nowadays, there seems little left. I have done Rfactor 2, Automobilista 1 and 2 and Project cars 2. They all had their nice things, but there are few online servers, few full servers and a lot more trolling and wrecking. Oh and community modding is also very different nowadays, often because developers give little options for the community to add because they want to keep it to themselves for commercial reasons. GPL was a huge thing and still is, i don't think the creators made a lot of money, but they sure turned into cult icons.
That was excellent, really well put together with your passion for the subject shining through. So well done in fact, that my wife didn't try to talk over it when she walked in the room!
I remember being so excited for this back in the day and waiting for so long, only to see a few renders of a Lotus. I was young (just graduated high school) but even then I was thinking to myself, "this project is being seriously mismanaged and is doomed if all they can produce so far is a render."
dont forget about street legal, that was one of my favorites for a long time ... street racing where you could build your car from the ground up ... you could race a bare chassis, the damage was great in that game too ... theres another infamous team of racing developers
uuuh I remember that beautiful rendered Lotus 49B and that Racing Legends site. Sadly it wasn't to be. I love this great documentation about it. Thanks for making my day.
Oh wow! I remember this. Me and a guy at work were really hyped about this back in the early 2000's. Can't believe 18 years ago as I write this! Thanks for this awesome video!
I'm falling more in love with this channel day by day. Good job, mate. It's not easy to make good documentary styled video. This is really a superb job.
Amazing to hear - in the era of "give us some money for our Kickstarter and maybe get something in 3 years if you're lucky" - that people balked at paying for an actual physical product you could get in the immediate future that would support development. Times have really changed.
I didn't know they're the actual guys behind TIR!That game was a huge part of my childhood,and along with GT4,became my gateway to sportscar racing scene.I still can vividly remember these simpler times,when I came back fron school,fired up my PS2 (I heard it's also available for PC,might have to pick it up again someday) and play TIR's career mode.Overall it's not as glorious or spohisticated as other racing games,but they contain several nice niche cars such as Sintura GTS,Quaife R4 GTS and Dome S101,as well as decent fictional tracks alongside your standard sportscar racing regular circuits
As an huge Star Citizen fan i must admit this project haves lot of common with Star Citizen/CIG/Chris Roberts.... i just hope it does not fail like Racing Legends... As i am a fan of racing too.. iRacing and so on.. Extremely interesting story thanks for making this vid
Great to watch man! I remember it well. Really liked the Wests, had a nice chat at FoS 2002 in the GPL tent. At first I didn't mind it taking long, hell, I didn't think computers needed to run RL were even invented at that time! But I totally checked out when the Transporter was revealed. THIS is what you think is a good way to spend your precious time? Not gonna happen. And it didn't. Too good to be true!
Bravo! I remember having all of the excitement in the world for WSC after it was announced. Congratulations on this one, Jake. This was really well done!
Omg, i remember this big time. I was constantly checking everyday for updates!! It was only a couple of months ago I was trying to look for this as I forgotten the name of the site. Awesome video and we made.
Wow, I remember all of this so vividly. I was well into Grand Prix Legends when this all started, and me and my mates were watching this with baited breath. We were gobsmacked in how much detail seemed to be going into the production, namely the physics of the vehicles, and we were busting for it to come to fruition, but like the video was talking about, that enthusiasm soon waned. We went from insanely eager to be met with more and more disappointment and then finally disillusionment, and then just gave up on it completely. Accolades to them for giving it a go and putting their heart and soul into it, but clearly their ambitions were much more grandiose than their ability to pull it off. And how you've described it in the video, they seemed to lose the plot completely about the direction they were taking with it. As one commentator wrote below, they seemed to have had no project management skills. It's such a damn shame that the likes of gofundme weren't around back then, I'm sure they would have had huge financial support from the sim racing community. Had they been able to pull it off, it would certainly have turned the sim racing world upside down and would have set a new standard. Such a bloody pity.
This was a good idea that suffered from a lack of project management. The renders back in the early noughties were mind-blowing. They had some great themes but they didn’t seem to have any clear goals and objectives. Not an uncommon theme when this kind of very small and enthusiastic team is involved. They were never able to show a car driving around a track and I think that was a real problem for them. If they had hit that target, it might have been different. I don’t hold anything against the West brothers. They didn’t take my money off me.
What a throwback. I remember visiting the Racing Legends site, wondering when and how I could my hands on the Sim. Those courtyard renders still look great.
Two things: I hope the West brothers haven't sold their houses. And they could easily - sort of - do this game nowadays in Unreal Engine, if they wished so.
god i remember racesimcentral (myself included - hell, i even went to goodwood that year and seeing them was a small part of the decision) going absolutely bonkers when that teaser image went up, first finding the custom 404 page and then during the countdown - though there were definitely people screaming vapourware from day 1. I wonder how things might have panned out if kickstarter was arounf back then...
I play a lot of NR2003 and knowing what sim graphics looked liked around that time period, those renders are reeeally amazing for the time. I totally understand why people were so hyped about it
Racing Legends is so weird. They failed while two other guys have more or less successfully done this for the last 18 years already with Live For Speed (lfs.net)... also, iRacing took their “selling cars” idea and ran with it...
What an interesting game concept. I'd love to see a sim focused on historical racing content and tracks. Although I'm not sure if there's a big enough market for it. Historical road series in iRacing like Grand Prix Legends and the Camel GT Series don't appear to be very popular. However, the NASCAR Legends 1987 Series has a strong following. I also liked the idea of car maintenance carrying over from race to race. It'd be a neat idea for a multiplayer career mode. One can only dream!
This was the video which actually got me into the channel. A very well done research piece and it's not often you see the subjects of the piece come in and give their POV, so seeing that as I popped on just now to watch the vid again was really great to see. I would love to see more of these type of research of racing games that maybe didn't make it, or became very different than the original idea. Im in th process of saving up for a wheel so I can race on my new computer and this channel is very inspiring, thank you so much.
Apart from the cool AC Mods, I had no idea of the story behind... Thank you ! Nicely showcased👍✨ Maybe one day a “Vintage Look” Sim will be released, with neo-old stuff + strong physics, meanwhile we are lucky to get these legendary mods in AC with cool vintage tracks. Thxs for the journey !! I would be curious to know how their work and vision have been exported to quality AC mods, could be an interesting next video😉
@@DanArnets1492 I stll think GPL deserves a sequel title i mean a championshio game. A punch of modern mods is not quite well what i have in mind. Anyway i agree with a moto gp legends game!
I remember keeping a eye on this sim & waiting for ages for something to come about. A better time when the pc strived for absolute realism! Then console became popular & over the years the hardcore pc simulation player base was crushed by the couch brigade industry. Sadly to this day all we really have is older games that strived for absolute raw realism(RBR,iRacing etc); who knows if we will ever see anything like what we dreamed of the way things are in the pc sim industry.
GP! This is Crazy! Thanks for pulling up this footage and making commentary on it . Good job GP! I know what's it's like to be 'alone' in the dev world. And these guys were very "ALONE" .. (gotta eat, Right?) Remember your wheel mods in AC? Yeah. That wasn't pleasant for sure. Building an entire game and cars? Crazy. I tried... Not given up yet. YET. but ... Time and $$$ . That's why I never do 'pre-orders' on ANYTHING! Because You never know if you can deliver for sure and the nightmare of 20hr days doing something is just not good for your health.. I built a motion sim instead and all the pressure is off.. Take a look or not, IDK I'm having a blast ! DMAX
Man I feel bad for these guys... They definitely got the gist of historic racing. I wonder in the days of crowdfunding if maybe their project could be revived some how?
That was fascinating...I just about remember the original ads and the anticipation that another GPL like sim was being developed. Thank you for taking the time to produce this excellent documentary. You did a great job and I'm really enjoying your new content on top of the GPL videos that we all love and appreciate. I met my ex-wife by playing GPL online in 1999...but that's another story!
Oh my goodness, I remember visiting that website back in the hay day and watching it, waiting, as the young enthusiastic early teenager I was, expecting something, anything to come of it. That website hasn't crossed my mind in over 15+ years, and yes, the renders today don't look like much, but 20 years ago, they were jaw dropping, however, we never got proof of any physical game either, so were they just pretty images? We'll never know I guess. Thanks for the walk down memory lane on this one, genuinely had forgotten entirely about it, which was probably for the best!
This video is one of my favorites, I enjoyed this a lot and felt that mysterious feeling. This whole project was very interesting, too bad it never got finished
And do not forget TEN (Total Entertainment Network) that took games with an online piece and gave it a front end to organize game sessions - for Nascar racing online it was how we I organized league races. I was in a league with a group of people who helped Papy create Hawaii (Nascar online racing) that led to some really high long distance bills. I got into it after Papy included it for online and I was on a 14.4 baud dial up modem.
This was really fantastic to watch on Christmas Day, best Xmas day Present ever! I remember this period well and looking back it feels like a scenario when you buy a car to restore, give it the initial polish on purchase then it sits in a barn for 20 years before it becomes a barn find, this is that barn find.
This has the vibe of Ahoy and I like it.
A fellow Spice and Wolf fan watching GPLaps? What a surprise!
We need more of this.
YES
Kas b that is the first thing I thought from the very start of the video! I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed!
Lol yep. I can't un see it now.
It's crazy how iRacing took NR2003's base engine and most of Racing Legends' development model and became the probably the biggest simulator of all time. Classic example of wrong place, wrong time.
And that sweet, sweet Red Sox money!
@@antispeed I mean, to be fair to them, most of the iRacing team developed NR2003, went bankrupt thanks to EA, and then vowed to never let that happen again.
So, yeah, they got someone who believed in them, got an investor for their crazy idea, then went out and made a simulation they believed in. Simple as that.
@@LithFox EA bought Papyrus?
@@oximofo9 Nope, EA bought the NASCAR license.
I've been a software product manager for a long time, and this seems to be a classic example of "feature creep." Professional developers will decide upon a set of achievable objectives and then work towards them. When those objectives are met they will decide upon their next milestones and work towards those. And your own resources must be included in determining how realistic those goals and milestones can be.
It sounds like real tragedy is that the West brothers had no real project management skills or experience, which can doom a software development project right from the start.
Yep, reminds me of Star Citizen however at least this game didn't sell people pixels and their shop had actual products
Very insightful comment. There is a reason why Project Manager is a separate discipline in s/w development.
@@bobmcl2406 I think every developer should be a little bit of a project manager too.
Perfection is the enemy of done
"I've been a software product manager"............... salesmen create nothing, Artists create, and dont give a damn about money.
*"It [the transporter] is currently just the body that has been done, and that is not complete yet."*
I remember a collective groan from the community.
We've been looking at magnificent 3D models of sway bars, space frames and the internals of dual overhead cam racing engines for a year. These were things that would be wonderful, in version 2.
The image of that beautiful transporter, and the plans for it, told us what we were dreading was true.
At the beginning of a project, with abundant cash reserves, it's easy to dream big, and broad. We all enjoyed those dreams for a year.
I believe the West brothers were sincere. They just couldn't focus on the task.
I feel sorry for them, and wish them the best.
The project predated crowdfunding, so there's one reason why the ambitious project was stillborn; a lack of funding. The overarching issue though was the lack of direction and priority from West racing. They had a big plan of how the sim was going to be distributed, blueprints for a Lotus transporter, eager posts about everything the sim would be able to do, but nothing to show for it beyond a few renders. It took a year to show a barely complete car and a couple of 3d renders of a track. I remember being pretty excited about Racing Legends all those years ago, but looking back I'm pretty convinced they had nothing beyond an idea. You would think that after 18 years they'd at least share what they did have, but the images and I think a brief physics test taken from WSC is all we have. They developed a vision of what sim racing would be in the future, but it's probably a mistake to credit West racing with contributing to this. Unless something of substance dating back to 2003 is revealed, all we can take from Racing Legends now is that it was just an idea and little more.
Exactly my guy!
Yeah,
a few years later and they could have followed the original Project CARS route (in terms of funding model)
@@zetetick395 Course that means the costs would have been higher and things would take more time to develop in the graphical department... Which is honestly why it got as big as it did, for the time those renders are stunning and in a world of their own.
Closest we have to their vision today, in my opinion, is Beam.NG, wonder if the Beam team or the brothers ever tried to get in contact.
They totally could have ended up like Star Citizen.
Docu's like these need to become a thing on this channel!
I remember this well, checking back on the website regularly, and then sometimes and then finally when they had an actual update and it was render of the transporter I never visited the site again.
It’s a great example of how that constricting nature of working within an organisation actually has a purpose, which is to keep the developers on track. They thought they knew a better way and they were wrong.
I also feel like they were way too ambitious for their own good. They definitely needed someone above them to rein them in before they went too far down a path that just wasn't feasible at the time. Unfortunately, they thought they knew better than anyone else and it resulted in the sim never coming out.
@@Jrodsly I agree with both of you. Adding on to this, at what point did the devs not consider some form of community help? By the time they quit, NR2003 would have been around and kicking. Sierra would have released the toolkits they did not too long after, plenty of interest in further modifying NR2003 picked up before iRacing devs nicked that. Surely community interest could have benefitted these two if they had outside help with physics already?
@@joshbrownell1868 I honestly don't know why they didn't go forward with community help since that could've taken a ton of the stress off the folks working on it. Sadly, we'll never know for sure, but I have a feeling that would've been beneficial.
I remember this so well. I developed the first tools to allow modding of SCGT (Sports Car GT - the ancestor of Rfactor!) in 3DS Max. The modding explosion that occurred, as a result, was phenomenal and WSC seemed to be a reaction to that. Great trip down memory lane.
Thanks!!!! I modded a lot in SCGT... and rfactor...and RF2 etc.
@@machucast Those were the days, a constant voyage of discovery and hope. Feels like we have arrived with the super-slick sims and kit we have now.
It's really a damn shame that their dreams were never brought to fruition. Just think of the time and money spent on what they thought would be the ultimate racing simulation. My folks had a software development company and we built a "mapper" used for EDI. Electronic Data Interchange, "paperless manufacturing" was the basic idea. It brought in lets say a purchase order from an IBM machine and the mapper reconstructed the data to exit the mapper in whatever computer format that was to receive the purchase order. This was the big 3 american automakers and all of their suppliers along with Caterpillar. We spent 8 years developing code and implementing it into the software that all of those companies ran on. We taught classes on site and had programmers going on site to work out any bugs or any other problems. The big 3 automakers pay their bills at net 180. Yep 6 months minimum to get your invoices paid. We would have 250k in receivables from GM-Ford etc. but you can't spend what you can't collect. What do you do, you sure cannot take them to court or anything. They got big bad lawyers.
My mom worked her magic until the IRS came and locked the doors and liquidated the entire company for non payment of the taxes every company has to match based upon each employees with holdings. If your federal withholdings are $124 this week, the company you work for must match that amount and send it in. She sent in the money withheld from each employees paycheck but couldn't afford to send the matching funds as required by the IRS. Their was no criminal charges filed as she never actually embezzled any money. My folks lost everything. House, cars, 401k's etc. The mapper was stolen from us by the company we had worked hand and hand with improving their software, teaching classes on how to use it and the mapper was implemented right into their operating systems source code. I had to give my folks a credit card to live on while my step dad looked for a job. They ended up moving around as his consulting was needed to help suppliers of the car companies. Automotive repetitive manufacturing is his specialty. My step dad is an ultra smart man. He used to pull down six figures doing consulting to improve production etc.
He worked with all the little companies that supply the automakers. We have tried to get him to try out for Jeopardy. He could probably give Ken Jennings a run for his money. They have finally retired but he still works at Lowes in the electrical department just to keep himself active.
The point to me rambling on and on about things nobody cares about is that I can feel for the West brothers.
They poured their heart and soul along with every damn nickel they could scrape up on their dream.
Just think about how you are going to tell your wife and family that you are selling the house so you can invest the money into a racing game on the computer. My wife would have flipped her lid.... That would definitely be a hell of a fight to get my wife to go along with selling the house.
And those are the stories nobody ever tells. All you hear is that story of two brothers who started a company in their fathers garage and now they are the worlds biggest manufacturer or something. Nobody tells you about the 1000 other brothers who did just the same, but their story ended a bit differently.
Rich, I feel You and your family. Big Risk.. Done it myself ( but not on that scale).. I'm about to retire so I built a motion sim to make me happy and forget all the stress of trying to dev something new. I have some videos posted if you want to take a look an have a laugh at driving classic cars in a motion sim.. DMAX
This video was gold, but it also had a creepy feeling. The old websites, pictures and renders, a project doomed to death... Reminded me of those creepypasta type of videos. I can't explain the feeling but I know someone out there will understand.
The somber tone and music made it feel like a eulogy for a game that was never made.
The fact that there were only relatively few people on the internet back then made that feeling as well
I recall the time at Goodwood 2002, the West brothers gave one of those leaflets to Nick Mason to interest him with, then whilst waiting to get an autograph of that drummer, I asked them for a leaflet which they were happy to give out to me, I still have it knocking about at home
Can we see the leaflet?
@@raceluxius if I can find it somewhere in my house
Oh man, this was pretty much the only thing we talked about in rec.autos.simulators back in the day. People defended it and attacked it in equal measure
@Ben T. Sure! There were online leagues back then too you know. I was in a really good European Nascar 3/Nascar 2003 league. Lag was a bit more of a problem back then.
@Ben T. actually, going back further than that, there was a time before the lobby thing was created for GPL and the only way you could race someone was for your dial-up connection to call that person's (which could have been long distance). Thankfully that didn't last too long and the lobby made things much easier.
@@FEBear1 I see more lag these days with ultra fast connections than back then when, at least with the Papyrus games (GPL, Nascar), you could play against 30 or more people with a 56k modem... ;)
i remember so much hate on BHMotorsport and High Gear Forum
Oh, man! That’s where I discovered GPL. Totally forgot about that. Thanks for the memories!!
Honestly, I think a lot of the sim racing community had written them off before Racing Legends even started because of the World Sports Cars debacle. So much of what we saw with RL was just a re-hash of what had happened with WSC - lots of pretty pictures and writing about amazing features, but nothing that we could actually play.
To be fair, they never took money from anybody, so it's hard to get too mad at them.
We need a title like this in modern sim racing. A title that focuses on the classics of motorsports. I’m so tired of GT3 cars. It’s like 90% of the content we get today. That’s auto manufacturers and eSport entities calling the shots right there.
That and the fact that they have to keep up with the times.
The old V10 F1 cars in the 2000s F1 games aren't there as "classics" but because they were the current cars at the time
It would be nice to see a modern racing sim centered around vintage/classic motorsports, the closest we've got is Simbin's GT Legends, which is a great game in its own right especially with the mod support. Thankfully Assetto exists.
Automobilista has these classics. Automobilista 2 also has these classics. Reiza deserves more recognition for their amazing achievements on cars, tracks and FFB.
What are you talking about? iRacing has classic cars and almost nobody races them.
try rFacror dude
"Blackhole Motorsports..." holy crap, now that's trip down memory lane... do they still exist?
I’m trying to remember the name of the guy who ran that site. He was hilarious
Anyone remeber Tim Wheatly? He ran a huge simracing site right when GPL was at its peak. And how about the US pits? Does anyone remember that one?
@@CrazyHenkie777 The USPits was great! I used to get all my setups from there...
No Blackhole Motorsports stopped years back , along with Racesim Central.
I seem to remember lots vanished after many of the bigger modders became official developers like Simbin.
Also it was around this period that Car companies started threating sites and modding teams over using their Car names and intellectual property.
Around the same time as Racing Legends site came about Image Space incorporated was about to split from EA and start their RFactor SIM with no lecenced cars .
Also Live For Speed came out of the blue , in fact some even thought it was the work of the West Brothers , but that was quickly put straight.
It was a very interesting time in SIM Racing development and the whole business concept that would be developed over the next decade or so.
In these days of Kickstarter and patrons , early access a project like this may have worked , it has for many games since and many none game projects. A bold vision ahead of its time I would say in hindsight.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane though.
@@CrazyHenkie777 I believe Tim has gotten back the rights to his Race Sim Central site and it currently gets updates once again.
I would legit love to see a community remake of this. Grand Prix, WSC, Bikes, Pre-War, Dragsters, Stock Car, Land Record, Touring Cars, Junior Formulas, Rally, CanAm, Trans Am, you name it. An all new GPL but bigger, and with that early 2000's PC retro look, and all those brilliant features the West's came to think of. Especially that garage walk-around feature and unique car ownership details.
For it to be a remake they would have to have made something in the first place.
I followed this game religiously at the time. It was the light that got me through some dark times, as stupid as that may sound. I placed all my hopes and dreams of living out my wildest racing fantasies in this sim. I was super active in the community and checked the website at least daily for updates. I realize now in retrospect, this sim was basically Star Citizen, but for sim racing. Very ambitious goals that could never be accomplished if you had a publisher. I think if they started this same idea today but went with crowd funding, it might actually make it. To this day there is no sim that even comes close to what the West Brothers wanted to achieve. Like I said, Star Citizen is the closest thing, since that game also aims to deliver everything you could want in a specific genre of game. If they started a Kickstarter campaign I'd be the first to sign up.
1:32 *Stunning graphics*
*shows choppy gameplay*
Ahh there’s the late 90s early 2000s I remember
Man, that was a blast from the past. Not only because of Racing Legends (eagerly awaited every news post back then, and actually revisited the site a few months ago for the first time in ages), but also because of the short clip of Sports Car GT and the Blackhole Motorsports screenshots, a site I visted daily back in the day :)
My Wingman Formula Force came with a copy of Sports Car GT. Great combo at the time.
I loved SCGT back in the day. And than GPL man wow! The simracing community was awesome in those days!
@@Dethmeister So sad Logitech abandoned that ffb technology...it was so smooth.
@@AndreaP76 yeah wasn't that the red wheel? I used the Act Labs wheel with the shifter. Great for GPL.
@@CrazyHenkie777 Yes, the first one, all red, that came out I think in 1998 or 1999. At that time, it was probably the best wheel, with the best ffb.
Wow Racing Legends. Blackhole Motorsports. This is a trip into things I'd entirely forgotten.
I am always certain that the game never existed at all. It was literally three or four renders and they sat back and ate crisps all year waiting for a big publisher to fund them.
First, what an outstanding piece of journalism. You told this story brilliantly. I knew nothing about this tale, but it really adds to the history of sim racing. Since there did not seem to be much (any) effort to raise funds, I guess I would like to believe that the Wests just had "big dreams but small means". At least we are left with that image of the Lotus 49 outside the garages, which is a thing of beauty!
Thanks for the kind words. Had they been a few years later I think things like Kickstarter/even easier e-commerce could have been easier. But remember, 2002 was even early for services such as paypal. They did try the online store thing, but I am sure the overhead of those items meant that the money they would actually intake would be very little.
@@GPLaps So true, I feel kind of bad for the West Bros.. They really just were big dreamers with not enough foundation behind them.
GPLaps, Thank you very much for adding a link to my channel in the description of your video.))
Of course! thank you very much for the amazing music!
Man, some people just have too much ambition for their own good. But I guess someone's got to fail so that others can later succeed.
Developpers often act like artists or children, (not kind for them, but u c what i mean) not grounded or structured enough, and often not easy to cope with.
This is where they need the good person that they failed to work with.
Reading today their “no release yet” messages, they also sound a bit emotional..
and being allergic to some authority didn’t help them. It’s a bit sad..
they definitely brought new ideas some that have outlasted many others and become expected features
I should like to add that God usually, it seems, does not give everything to one individual. You may be very gifted in making things happen in the code, but what it takes to pull it all together doesn't come along with that gift of coding. It seems we are meant to work together, as teams. The key is finding the correct keys to unlock all the potentials of every team member. I think these guys just need to find a few good key people to bring it all together. I wish them all the best in their future endeavors.
I wonder if the West Brothers have any relation to Christian West, the guy who made Motorsport Manager? I mean, it’s _likely_ a coincidence, but it would be a pretty uncanny one, especially that one of them is named Chris…
No, no relation, or not that I am aware of.
Oh, hey, Tony. Wasn’t expecting to see you here (then again, I don’t think any of us were, haha).
Well, thanks for clearing that up, and good luck on MacSpeedee!
Looking at the renders and listening to their vision 20 years later and I STILL want that game...
OMG! I remember this. It was supposed to be the ultimate racing sim ever, I got swept up in all the hype, and followed this for so long back then, until I eventually forgot about it and moved on. I hadn't thought of it again until I saw this video on my recommended videos. I honestly think this would have been the Star Citizen of racing sims, if Kickstarter had been a thing then. They would have raised a lot of money and ended up with very little, to nothing until like 20 years later when it probably would have been surpassed.
Damn. Sad story. I remember following it around 2003. I now understand a bit more. Thank you. I do own Total Immersion Racing for PS2. It was quite good.
That was definitely interesting.
I played TIR quite a bit way back when. And yeah, the breadth of scope, even just in the Sportscars, GTs, and TCs was quite something. But yeah, trying to do Le Mans, ALMS, FIA SCC, late '90s FIA GT1, DTM, SuperGT, British GT, and whatever else, was going to be a tall order no matter how you look at it.
Still, it was fun to play. They had a number of mainstays in terms of IRL tracks: Monza, Silverstone, Sebring, Hockenheim (back when it still went out and back through the woods), and a few others. In addition, the fictional tracks they made really were quite good, I felt. Springfield, Talheimring, and Minato City were all enjoyable, and quite satisfying to drive truly fast, but it was certainly a challenge to get that ultimate lap. You had to drive the right line, not only t keep from running out of road, but also to avoid bogging the cars down in some key spots.
It was fun, and seeing this, you have to wonder at what might have been.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! 😁 TIR and GT4 were my gateway to sportscar racing scene,and I'm still grateful to have ever played both in my childhood
I was a big GPL fan and got so excited when this was announced. I remember refreshing their website every day and hanging off any news. But when they started talking in detail about the Lotus team bus - I started to become skeptical about whether we'd ever see anything come to fruition...and now the world has just moved on. Great video!
This was an insane roller coaster of a story.
Ah yes.. hopes were high for this one, but most people thought / were afraid the whole project was simply way too ambitious for 2 devs. The pictures released back then made it all even more unbelief worthy to me. Beautiful renderings but the lack of any actual pictures or demos from the sim itself. The mentioned features and ideas were great on paper but totally unrealistic for such a small team.
I met one of them on a Grand Prix Legends lan party in Holland, 20 years ago or something. Can't remember if it was Chris or Tony. He was a really nice, bit shy guy. Always wondered what happened to them after this debacle. Hope they didn't get in a too big financial mess after this.
You probably met Chris. He's the somewhat shy one.
@@toddwasson3355 Yes I thought it was Chris but wasn't 100% sure. It's been a while :)
They hated the idea of a store.......that helped fund the game. That's so ass backwards lol. Today that's common practice.
I had forgotten all about Racing Legends. It was an exciting time for sim racing.
Excellent doc. I think it's interesting how often this seems to happen in sim racing. A small dev team announces some wildly ambitious project that realistically will never be completed, and they string the community along for years. Another great rabbit hole is IDT's Champcar Challenge.
I remember all this and i was also hooked on the concept for a while.
But eventually, i switched from GLP to Rfactor around 2004 and i forgot all about racing legends.
I somehow had the idea that this concept was transformed into another racing game/sim that is still being used, but i can't come up with the game i had in mind then.
I have been a sim racer for ages, but nowadays the community is so spread out because of the number of games out there, i don't enjoy it so much anymore.
Rfactor at it's peak had huge amounts of people and online servers and the dedication shown by people was just amazing.
Nowadays, there seems little left. I have done Rfactor 2, Automobilista 1 and 2 and Project cars 2. They all had their nice things, but there are few online servers, few full servers and a lot more trolling and wrecking.
Oh and community modding is also very different nowadays, often because developers give little options for the community to add because they want to keep it to themselves for commercial reasons.
GPL was a huge thing and still is, i don't think the creators made a lot of money, but they sure turned into cult icons.
I remember religiously checking out the messages board daily. Thanks for you work on this.
That was excellent, really well put together with your passion for the subject shining through.
So well done in fact, that my wife didn't try to talk over it when she walked in the room!
I remember being so excited for this back in the day and waiting for so long, only to see a few renders of a Lotus. I was young (just graduated high school) but even then I was thinking to myself, "this project is being seriously mismanaged and is doomed if all they can produce so far is a render."
You should do more of these. Very well done, well researched, and put together nicely. Cheers.
Honestly I’ve never heard of this development before but wow was this documentary intriguing. Amazing work.
dont forget about street legal, that was one of my favorites for a long time ... street racing where you could build your car from the ground up ... you could race a bare chassis, the damage was great in that game too ... theres another infamous team of racing developers
uuuh I remember that beautiful rendered Lotus 49B and that Racing Legends site. Sadly it wasn't to be.
I love this great documentation about it. Thanks for making my day.
Oh wow! I remember this. Me and a guy at work were really hyped about this back in the early 2000's. Can't believe 18 years ago as I write this! Thanks for this awesome video!
I'm falling more in love with this channel day by day. Good job, mate. It's not easy to make good documentary styled video. This is really a superb job.
Still got my Racing Legends booklet from Goodwood somewhere, must dig it out. Was excited for this in 2002!!!
That was pretty interesting! I'd never heard of this project before... Side note the music was awesome in this!
Amazing to hear - in the era of "give us some money for our Kickstarter and maybe get something in 3 years if you're lucky" - that people balked at paying for an actual physical product you could get in the immediate future that would support development. Times have really changed.
I didn't know they're the actual guys behind TIR!That game was a huge part of my childhood,and along with GT4,became my gateway to sportscar racing scene.I still can vividly remember these simpler times,when I came back fron school,fired up my PS2 (I heard it's also available for PC,might have to pick it up again someday) and play TIR's career mode.Overall it's not as glorious or spohisticated as other racing games,but they contain several nice niche cars such as Sintura GTS,Quaife R4 GTS and Dome S101,as well as decent fictional tracks alongside your standard sportscar racing regular circuits
this is undoubtedly one of the best sim racing channels on youtube, and for sure, my favorite.
As an huge Star Citizen fan i must admit this project haves lot of common with Star Citizen/CIG/Chris Roberts.... i just hope it does not fail like Racing Legends...
As i am a fan of racing too.. iRacing and so on..
Extremely interesting story thanks for making this vid
Star Citizen is playable though
@@pandamator True actually just did some ROC mining :)
Great to watch man! I remember it well. Really liked the Wests, had a nice chat at FoS 2002 in the GPL tent. At first I didn't mind it taking long, hell, I didn't think computers needed to run RL were even invented at that time! But I totally checked out when the Transporter was revealed. THIS is what you think is a good way to spend your precious time? Not gonna happen. And it didn't. Too good to be true!
Bravo! I remember having all of the excitement in the world for WSC after it was announced.
Congratulations on this one, Jake. This was really well done!
Omg, i remember this big time. I was constantly checking everyday for updates!!
It was only a couple of months ago I was trying to look for this as I forgotten the name of the site. Awesome video and we made.
Wow, I remember all of this so vividly. I was well into Grand Prix Legends when this all started, and me and my mates were watching this with baited breath. We were gobsmacked in how much detail seemed to be going into the production, namely the physics of the vehicles, and we were busting for it to come to fruition, but like the video was talking about, that enthusiasm soon waned. We went from insanely eager to be met with more and more disappointment and then finally disillusionment, and then just gave up on it completely.
Accolades to them for giving it a go and putting their heart and soul into it, but clearly their ambitions were much more grandiose than their ability to pull it off. And how you've described it in the video, they seemed to lose the plot completely about the direction they were taking with it. As one commentator wrote below, they seemed to have had no project management skills.
It's such a damn shame that the likes of gofundme weren't around back then, I'm sure they would have had huge financial support from the sim racing community. Had they been able to pull it off, it would certainly have turned the sim racing world upside down and would have set a new standard. Such a bloody pity.
Racing Legends went on to be the standard operating model for crowd funded projects
This was a good idea that suffered from a lack of project management. The renders back in the early noughties were mind-blowing. They had some great themes but they didn’t seem to have any clear goals and objectives. Not an uncommon theme when this kind of very small and enthusiastic team is involved. They were never able to show a car driving around a track and I think that was a real problem for them. If they had hit that target, it might have been different. I don’t hold anything against the West brothers. They didn’t take my money off me.
This could have been funded by crowdfunding now days!
GP Laps meets Summoning Salt. This can't be anything but great content
I remember it well and this captures the events beautifully. Well done sir!
What a throwback. I remember visiting the Racing Legends site, wondering when and how I could my hands on the Sim. Those courtyard renders still look great.
Great work putting this together. The background knowledge and tone are so on point.
Two things: I hope the West brothers haven't sold their houses. And they could easily - sort of - do this game nowadays in Unreal Engine, if they wished so.
this reminded me of development of bugbears ''wreckfest'' until thqnordic came
god i remember racesimcentral (myself included - hell, i even went to goodwood that year and seeing them was a small part of the decision) going absolutely bonkers when that teaser image went up, first finding the custom 404 page and then during the countdown - though there were definitely people screaming vapourware from day 1.
I wonder how things might have panned out if kickstarter was arounf back then...
I had forgotten about this...
I like the render of the transporter where you can see right through the front wheels and also, look at the shadow...
I play a lot of NR2003 and knowing what sim graphics looked liked around that time period, those renders are reeeally amazing for the time. I totally understand why people were so hyped about it
Racing Legends is so weird. They failed while two other guys have more or less successfully done this for the last 18 years already with Live For Speed (lfs.net)... also, iRacing took their “selling cars” idea and ran with it...
Digging up an old video but now they're back with Age of Speed, an ever expanding collection of renders pumping their Patreon for the past 2 years.
What an interesting game concept. I'd love to see a sim focused on historical racing content and tracks. Although I'm not sure if there's a big enough market for it. Historical road series in iRacing like Grand Prix Legends and the Camel GT Series don't appear to be very popular. However, the NASCAR Legends 1987 Series has a strong following. I also liked the idea of car maintenance carrying over from race to race. It'd be a neat idea for a multiplayer career mode. One can only dream!
Awesome video mate, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's even more enjoyable as it's a story I did not know about!
I remember that like it was yesterday, but I've completely forgot it overtime . Great content
This was the video which actually got me into the channel. A very well done research piece and it's not often you see the subjects of the piece come in and give their POV, so seeing that as I popped on just now to watch the vid again was really great to see. I would love to see more of these type of research of racing games that maybe didn't make it, or became very different than the original idea. Im in th process of saving up for a wheel so I can race on my new computer and this channel is very inspiring, thank you so much.
Apart from the cool AC Mods, I had no idea of the story behind...
Thank you ! Nicely showcased👍✨
Maybe one day a “Vintage Look” Sim will be released, with neo-old stuff + strong physics, meanwhile we are lucky to get these legendary mods in AC with cool vintage tracks. Thxs for the journey !!
I would be curious to know how their work and vision have been exported to quality AC mods, could be an interesting next video😉
What are you talking about? Are you confusing AC Legends with Racing Legends?
HOLY SHIT, I remember visiting their page! It's been like 17 years since I last saw that transporter...
Also, R.I.P. Blackhole Motorsports
Perhaps one day Jake. GPL really deserves a sequel.
@@DanArnets1492 I stll think GPL deserves a sequel title i mean a championshio game. A punch of modern mods is not quite well what i have in mind. Anyway i agree with a moto gp legends game!
IRacing has the old lotus, well done too, thats the closest you'll get for now :P.
@@machucast Yeah mate i know... but i stll hope to have a GPL sequel with modern graphics and without the 36 FPS limitation!
I remember keeping a eye on this sim & waiting for ages for something to come about. A better time when the pc strived for absolute realism! Then console became popular & over the years the hardcore pc simulation player base was crushed by the couch brigade industry. Sadly to this day all we really have is older games that strived for absolute raw realism(RBR,iRacing etc); who knows if we will ever see anything like what we dreamed of the way things are in the pc sim industry.
Wow, 18 years ago, I remember this, was so pumped for their success.
Awesome work on this piece, really enjoyed it. Well done 👍
I remembered these times. The hype! Thanks for reminding. Was once part of the vibrant GPL community.
Love it. So glad that someone made an update / history of it all. Just found Chris's YT channel because of the MacSpeedee thing.
Awesome stuff. Great choice of music for this. Your voice really suits this documentary style video as well. Super well put together. 👍
The music, the voicing, the research, everything in this video is outstanding! You made me a fan within the first ten seconds, I loved this!
Damn, internet was so fun in the early 00s
Reminds me of IndigoGaming, absolutely love this kind of content
Extremely well done! I had that Lotus as my wallpaper forever, quite a trip down memory lane, thanks.
GP! This is Crazy! Thanks for pulling up this footage and making commentary on it . Good job GP! I know what's it's like to be 'alone' in the dev world. And these guys were very "ALONE" .. (gotta eat, Right?) Remember your wheel mods in AC? Yeah. That wasn't pleasant for sure. Building an entire game and cars? Crazy. I tried... Not given up yet. YET. but ... Time and $$$ . That's why I never do 'pre-orders' on ANYTHING! Because You never know if you can deliver for sure and the nightmare of 20hr days doing something is just not good for your health.. I built a motion sim instead and all the pressure is off.. Take a look or not, IDK I'm having a blast ! DMAX
Two guys trying there best to make something happen... That's the lesson you need to remember
Well done. I got some Ahoy vibes from this which is high praise.
I think it was a genuinely earnest idea that turned into what looked like a scam. Their huge mistake was to try to do it all themselves.
Man I feel bad for these guys... They definitely got the gist of historic racing. I wonder in the days of crowdfunding if maybe their project could be revived some how?
That was fascinating...I just about remember the original ads and the anticipation that another GPL like sim was being developed. Thank you for taking the time to produce this excellent documentary. You did a great job and I'm really enjoying your new content on top of the GPL videos that we all love and appreciate. I met my ex-wife by playing GPL online in 1999...but that's another story!
I've been lurking on this channel for a while and WOW! I really like this new video format! Great job making this one!
Oh my goodness, I remember visiting that website back in the hay day and watching it, waiting, as the young enthusiastic early teenager I was, expecting something, anything to come of it. That website hasn't crossed my mind in over 15+ years, and yes, the renders today don't look like much, but 20 years ago, they were jaw dropping, however, we never got proof of any physical game either, so were they just pretty images? We'll never know I guess.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane on this one, genuinely had forgotten entirely about it, which was probably for the best!
more simracing history videos please, this was great!
Nice, high quality video here. Thanks!
On topic, this sounds a lot like the Star Citizen of racing games..
This video is one of my favorites, I enjoyed this a lot and felt that mysterious feeling. This whole project was very interesting, too bad it never got finished
Amazing work man! Really enjoyed it. Really well written script and awesome narration. Do more like this!
And do not forget TEN (Total Entertainment Network) that took games with an online piece and gave it a front end to organize game sessions - for Nascar racing online it was how we I organized league races. I was in a league with a group of people who helped Papy create Hawaii (Nascar online racing) that led to some really high long distance bills. I got into it after Papy included it for online and I was on a 14.4 baud dial up modem.
This was really fantastic to watch on Christmas Day, best Xmas day Present ever! I remember this period well and looking back it feels like a scenario when you buy a car to restore, give it the initial polish on purchase then it sits in a barn for 20 years before it becomes a barn find, this is that barn find.
I remember this back in the day. Waaay too ahead of its time.
Never expected a doco from you, awesome!!
We still have the original promotional materials in our office :) Time flies.