I would call my cousin. We would then practice at the same track relaying our lap times to one another over the phone. some of my best childhood memories.
Where it all began! 28 years later and I'm still racing and broadcasting a Papyrus' NASCAR sim most nights! The paintkit (which we first got a taste of in an Indycar Racing add-on) also got me started on what has become a hobby within the hobby, as you alluded to. The nostalgia is palpable here - thanks for the trip down memory lane! Feels like just yesterday I was bugging my parents to get this for me. 😄
Yes, Elton Sawyer and Ken Schrader's cars are their respective Busch Series schemes from 1994. That 64 is also a Busch Series car, driven by a few drivers (Dick Trickle, Jimmy Spencer, and Phil Parsons) in 1994 owned by Dennis Shoemaker. Like Shepherd, their names weren't licensed for use in the game. Fun fact; In addition to alcohol and tobacco sponsors not being in this game (for obvious reasons), Unocal 76 fuel wasn't in this game either, being replaced with 65 on those iconic orange signs.
Holy smokes I haven't seen footage of this game since I was a kid. My mom brought home this and the Thrustmaster wheel one weekend. She's always been the big tech obsessed in my life. Still don't know how she even found out about the wheel haha. Played this for hundreds of hours with her and my brother. Man what a name for a studio too, Papyrus, so damn memorable.
What a great mom you have :) Enjoy every day with her! I’m so glad that remote work made it possible for me to move back to the village I grew up in. Now I can see my parents everyday if I want and I love this rural mountain area so much more than the suburbs were I lived before!
This game changed everything. I remember coming home from school one day when I was in kindergarten to see my father playing this, and it looked like the coolest thing ever.
For Christmas 1994 or 95, got this together with a Thrustmaster Formula T1. Being 11 years old in Sweden, I had very little clue what Nascar was. Got totally hooked, and me and a friend of mine played every weekend, and watched Days of Thunder. Good times.
Since both the IndyCar and Nascar games we're based off the same tech, modders figured out how to convert tracks from Nascar to IndyCar and vice versa. In the late 90's I put a season together in ICR2 that included Talladega, Sears Point(Sonoma), Pocono, Atlanta (old layout), Charlotte, Texas and Watkins Glen along with ICR2's track list.
ah thats what i need for this game... yes im an australian and we dont really do oval racing so i need a couple of more tracks for this game so things dont get boring... sears point and watkins glen isnt enough..
Ah the memories... I was involved in the testing of these great early games (think I’m even in the manual of this title as I recall!). It is so odd to me still that these really started something that went on to the great 2003 and to this day (at least solo players) have been looking to replicate these since and struggling to. Thanks for the flashback!
Played the hell out of this as a kid! Got given a bootleg copy on a few floppys by a mate at school. Being in Australia (we didn't even have the internet then) my knowledge of NASCAR was Days of Thunder. I had no idea who was real and who wasn't, but this game taught me a lot and I run the biggest NASCAR iRacing league in my part of the world today. One thing you didn't mention, the damage model for the time was insane. The way the cars bent and shed parts was absolutely world leading at the time.
I bought my first PC to play this game. I walked into Best Buy, grabbed the game box and said "I need a computer to play this!" Got a Pentium 75 and rocked it. Did online racing by dialing Boston and paying the long distance. Great memories! thank you!
Yes this was crash simulator for me. Did it for hours. Physics were so hilarious it made you want to do it too and count how many you could take out at once. Especially on ovals. Hit them slightly on the right side against the wall and they launch backwards just as fast and take out almost everything. 100 G spins, parts everywhere, tires everywhere. It was glorious!
I can't begin to count the hours I have put into this SIM! 1995 I sold a car I inherited but was 2 years too young to drive. I bought a Powerhouse of a PC a thrustmaster and a copy of NASCAR! I still have all three!
I love how they simulated the different tyre brands in this game to be just like that season. Hoosiers would be fast in qualy and early on but fall off, while Goodyear's would be not as quick over 1 lap but were more consistent.
I lived in the UK, didn’t know NASCAR existed as a real sport when I bought this. I ended up buying Autosport magazine and looking way in the back where they’d have the results from the previous week. I edited the AI each week to match the results (they only listed the top 20) and would race if the following weekend. Really special times. I miss them. I also could never run SVGA.
You got the real driver names and logos in your copy? I bought mine from HMV and it was all the fake ones, had to wait until nascar 2 before it felt real! I would run SVGA with the road textures turned off and it was playable
There's something very satisfying while watching these Classic Unboxing of Old PC Games and especially Racing Games. This was the peak of the Golden Age of Big Box PC Games where almost every PC Game got a big box. The amount effort Papyrus and a variety of different Racing Game Devs put in to not just their games but the presentation is fascinating. I love Collecting Big Box PC Games, and I already ran out of space
Great watch! It was cool to see what this all came with out of the box, one of the few games where the manual is actually worth reading. Maybe you could go down the line of NASCAR by Papyrus titles, that'd be a good way to keep adding boxes to your collection along the way!
I remember getting a Thrustmaster wheel and it came with a CD-ROM version of NASCAR Racing. My computer at the time didn't run it too well. I recall that if I was racing then suddenly pressed escape on the keyboard to get back to the menus, it basically froze my computer for about 5 minutes before I can play again lol
Thank you for appreciating PDG's work. This brings back memories when I did some testing for Papyrus Design Group in the mid-90's. Later after NR's release, I was also able to help test their proposed multiplayer service on their "Alaska" servers. (Edit: The "Hawaii" servers you mention came later, and were open to the public.) Unfortunately the "open invite" thing didn't work. It didn't last long as there were too many rowdy individuals goofing off on the track (driving in reverse at Talladega to smash others during a "serious" race, for example) and they shut those down. I later helped a bit with ICR2 and actual track testing for NR2, but then my gaming life took a break to allow more time for my real-life racing. So I never got a chance to take part in helping them with the other NASCAR Racing releases in the late 90's. I didn't come back to take part until NR 2002 Season, and especially NR 2003 Season. But the demise of PDG and "NR2k3" as we called it, is another story that is too depressing to tell. TL;DR John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, took the code from NR2k3 to create what is now known as iRacing. But he dissolved PDG and rid of all of us to get it done. :(
Just the dose of nostalgia I needed, thank you for publishing this! I couldn't find anyone else who went into the paint shop, and that's the part of the game I most vividly remembered. Had forgotten it was a separate program!
Great video, took me back to some great memories of my first taste of NASCAR. Been in the UK, NASCAR was basically none existing thing back then in the early nineties, I only knew it as stock racing. But after getting NASCAR racing I couldn't get enough and wasn't long after when cable TV started showing some NASCAR in the UK. Would love to see some more retro reviews from your self, as really enjoyed your NASCAR racing video.
Papyrus did a such good job developing this series, it's amazing. By the way, IRacing is based on the 2003 title, which for me it's the best racing game ever
Something that gamers miss out on today is the trip to the local games shop and the many hours trawling the shelves deliberating on which to buy. The big box versions were great. I have all of the Crammond GP series big box versions and GP4 big box. The manuals that came with some are insanely detailed. Yeah OK you have websites and forums these days and you can buy from places like Steam but it's not the same. Ahh the good ole days. :)
Interesting tid bit about night races, when they really got popular in the 90s, they were a fairly old concept that had been around since NASCAR’s beginnings. Short tracks often held Grand National races on weeknights frequently each season. However, this concept was phased out as Winston did away with many of the short track races on the NASCAR schedule, eventually only leaving Nashville as a night race until it was removed in 1984. NASCAR sort of reintroduced them in the 90s, so to the common viewer, they were new, but in reality they weren’t, they just had never been televised before.
This is soo cool. I remember I bought the game 1994 at 14 years age via telephone call at a retailer which inserted their adverts in a German PC paper mag. Then also bought the track pack later on and also up to title Nascar 4, which had a huge box and also a big instruction manual. Sweet memories! Thank you for that!
I still have my copy that I bought when it released back then. All these years later I still credit this game for really bringing me into the racing sim scene, and I've just updated the 2003 version with all the cars, tracks, and drivers for the 2023 season.
12 minutes in and I'm already getting LGR vibes. Loving it. Also, Clint at LGR may possibly be a good resource for you in the way of retro hardware. No idea if he actually has any vintage sim racing stuff, but the man has a little bit of everything and if he doesn't, he probably knows who does. Just a thought.
I had this game in the late 90’s as a young kid. Had the thrust master wheel and peddle combo. Who know how many laps I had around my home track of Bristol. I’d just demolish the field and win lol
I spent hours and hours racing both this and IndyCar when I was a kid. I like the improved damage of the NASCAR games, as only the wheels came off in IndyCar. I used to start a race at Talladega, get up above 200 mph driving the wrong way on the track, then send it right into the middle of the pack. The replays with all the damage were crazy! I would do a slow-mo replay from inside the car and would count 40+ spins in the car. I also did a lot of actual racing too :)
I’m a born and bred circuit guy but over the last 6 months I have become obsessed with racing stock cars in iRacing, so much so that my oval iRating is higher than my road one 😂 So it’s good to see where it all started. These devs have been the kings of NASCAR simulation since forever.
I remember getting mine and getting it to run and getting dissapointed as i couldn't see the decals on all the cars as shown on the back of the box and images in the magazines. And i didn't know why. It wasn't until i realised i had a 4 meg machine and it needed an 8meg to open all the graphical features!! As our PC at the time was a rented one, i updated to an 8meg machine very quickly and i got to see the game in all It's glory!!
God I loved reading PC game manuals from this era. Dynamix made the Aces of the Pacific and Aces Over Europe flight sims, which included actual 100+ page spiral notebooks with not only how to play the game but detailed histories of WWII air warfare, background on all of the campaigns, illustrations and performance data of every plane in the game, and more. They were extraordinarily well done.
I have been collecting vintage sims over the last year just to have the manuals. The old Jane's manuals, Falcon 3/4, Ef2000/TAF, GPLs 4 wheel drift, Nascar 4 how to tune a stock car, European Air Wars history chapter, etc. They don't make anything like those old games any more.
That was my first ever racing Sim on a Macintosh Performa 5200, and later on a 5400/160 running Mac OS 8. Oh the memories!! Thank you so much for this one.
if Clint LGR shows up here, he will be probably testing NR1 with the Rendition high resolution mode after watching your review. Sadly there is no way to emulate Rendition high resolution 3d graphics these days, as its API source code is lost. and a Original Rendition Card is very expensive.
I just gotta say the quality and education in your videos are second to none. You do such a good job branching the eras of racing to the modern sim racers. You're doing racing a great service keep it up man.
great how game developers/companies had pride in the box art work and information. Now it's so minimal. I guess due to the size of the cases. As you've mentioned before the booklet that comes with Gran Prix Legends big box is and still is amazing. nothing will come close to that. Big box games were the best in all fairness on all playforms
One thing I loved was you could save in the race itself. Either in the pits or the back straight I could save and finish the race at another time or another day. It made it easier to do full length racing.
I used to love NASCAR 3 and NASCAR 2003. I spent so many hours just practicing. All of the short tracks in NASCAR 3 were some of the most fun I've ever had racing.
The track guides were amazingly good, and it had a detailed breakdown of the Latford point system as well. Something that, at the time, ESPN and company didn't do a good job of explaining. I've always heard Dale and RCR weren't included because something about not seeing the value of being in the game, yet come NR2 Dale was in. I never really minded the fictional drivers, but I hated, hated, hated Richmond with a burningg passion. I always ot spun off of 2 or into 3. Thanks a lot, AI...thanks a lot. IIRC, they kept the Winston Cup name in the manual since they could use that, just not in the game, all the way up to 2003. EA's games did the same with MRN, which always amused me how they blurred out Winston's logos/naming, then EA somehow missed the MRN crew being blatantly obvious with it.
That Talladega tri-oval kink was brutal. Using a joystick at the time I had to lay it over full to the left with perfect timing to run it flat-out. Forget it if you were 2 or more wide 😲
In a way it seems a shame to open it, but also - so awesome. I never played NASCAR Racing but spent a long time with NR2 - I remember painting ‘Cole Trickle’s’ car after watching Days of Thunder!
I love the drivers animations you see throughout the windscreen from track cam view! Absolutely gorgeous, how much love to detail they have put in to simulate this aspect back in 1994! Great unboxing & rewiev, I enjoyed it a lot!!!👍👍
Yeah i had the European version (i.m dutch) and it only had the fictional drivers so i spent hours and hours on the paintkit and the driver editor to put the real drivers and teams in my Nascar game. When i picked it up it was around 96/97 and Nascar was starting to gain some popularity as we had a tv station called Eurosport wich aired Nascar and Indycar/CART racing live for the first time i believe in our country.
When I was a teenager (circa 2009) I found a copy of Nascar Racing 2 in my step-dads old game boxes. I put together a computer running Windows 98 just so I could play that game. I had it sat on the floor in my room and would lay on the floor and race with my key pad. Even a decade on that game was fun enough to suck hours out of my day.
The game that started sim racing for me. I played this along with first Indycar and Indycar Racing 2 for long hours throughout my teens year. I was super obsessed with racing and finding car sets to race against. A great trip down to PC racing memory lane
I played this game to death. You could also download templates of current cars and to update your paint schemes year-over-year without buying the next version. I would also play with the code in the game to make adjustments to the A1. Massive fun.
Absolute classic. This was definitely the first sim I ever played, although NASCAR Racing 4 was the one I really got into once I had a PC at home that could play.
The curved pits annoyed me as a kid. My first sim was NASCAR Racing 2 and it was especially pronounced at Richmond. In real life there's a large grassy infield between the track and the pits but in NR2 it there was a like a 2 foot wide strip of green between the edge of the track and the pit wall. It made the frontstretch feel a lot narrower than it really was.
Ken Schraders Racing number at the top is white because it’s dumped into the Winston cup for this game despite that it is regularly a Busch cup series car and everyone knows the racing number in the Busch series for Ken is blue.
i had every version up until the final 2003 season. I never did get 2003. I still have every copy except this first game. when i was still young i gave the first game away to a friend after i had gotten nascar racing 2
Very nice! I remember starting this one up on my Pentium60 alongside DoomII and later Quake. It was really cool to see it running as it looked great and felt dynamic/professional(I preferred VGA to SVGA as latter made it look too clunky). Btw - PainShopPro... oh my - still using 5.0 to alter Doom textures in 2024.
This was the only racing game I played as a kid. Never knew what the hell I was doing (I was like, 5 or 6) but man, I loved playing it and messing around in the paint booth.
I played this for so long as a kid without ever completing a race.
I remember doing a 200 lapper with a friend of mine sharing the driving. We were using a keyboard to control and wrecked on the second to last lap 😂
lol i spend hours doing repeated practice laps in this without even starting a race, just passing cars is fun in this sim to this day still
@@alexharkettsimracing wjtyjl
@@alexharkettsimracing damn I can only imagine the pain
I would call my cousin. We would then practice at the same track relaying our lap times to one another over the phone. some of my best childhood memories.
Dale Jr. was one of those racking up massive phone bills playing this game online, their phone bill jumped $400 in the first month this game was out!
Yep that Hawaii server was expensive. lol
I did that with N2 calling TEN from the UK :)
Dear God! I bet Dale Sr was not happy! But also kind of happy.😂
That manual is nuts. Nowadays sims just throw you a million things with absolutely no assistance, back then you got an entire novel in the box!
with setup tips for each track and like 50 blank pages for notes. NASCAR 2 was better but this is where it all started.
GPL gave you two manuals even! One for the game itself, and another one for explaining driving techniques and car setup.
Check out the size of the manual for Falcon 4.0.
Where it all began! 28 years later and I'm still racing and broadcasting a Papyrus' NASCAR sim most nights! The paintkit (which we first got a taste of in an Indycar Racing add-on) also got me started on what has become a hobby within the hobby, as you alluded to. The nostalgia is palpable here - thanks for the trip down memory lane! Feels like just yesterday I was bugging my parents to get this for me. 😄
Yes, Elton Sawyer and Ken Schrader's cars are their respective Busch Series schemes from 1994. That 64 is also a Busch Series car, driven by a few drivers (Dick Trickle, Jimmy Spencer, and Phil Parsons) in 1994 owned by Dennis Shoemaker. Like Shepherd, their names weren't licensed for use in the game.
Fun fact; In addition to alcohol and tobacco sponsors not being in this game (for obvious reasons), Unocal 76 fuel wasn't in this game either, being replaced with 65 on those iconic orange signs.
Holy smokes I haven't seen footage of this game since I was a kid. My mom brought home this and the Thrustmaster wheel one weekend. She's always been the big tech obsessed in my life. Still don't know how she even found out about the wheel haha. Played this for hundreds of hours with her and my brother. Man what a name for a studio too, Papyrus, so damn memorable.
Was the thrustmaster the blue and black one. If so I think my parents still have it in the closet of my old bedroom.
What a great mom you have :)
Enjoy every day with her!
I’m so glad that remote work made it possible for me to move back to the village I grew up in.
Now I can see my parents everyday if I want and I love this rural mountain area so much more than the suburbs were I lived before!
I played this so much when I was a kid, no wait.... I was 28 when this came out. I played this sooo much when I was 28.
LOL. You were a kid. I was 40!
@@bigalexg You're both kids! I was 86 when it came out!
@@SomeUsernameSomeoneElseTookIt 119...
This game changed everything. I remember coming home from school one day when I was in kindergarten to see my father playing this, and it looked like the coolest thing ever.
For Christmas 1994 or 95, got this together with a Thrustmaster Formula T1. Being 11 years old in Sweden, I had very little clue what Nascar was. Got totally hooked, and me and a friend of mine played every weekend, and watched Days of Thunder. Good times.
Since both the IndyCar and Nascar games we're based off the same tech, modders figured out how to convert tracks from Nascar to IndyCar and vice versa. In the late 90's I put a season together in ICR2 that included Talladega, Sears Point(Sonoma), Pocono, Atlanta (old layout), Charlotte, Texas and Watkins Glen along with ICR2's track list.
ah thats what i need for this game... yes im an australian and we dont really do oval racing so i need a couple of more tracks for this game so things dont get boring... sears point and watkins glen isnt enough..
I remember doing a full-length race at Bristol using keyboard which, incidentally, was the last time I used keyboard for any kind of auto racing.
it's clearly a "GPLaps - LGR" crossover
I was thinking the same thing!
Ah the memories... I was involved in the testing of these great early games (think I’m even in the manual of this title as I recall!). It is so odd to me still that these really started something that went on to the great 2003 and to this day (at least solo players) have been looking to replicate these since and struggling to. Thanks for the flashback!
I played this so much as a kid. Making paint schemes felt revolutionary back then.
Played the hell out of this as a kid! Got given a bootleg copy on a few floppys by a mate at school. Being in Australia (we didn't even have the internet then) my knowledge of NASCAR was Days of Thunder. I had no idea who was real and who wasn't, but this game taught me a lot and I run the biggest NASCAR iRacing league in my part of the world today. One thing you didn't mention, the damage model for the time was insane. The way the cars bent and shed parts was absolutely world leading at the time.
I bought my first PC to play this game. I walked into Best Buy, grabbed the game box and said "I need a computer to play this!" Got a Pentium 75 and rocked it. Did online racing by dialing Boston and paying the long distance. Great memories! thank you!
I remember setting no damage on my car, race backwards DNF every single car and then start to race to win LOL
Yes this was crash simulator for me. Did it for hours. Physics were so hilarious it made you want to do it too and count how many you could take out at once. Especially on ovals. Hit them slightly on the right side against the wall and they launch backwards just as fast and take out almost everything. 100 G spins, parts everywhere, tires everywhere. It was glorious!
That's exactly what I used to do
I can't begin to count the hours I have put into this SIM! 1995 I sold a car I inherited but was 2 years too young to drive. I bought a Powerhouse of a PC a thrustmaster and a copy of NASCAR! I still have all three!
I love how they simulated the different tyre brands in this game to be just like that season.
Hoosiers would be fast in qualy and early on but fall off, while Goodyear's would be not as quick over 1 lap but were more consistent.
I lived in the UK, didn’t know NASCAR existed as a real sport when I bought this. I ended up buying Autosport magazine and looking way in the back where they’d have the results from the previous week. I edited the AI each week to match the results (they only listed the top 20) and would race if the following weekend. Really special times. I miss them.
I also could never run SVGA.
You got the real driver names and logos in your copy? I bought mine from HMV and it was all the fake ones, had to wait until nascar 2 before it felt real!
I would run SVGA with the road textures turned off and it was playable
There's something very satisfying while watching these Classic Unboxing of Old PC Games and especially Racing Games. This was the peak of the Golden Age of Big Box PC Games where almost every PC Game got a big box. The amount effort Papyrus and a variety of different Racing Game Devs put in to not just their games but the presentation is fascinating.
I love Collecting Big Box PC Games, and I already ran out of space
Great watch! It was cool to see what this all came with out of the box, one of the few games where the manual is actually worth reading. Maybe you could go down the line of NASCAR by Papyrus titles, that'd be a good way to keep adding boxes to your collection along the way!
I LOVED this game. It was such a leap forward. I am on iRacing now. I remember thinking the graphics were AWESOME at the time. lol
I seem to remember that not only did this have a fantastic career mode, it also had an in-game livery editor that is still unmatched.
Yes! I made my car look like a striped Viper!
Had this port for the ps1 circa 96*? Spent a lot of time with NASCAR Racing 2 on the PC. Thanks for the nostalgia trip 🤘🏻
My first ever racing game on PC. I loved it so much and enjoyed the driving and of course the crashes haha.
Man, you just made me feel like I'm back in a time for some 25 years.
Thank you so much for doing this, as a whole, just the historical catalogue, the fact this is here and will be for years is just so great to see
I remember getting a Thrustmaster wheel and it came with a CD-ROM version of NASCAR Racing. My computer at the time didn't run it too well. I recall that if I was racing then suddenly pressed escape on the keyboard to get back to the menus, it basically froze my computer for about 5 minutes before I can play again lol
I knew it. After someone on Twitter showed his collection I knew you wouldn't resist 👍
Thank you for appreciating PDG's work. This brings back memories when I did some testing for Papyrus Design Group in the mid-90's. Later after NR's release, I was also able to help test their proposed multiplayer service on their "Alaska" servers. (Edit: The "Hawaii" servers you mention came later, and were open to the public.) Unfortunately the "open invite" thing didn't work. It didn't last long as there were too many rowdy individuals goofing off on the track (driving in reverse at Talladega to smash others during a "serious" race, for example) and they shut those down. I later helped a bit with ICR2 and actual track testing for NR2, but then my gaming life took a break to allow more time for my real-life racing. So I never got a chance to take part in helping them with the other NASCAR Racing releases in the late 90's. I didn't come back to take part until NR 2002 Season, and especially NR 2003 Season. But the demise of PDG and "NR2k3" as we called it, is another story that is too depressing to tell. TL;DR John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, took the code from NR2k3 to create what is now known as iRacing. But he dissolved PDG and rid of all of us to get it done. :(
My first REAL sim! Purchased my first wheel for this game! This video, like the game box, comes packed with quality components, thanks!
Just the dose of nostalgia I needed, thank you for publishing this! I couldn't find anyone else who went into the paint shop, and that's the part of the game I most vividly remembered. Had forgotten it was a separate program!
Great video, took me back to some great memories of my first taste of NASCAR.
Been in the UK, NASCAR was basically none existing thing back then in the early nineties, I only knew it as stock racing.
But after getting NASCAR racing I couldn't get enough and wasn't long after when cable TV started showing some NASCAR in the UK.
Would love to see some more retro reviews from your self, as really enjoyed your NASCAR racing video.
Papyrus did a such good job developing this series, it's amazing. By the way, IRacing is based on the 2003 title, which for me it's the best racing game ever
Something that gamers miss out on today is the trip to the local games shop and the many hours trawling the shelves deliberating on which to buy. The big box versions were great. I have all of the Crammond GP series big box versions and GP4 big box. The manuals that came with some are insanely detailed. Yeah OK you have websites and forums these days and you can buy from places like Steam but it's not the same. Ahh the good ole days. :)
I had a lot of fun on this simulation, the best and the discovery of nascar and only good memories
Interesting tid bit about night races, when they really got popular in the 90s, they were a fairly old concept that had been around since NASCAR’s beginnings. Short tracks often held Grand National races on weeknights frequently each season. However, this concept was phased out as Winston did away with many of the short track races on the NASCAR schedule, eventually only leaving Nashville as a night race until it was removed in 1984. NASCAR sort of reintroduced them in the 90s, so to the common viewer, they were new, but in reality they weren’t, they just had never been televised before.
This is soo cool. I remember I bought the game 1994 at 14 years age via telephone call at a retailer which inserted their adverts in a German PC paper mag. Then also bought the track pack later on and also up to title Nascar 4, which had a huge box and also a big instruction manual. Sweet memories! Thank you for that!
God the memories this brings back...386 and then moving up to to the 486 DX2 and so on...wonderful times that all started with Indycar!
I still have my copy that I bought when it released back then. All these years later I still credit this game for really bringing me into the racing sim scene, and I've just updated the 2003 version with all the cars, tracks, and drivers for the 2023 season.
12 minutes in and I'm already getting LGR vibes. Loving it. Also, Clint at LGR may possibly be a good resource for you in the way of retro hardware. No idea if he actually has any vintage sim racing stuff, but the man has a little bit of everything and if he doesn't, he probably knows who does. Just a thought.
LGR did a video about a special version of NASCAR Racing for a specific video card
I had this game in the late 90’s as a young kid. Had the thrust master wheel and peddle combo. Who know how many laps I had around my home track of Bristol. I’d just demolish the field and win lol
I spent hours and hours racing both this and IndyCar when I was a kid. I like the improved damage of the NASCAR games, as only the wheels came off in IndyCar. I used to start a race at Talladega, get up above 200 mph driving the wrong way on the track, then send it right into the middle of the pack. The replays with all the damage were crazy! I would do a slow-mo replay from inside the car and would count 40+ spins in the car. I also did a lot of actual racing too :)
I’m a born and bred circuit guy but over the last 6 months I have become obsessed with racing stock cars in iRacing, so much so that my oval iRating is higher than my road one 😂
So it’s good to see where it all started. These devs have been the kings of NASCAR simulation since forever.
Dude!!! I remember seeing this in the Mall Store when it came out & I lost my mind.
Great Memories!!!
This is what started it all for me.
Dale JR was hooked on this game before he ever became a NASCAR driver.
First PC game I ever played and WOW wasn't it the best slide show EVER! Awesome review thanks!
I remember getting mine and getting it to run and getting dissapointed as i couldn't see the decals on all the cars as shown on the back of the box and images in the magazines. And i didn't know why. It wasn't until i realised i had a 4 meg machine and it needed an 8meg to open all the graphical features!! As our PC at the time was a rented one, i updated to an 8meg machine very quickly and i got to see the game in all It's glory!!
Not sure, but I think I remember that I put the CD into a CD music Player and was blown away that it actually played music
God I loved reading PC game manuals from this era. Dynamix made the Aces of the Pacific and Aces Over Europe flight sims, which included actual 100+ page spiral notebooks with not only how to play the game but detailed histories of WWII air warfare, background on all of the campaigns, illustrations and performance data of every plane in the game, and more. They were extraordinarily well done.
I have been collecting vintage sims over the last year just to have the manuals. The old Jane's manuals, Falcon 3/4, Ef2000/TAF, GPLs 4 wheel drift, Nascar 4 how to tune a stock car, European Air Wars history chapter, etc. They don't make anything like those old games any more.
@@happyloaf Janes WW2 Fighters is still one of my favorite games of all time.
7:36
I remember learning about The Fat Man back in like 2004 on G4TV, that channel use to be so good before it took a dump
great vid btw
That was my first ever racing Sim on a Macintosh Performa 5200, and later on a 5400/160 running Mac OS 8. Oh the memories!! Thank you so much for this one.
if Clint LGR shows up here, he will be probably testing NR1 with the Rendition high resolution mode after watching your review.
Sadly there is no way to emulate Rendition high resolution 3d graphics these days, as its API source code is lost.
and a Original Rendition Card is very expensive.
Nice. I like the LGR vibes. I really enjoy the vibrant colors of this one, even though I never played it.
I just gotta say the quality and education in your videos are second to none. You do such a good job branching the eras of racing to the modern sim racers. You're doing racing a great service keep it up man.
great how game developers/companies had pride in the box art work and information. Now it's so minimal. I guess due to the size of the cases. As you've mentioned before the booklet that comes with Gran Prix Legends big box is and still is amazing. nothing will come close to that. Big box games were the best in all fairness on all playforms
One thing I loved was you could save in the race itself. Either in the pits or the back straight I could save and finish the race at another time or another day. It made it easier to do full length racing.
I used to love NASCAR 3 and NASCAR 2003. I spent so many hours just practicing. All of the short tracks in NASCAR 3 were some of the most fun I've ever had racing.
The track guides were amazingly good, and it had a detailed breakdown of the Latford point system as well. Something that, at the time, ESPN and company didn't do a good job of explaining.
I've always heard Dale and RCR weren't included because something about not seeing the value of being in the game, yet come NR2 Dale was in. I never really minded the fictional drivers, but I hated, hated, hated Richmond with a burningg passion. I always ot spun off of 2 or into 3. Thanks a lot, AI...thanks a lot.
IIRC, they kept the Winston Cup name in the manual since they could use that, just not in the game, all the way up to 2003. EA's games did the same with MRN, which always amused me how they blurred out Winston's logos/naming, then EA somehow missed the MRN crew being blatantly obvious with it.
Back when EA actually made good games, like the Jane's Combat Sims, the original Battlefield (as well as Vietnam and 2), Ultima, F1 Challenge.....
That Talladega tri-oval kink was brutal. Using a joystick at the time I had to lay it over full to the left with perfect timing to run it flat-out. Forget it if you were 2 or more wide 😲
An awesome game from an awesome period in PC gaming. I really miss the big box pc games from 90s.
My first experience of a racing sim was a demo disk of NASCAR 94, then got the full game. Never looked back! Thanks you Papyrus!
In a way it seems a shame to open it, but also - so awesome. I never played NASCAR Racing but spent a long time with NR2 - I remember painting ‘Cole Trickle’s’ car after watching Days of Thunder!
Sim history to watch on my snow day? Yes please!
A perfect video for me to sip some tea, chill out and listen to some vintage sim racing talk. Great video bud thanks for that time capsule!
funfact: in nascar thunder 2004, the announcer will occasionally yell "WHO WILL WIN THIS NASCAR WINSTON CUP EVENT!" on the final lap.
Fantastic game. All of the Papyrus NASCAR games were gold. 1994. Better times.
I wish modern PC games could be purchased as physical media like this.
I love the drivers animations you see throughout the windscreen from track cam view! Absolutely gorgeous, how much love to detail they have put in to simulate this aspect back in 1994! Great unboxing & rewiev, I enjoyed it a lot!!!👍👍
Yeah i had the European version (i.m dutch) and it only had the fictional drivers so i spent hours and hours on the paintkit and the driver editor to put the real drivers and teams in my Nascar game.
When i picked it up it was around 96/97 and Nascar was starting to gain some popularity as we had a tv station called Eurosport wich aired Nascar and Indycar/CART racing live for the first time i believe in our country.
eurosport was so cool at that time. CART and Nascar live...
The season play through you did of this had me howling with laughter at times. “The pace car! The pace car hit me!” 😂
This and NR2 was my favorite game to play. I still have files to recreate the Daytona track and edit the race schedules to reflect the real schedules.
I love old games manuals, they have so much info there
"For not too much money" is one hell of a phrase. Great vid as always Jake.
When I was a teenager (circa 2009) I found a copy of Nascar Racing 2 in my step-dads old game boxes. I put together a computer running Windows 98 just so I could play that game. I had it sat on the floor in my room and would lay on the floor and race with my key pad. Even a decade on that game was fun enough to suck hours out of my day.
The game that started sim racing for me. I played this along with first Indycar and Indycar Racing 2 for long hours throughout my teens year. I was super obsessed with racing and finding car sets to race against. A great trip down to PC racing memory lane
Oh yeah, the memories. We drew a weedtaxi back then, phonenumber on the back spoiler.
I played this game to death. You could also download templates of current cars and to update your paint schemes year-over-year without buying the next version.
I would also play with the code in the game to make adjustments to the A1.
Massive fun.
love these boxes, it's how all pc games came here in mid 90's era. Glory days :)
Check out BENC Bill Elliot's Nascar Challenge id love to see you try to play that game on a live and do a video on it! Love the channel dude!
Having bought this game new when I was a kid that shrink wrap is correct for the time. I'm pretty sure I still have it in a box in my parents attic.
Thank you for the sharing of the Good Neat video, wrecks, races and old numbers of their Drivers!!
I can’t believe they got Fred Jones from Scooby Doo to drive their car. Fred, trap master with the gang and motorsport legend on the track.
Absolute classic. This was definitely the first sim I ever played, although NASCAR Racing 4 was the one I really got into once I had a PC at home that could play.
Bought this at a yard sale a solid decade ago for $1. Haven't opened it. Pretty sure it's still at my parents' house.
The curved pits annoyed me as a kid. My first sim was NASCAR Racing 2 and it was especially pronounced at Richmond. In real life there's a large grassy infield between the track and the pits but in NR2 it there was a like a 2 foot wide strip of green between the edge of the track and the pit wall. It made the frontstretch feel a lot narrower than it really was.
Ken Schraders Racing number at the top is white because it’s dumped into the Winston cup for this game despite that it is regularly a Busch cup series car and everyone knows the racing number in the Busch series for Ken is blue.
If you could do this for ICR2 that would be amazing.
my first racing game togehter with test drive 2. i loved the black texaco havoline livery
Never forget wearing out the left arrow key at Talladega! I feel so old 😄😂
i had every version up until the final 2003 season. I never did get 2003. I still have every copy except this first game. when i was still young i gave the first game away to a friend after i had gotten nascar racing 2
The accidents are so damn realistic.
I have a copy of Nascar 2003 with the original box and the 48 Lowes Chevy. Great game.
I had many hours of fun in my early 20s playing this!
This game was astonishing !
Dude, i love your channel!
Very nice!
I remember starting this one up on my Pentium60 alongside DoomII and later Quake.
It was really cool to see it running as it looked great and felt dynamic/professional(I preferred VGA to SVGA as latter made it look too clunky).
Btw - PainShopPro... oh my - still using 5.0 to alter Doom textures in 2024.
This was the only racing game I played as a kid. Never knew what the hell I was doing (I was like, 5 or 6) but man, I loved playing it and messing around in the paint booth.
Wow.. that was full sim wow wow... like their IndyCar game. Top quality