I’m not including the gravel track in Super Mario Kart in the rally category because it isn’t one. Nor am I including the Super Nintendo title Top Gear here, or Super Off Road, as they are not pure rally games. Instead, it was in 1993 that I first played a dedicated rally game that really got me thinking; Why aren’t there more games of this type? Trash Rally for Neo Geo was one of SNK’s weakest racing titles, and they weren’t particularly good at developing racing games to begin with, but for me, it was the start of something, nonetheless. Besides, at that point, I had no idea that Sega was working on what would become Sega Rally.
In 1995, the Sega game that I often and gladly refer to as “one of the best of all-time” was released, an experience that naturally meant a great deal to the rally subgenre and thus to Sega. I saw the slightly enormous double cabinet for the first time during the summer holidays in 1996 and remember very well how incredibly inviting it looked. Rally was also my favourite motorsport at the time. I saw my first real rally as a snotty six-year-old together with my grandfather (who loved Lancia rally cars, among other things). My love affair with Sega Rally was boundless in many ways. For several months, I spent half my freelance salary from my job as a game reviewer for the entertainment section of my local newspaper on Sega Rally, and the second I got my hands on the Sega Saturn version, I played even more. I think I played the same game and the same three tracks with the same car for three hours a day for several months. “Easy left, maybe” and “Game Over Yeeeaaaaah!” lived (as young people say) rent-free in my head, and Sega Rally stands as one of the best racing experiences ever made.
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After hundreds of hours in Sega Rally, I swapped Carlos Sainz’s iconic Toyota Celica for a frank little WRC chassis and AM2’s wide skids for much tighter driving in Infogrames’ PlayStation title V-Rally (1997). I especially remember how strangely light the cars were in this game and how frustrating it was to flip your entire vehicle and roll over onto the roof just by touching a rock or a stump, which ultimately defined V-Rally as an experience. It was difficult, it was technical, albeit in the wrong way (if we’re being harsh), but back then, in 1997, it didn’t really matter. Infogrames had beaten many competitors to market, the game sold very well, got several more or less sensible sequels, and defined what Infogrames would largely become. It’s just a shame that it was neglected. V-Rally is dead and buried today, but it really didn’t have to be that way if the cards had been played differently.
For me, it was largely Sega Rally (as mentioned) and Colin McRae Rally (1998) that paved the way for rallying as a gaming hobby to occupy thousands of hours of my time since the mid-90s. Colin McRae Rally was released for PlayStation on 15 July 1998, and I remember the release date as if it were yesterday. There was a demo containing a single stage with a single car (Colin’s iconic STI) on a Sony demo disc the month before, and I think I drove through that specific little bit of the game at least 200 times before I got my sweaty hands on the finished product. For its time, at least… Codemasters’ smash hit was considered the most realistic simulation of rallying as a sport that the gaming world had ever seen, and even though we now know that Colin McRae Rally wasn’t much more “realistic” than, say, Sega Rally, it at least felt like it better mimicked the reality of the WRC.
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The following year, I became hooked on Magnetic Fields’ upstart Mobil 1 Rally Championship, which at the time felt much more “hardcore” than Codemasters’ games and V-Rally in particular. I remember the extremely long stages that required a different kind of concentration, and just a few months after I got tired of Mobil 1, largely due to the cars’ unwillingness to skid or slide, Colin McRae Rally 2.0 was released, which was something of an overloaded Colin McRae in terms of graphics, content, stages, and presentation. Everything was improved, enlarged, refined and thus absolutely fantastic in this game, which I still consider to be one of the best sequels ever made. I remember the minimalist, beautifully designed interface, how much better the graphics looked, and how the interiors of the cars were much more accurately recreated, which also meant that with this game, I started steering from inside the cockpit and thus gave up bumper cam driving altogether.
It was around the same time that Sega rolled out the sequel to Sega Rally Championship, and even though I liked this game back then, and even though I like this game today, I can’t get over how disappointing it was compared to the iconic original. The Dreamcast graphics were fantastic for their time, and Sega had managed to capture that slightly silly, fun, and very Japanese arcade feel that was part of the AM2 games at the time, but steering the rally cars was never as challenging in Sega Rally 2 as it was in the first game. It was never as good.
In 2004, Warthog released the Swedish-developed Richard Burns Rally, and we all know what an immortal game it has been over the past 21 years and how it has been given new life by passionate home modders who have created cars, tracks, notes, and improvements to both the sound engine and the graphics engine in this game over the past ten years. Today, a skilled modder can download the game for free, download 40+ different mods at no cost, put it all together and enjoy what is perhaps the most demanding and challenging rally experience of all-time and the game that sim-racing fans still consider, in many ways, to be the definitive experience for those who want to drive really fast with a focus on realism, in a coniferous forest. For my part, I have always appreciated Warthog’s work, I have always liked the idea of Richard Burns Rally and the insane level of ambition that the developers obviously had when they made it. However, I have never really liked the car physics in it because I found it far, far more difficult than actually driving a real rally car on a real rally road. The total, complete lack of grip has always felt to me like a slightly insane exaggeration to make the game more difficult than necessary, and even though it has always been possible to learn to drive on Burns’ terms, I have also always looked for other rally experiences than this, despite its obvious qualities (of which there are many).
After Burns and all the way up to 2015, arcade rally dominated the entire subgenre. Rallisport Challenge 2 from Swedish developer Dice was brilliant, as were Colin McRae Dirt, Dirt 2, and several other titles that focused on “fun” rather than realism. In the spring of 2013, Kylotonn Games took over the WRC licence from Sony (which had only released rubbish games based on the official licence for a number of years), and early on in KT Games’ WRC phase, they had the right people in the right places in terms of the direction they intended to take with development. The assistant producer behind Simbin’s GTR 2, Diego Sartori, led the development of WRC 5 and 6 through 7, and there were definitely qualities here that would later be lost in later instalments.
In 2015, Codemasters released Paul Coleman and his small team of 30 people and their passion project, Dirt Rally, which in many ways was the first real rally simulation since 2004’s Richard Burns Rally. Dirt Rally was released almost as soon as it was announced (well, almost) and felt like a shock to the system in many ways, not least considering that Codemasters had only been working on arcade rally games for the past ten years. The driving was demanding, the graphics free from excessive bloom and other “flashy” filters, and when we talk about rally simulation today, it’s often forgotten in wider sim-racing circles, which I think is both a shame and more than a little unfair.
Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo was released in 2016 and developed by Italian company Milestone. The producer behind the game is now the producer of Assetto Corsa Rally and already wanted to create a more realistic simulator-like racing experience with Loeb’s official game, but was stopped by the publisher who was chasing “ease of access”. That compromise was evident in the game, as always, but it did not detract from Loeb Rally’s obvious qualities. There was a lot of potential here that could have been used to create something really good in a sequel. The same can be said for several of KT Games’ official WRC games over the years. Poor graphics that never really included the realistic scaling that rallying requires, and poor car physics that made the cars either spin at the slightest movement or not at all, plagued several of these games, and for me, it was WRC 10 and WRC Generations (their last two games) that felt the most unsuccessful in terms of pure rallying experience.
All the better then was Dirt Rally 2.0, which was rolled out in February 2019 and took everything that was good about Paul Coleman’s acclaimed predecessor and added more cars, more tracks, more countries, and even more speed. I didn’t get hooked on Dirt Rally 2.0 right from the start, though, as I felt that the bloom filter contradicted the realistic car physics and because the release version lacked content. Codemasters fixed this, however, and Dirt Rally 2.0 grew to more than double the number of tracks/rally countries, and the FFB was improved along with several other aspects. If you look at the car’s behaviour in this game today and compare it to real-life rallying, it’s relatively easy to see that the lateral grip in particular is exaggerated so as not to end up in Richard Burns Rally territory. Whether this is realistic or not is a matter of debate even among real rally drivers. I have spoken to my friend and former J-WRC world champion Patrik Sandell about this, among others, who believes that the grip of soft, new gravel tyres is several times better in reality than it ever is in Richard Burns Rally, for example. Others who are involved in the sport, on real terms, argue that the lateral grip in Codemasters’ game is too good, making it too easy to drive the car fast when it turns. In any case, I know that I have spent 2,200 hours in Dirt Rally 2.0 and love that game with all my soot-black heart.
As we all know, EA Sports WRC was not originally intended to be based on an official WRC licence, thereby not limiting the part of the development that was intended to increase the feeling of realism and immersion, rather than the opposite. But Codemasters was bought by Electronic Arts, which acquired the WRC licence, and Dirt Rally 3.0 switched game engines from the in-house creation Ego Engine to Unreal 4, and the focus shifted from realism to more “accessibility” in driving. Unfortunately. What began as a proper sequel to one of the best rally games of all-time became, over time and through EA’s involvement, something that fans ultimately did not want, and with hindsight, we all know what a mistake EA Sports WRC was. With over 6.3 million copies sold, Dirt Rally 2.0 naturally outclassed EA Sports WRC, which didn’t even manage to sell 700,000 copies in two years, and today the team is gone and the game has been discontinued. Tragically…
That makes it all the more exciting that this year’s Sim Racing Expo offered what was perhaps the best surprise for us rally game fans in many years in the form of Assetto Corsa Rally. It was announced in mid-October and released last week (Early Access). The developers, Supernova Games, intend to work on its completion over the next 18 months, with your (and my) help, and already today, in version 0.1, it is clear that this game offers the most realistic simulation of rallying as a motorsport ever. There is work to be done with the locking of all four wheels, there is work to be done with the mapping of how the throttle works in all cars, and there are details that need to be added to the game’s force feedback, but as a start, this is incredibly promising and very impressive, not least considering how good it feels to drive and how insanely beautiful it really is. From the closure of EA Sports WRC and an inherent sadness in the fact that rallying as a gaming hobby has been forgotten, to an awakening without equal, the future of rallying games suddenly looks brighter than it has in a very long time. For me, this wonderful subgenre has always been there, always been a favourite and always offered a unique experience far removed from anything called circuit racing. I hope that this will continue to be the case and that you too are hopeful about the future of everything containing rough gravel and wide skids.
