T URN O NE Formula 1 Championship Manager Exclusive It’s been almost six years since the last incarnation of an F1 Management Sim – but the long-wait is soon to come to an end with AzTech Games’ upcoming Formula 1 Championship Manager. The project, six years in the making, promises not only a return to the unique joys of managing a 500 million dollar F1 team – but to redefine the very genre itself. Stuart Currall reveals all … The Design Management sims have been synonymous with PC gaming – they are a staple of the PC market, and encompass everything from the fiendishly successful Championship Manager footie sims to The Sims and passing through Sim City and Singles along the way … but whereas managing little footie players or trying to entice a big-boobed polygon into some questionable sex-act or subjecting an entire city to the horrors of an unleashed Godzilla has always been geekishly exciting, management sims based around motorsports have traditionally been … inadequate. After all, whodya really really wanna be? Ayrton Senna, or … Ron Dennis? F1 management sims have never quite captured the imagination which is odd, really, considering that the F1 team principal’s job is far more involved than that of the footie coach. And yet every year sees yet another update to the litany of footie management sims, and they fly off the shelves faster than John Newhouse … What is missing? Is it the actual nature of F1 management that fails to ignite the spark of interest – or has
there been something lacking in the way it has been habitually simulated? That is the question that any developer needs to ask before attempting, yet again, to succeed in a genre that has seen some laudable (and otherwise) failures over the years. Sports management sims based around motor racing have always been, at best, a frustrating affair. Sitting on the pit-wall, developers have discovered, is not quite the same as sitting in the dugout … or is it? It all started so promisingly as well – way back in the day, in 1988, with Electronic Arts’ Ferrari Formula One. This was not only the first management sim, it was also (and remains about the only) attempt at bridging the gap between racing and management (not only did you get to drive, but you had to be the engineer and the test-driver, and the mechanic, and every change to the car had to be checked against the clock) … After that, there came, in the mid 90s, the first real attempts at simulating the management of F1. Foremost were the Grand Prix Manager sims - Microprose’s 1995 Grand Prix Manager by Edward Grabowski– and its sequel, Grand Prix Manager 2 (1996). Microprose, at the time, were also publishing Crammond’s Grand Prix series, and the two came in boxes not too dissimilar – leading some to conclude (fantasise) that they would, one day, merge into one super-sim.
AUTOSIMSPORT – Volume 1 – Number 6
… a wonderful concept, but one that was never to see the light of day. The management and racing sim, combined, remains the holy grail of sim-racing, and Ferrari Formula One remains, to this day, the only valid attempt at what appears, at least superficially, to be the solution to sim-racing’s woes. Racing Legends, being worked on somewhere in the genteel English countryside, promises much in this regard … but we digress … after the GP Manager series came F1 Manager Professional, a “German” sim released in 1997 that remains an undiscovered classic of the genre. It was then another 3 years before Grabowski, the mind that had created the platform for the genre, came back with Grand Prix World, undisputedly the King of F1 Management Sims. But GPW suffered, like all the F1 management sims before it, of a simple problem – it simulated allright, but it was also … boring. Sure, the first couple of seasons were fun but – it was somehow shallow repetitive. And managed to translate a sport rich in fascinating nuance into a sim poor of excitement. It is the nature of games though; after all, what makes GPL so much more ‘exciting’ that GTR? It is that unquantifiable ‘something’ that has always been missing from F1 management sims – and it is that something that is found, in abundance, in its cousins, the footie management sims which are – and will remain – the template for sports management sims. 19