Accolade Grand Prix Circuit (1988)

Snickers Man

Having loads of fun and revisiting my miss spent youth (early adulthood actually) playing an old PC game called Accolade Grand Prix Circuit. It's a game that occupied the post 5:30 working lives of four supposedly sane fully grown adult men a quarter of a century ago as we became addicted to our green-screen PCs trying do outdo each other over Monza, Silverstone, Hockenheim and others.

It's a simple (primitive by today's standards) racing game where you have a choice of three cars (McLaren, Wiliams and Ferrari) and eight Grand Prix circuits (one each from Britain, Brazil, Germany, Monaco, Italy, Canada, USA and Japan).

It's VGA graphics and sound is via the PC speaker, not the sound card, so no multimedia. There is a race mode, where you can race against 12 other cars provided by the computer but we found the really competitive element was Practice Mode, where you drove on your own over an empty track and the computer would record the fastest lap times for a particular circuit.

This led to each of us redlining our blood pressures up beyond 11 as we frantically tried to shave a fraction of a second off the bends at Monaco and Monza trying to outdo each other.

I wasn't particularly good back then, and am even slower now, but does anyone have a copy of the game and still have a blast at it.

If you do and would like to compare lap times, my current record for Monaco is 57.5 seconds (in a Ferarri) and for Monza it's 1m 10.3secs in a McLaren.

I seem to remember my colleagues could get comfortably below 1m 10 at Monza but the memory is fading.

Myrddin

Oblig video

Snickers Man

McLaren (with turbo) was the only car for circuits with long straights (Hockenheim, Monza, Silverstone) Ferrari was slower but more agile for twisty circuits like Detroit and Monaco.

Williams was muck. In this game anyway.

That clip shows race mode. Practice mode was how we measured ourselves against each other.

And wasn't that sound annoying, but you needed it on if you were using the gear change option (level 3 and higher) to let you know when to change up.

Wow. This brings me back.
I think my da had this on the 386.

Snickers Man

urbanledge wrote: »

Wow. This brings me back.
I think my da had this on the 386.

Well, the name of the Forum is "retro".

386? Luxury!! I think the first computer I played this on was powered by an 8088.

Star Lord

Used to play this on our Amstrad PPC640.
CGA graphics in all their glory. When we eventually upgraded to a computer with VGA graphics, we were blown away.

Test drive 3 was the one that really blew everyone's minds though.

Doge

Its probably graphically the best f1 style game that came out on the commodore 64.

It actually looks like a decent port of it, even the intro is very faithful to the PC version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmGUzuSW5PU