Formula One Grand Prix (1991) Amiga Re:Review | Episode 60

[@somecallmetim42]

I was a student back in 1991 and I fondly remember the excitement when I got back from lectures to find a package on the door matt containing my pre order of Formula One Grand Prix. Once I'd got it up and running on my A500 It was such an amazing revelation that I played it for 24 hours straight missing lectures the next day until the point I could no longer keep my eyes open . No other game release since has even got close to matching the excitement of playing Formula One Grand Prix for the first time.

[@greensleevez]

As a uni lecturer who is supervising a thesis on F1 games, I feel... conflicted reading this.

[@sutton513]

@@greensleevez that sounds interesting, what does the thesis explore?

[@herdarkshadow834]

When I pulled my Amiga 1200 out of the loft a few years back this was still installed on the hard drive. It was the game that sold me on buying the Amiga 1200 in the first place and then buying and fitting the hard drive to avoid disk swapping breaking the immersion. It was the start of a long, expensive 30 year deep dive into sim racing, PC builds and full sim rigs. I always loved racing games but this was the game that started me on the sim racing path proper. The graphics may have improved and the experience may be more visceral today but I still love Geoff’s Grand Prix series, especially his magnus opus Grand Prix 4. The AI in GP4 is amongst the best even today. I’ve certainly had some intense races and I still rue the day I spun on the last corner due to a back marker getting in the way after fending off Schumacher for the entire race. Never had that sense of crushing defeat before or since and still stings today. Racing was better for having Geoff in it and I think many in the sim community wish we were playing Geoff Crammond’s F1GP ‘24 today. Thanks Geoff for all the miles and that haunting last corner spin…

[@kwirkkwirksn1090]

I played this game hundreds of hours back in the 90s on my Pentium 90 😍

[@ede981]

i also.. but on 486 dx2 66mhz... it was an awesome time ❤

[@ryansoucyracing]

Lucky! My 486sx/25 did well enough though!

[@NeilStudd]

I remember my modest student PC at university, with Grand Prix 3, plus a mod to change the overlays to match the real TV broadcasts. Used to set it to all CPU cars, 100% race distance, TV camera, and sit back and watch!

[@RaceSimCentral]

Excellent stuff. :) This was a really special game for me. I have worked in gamedev, on racing sims, for 20 years now. Absolutely due to this game. For reference, the drivers and cars from 1991 were included, but not licensed, so not properly named. You had to type in the real names, which were listed in the manual only. Nigel Mansell was Robert Davies, etc. The framerate could be increased with a mod by Grant Reeve, which gave it the NTSC framerate on systems that would support it. Grant went on to work at Papyrus and iRacing.

[@burgek1]

I loved this game and Stunt Car Racer - what a joy as kid!

[@philharrison5]

And one more, lotus esprit turbo

[@burgek1]

​@@philharrison5omg absolutely! I played that soooo much!

[@OwenThesaints-z5k]

My friends and I did a whole season of full races whenever we all had the time & could get together, with a trophy at the end for the winner. The multiplayer mode was good and involved taking turns & the manual was a thing of beauty , what a wonderful year with my best mates!

[@heneganov]

Nice review! I spent so many hours playing Stunt Car Racer and particularly Microprose F1 GP, which I remember buying on its release date as a 14 year old. I have never been so excited to open and play a game as I was with F1 GP on that day. Good times!

[@rachroyston6697]

One thing I remember about this game is it didn't have the team names and drivers in game you had to type them in form the manual, for instance Nigel Mansell was called Robert Davies and Williams was called Puma. I think the suggested gear in race is lower then in qualifying is because in back then they had special qualifying tyres only good for a few laps so can go much quicker, taking brazil for example fastest qualifying time was a 1.16 and the fastest time in race was a 1.19

[@Sparkypark]

I used to love this game when I was a youngster. I learned all the courses off by heart. For the next few years I knew every turn of the tracks when I watched Grand Prix on the tv. I used to enjoy driving into my rivals a la Schumacher.

[@rjd97c]

Great review. Remember this fondly for hours. Even shared my name with the default driver! They AMS2 on PC if you want (in my opinion) beat vintage F1 and old track layouts in a modern accessible Sim-racer.

[@MIKandJEAN]

Very nice review! Surprisingly the whole game, editor and everything you could wish for was given away free on an Amiga Format CD around 1998-1999. If I remember correct the frame rate did improve if you had an 030. On A500 though it took a while to get used to that frame rate but soon enough you could feel the sense of speed and it was as solid game for the longest time even on A500. Great achievement and great game!

[@andrewholt5659]

Nice video. I remember playing this on my A600 with a hard drive. It was amazing.

[@studlydudly]

I played 4 full seasons, on full difficulty, at full race distance, back to back, and I never lost the desire to continue. I don't think I could say the same for any other game.

[@peterbondy]

Me too. And if I’m being very honest I also used to put on a helmet my brother had when I played the game! 😊😂

[@jdevlin1910]

Thank you for this burst of nostalgia. My memories of this are a bit vague as I was too young to really appreciate it, being more fascinated by the level of detail in the tracks and customisation of the teams / cars available to gawp at and tinker with - funnily enough the same things that still fascinate me today!

[@TregTube]

Bertrand Gachot was a Jordan driver in the team’s first year. He was famously arrested for assaulting a London taxi driver with CS gas, and his incarceration giving a certain M Schumacher his first F1 drive at Spa that year (1991).

[@theblackwidowchronicles]

That was a shame....It introduced the biggest cheat in F1 history to the world....But karma got him in the end

[@TregTube]

@ calm down

[@sloppynyuszi]

@@theblackwidowchroniclesdude. Not cool

[@dontliftoff]

@tregtube beat me to it 👌🏻👍🏻

[@Hedonistik_Ritual]

As a young kid i'd rename the drivers and teams after my toys and play full length races on multiplayer mode, switching between all the drivers and commentating on my alternate world championship as i went along. One of the standout games in my life!

[@Frostie3672]

Played this game to death, it was the game that got me hooked on F1 & I've not missed a race ever since. Getting a blizzard 1260 accelerator transformed F1GP & especially a shareware program called f1gp-ed which let you alter how fast the ai drivers were to make the game more challenging, change their names to accurately portray future seasons of F1 & the software could also alter the framerate & playing at 25 fps it was silky smooth. You weren't playing the game at 25fps in this video though as you mentioned, the hard coded frame rate is much lower than that which is where f1gp-ed software comes into it.

[@Jellybeantiger]

Memories.❤ The highest point of my gaming life,firing this up on the Amiga.

[@tristanfletcher6621]

I was lucky enough to have an Amiga A4000/040, (sold for £250 in late 90’s!) this game was brilliant on that machine.

[@jonridley]

Man, that game . Remember playing the sort of 2 player version with my friend on Atari st where tou take turns, we played with no assists and loved it.

[@stuartcarter7053]

Spent so many hours on this game. What I found weird though was the way the game would force you take the racing line out of corners. If you roll up to a normal corner and try to follow it around the inside all the way you can't do it - there's like an invisible wall on the inside of the corners that disappears as soon as you're on the straight again.

[@jaysmudger]

I would always knock the gfx settings down for that extra fps, loved that game.

[@SuperVezzeli]

Oh man, I broke couple joysticks with this game! Stunt Car Racer was my favorite also.

[@alezandercorben4122]

I used to play this all the time.

[@Midwinter2]

Very impressive game back in the day - but I'm afraid I only played a few times as the frame rate was just unacceptable on my OCS Amiga. I still appreciated how good it was, though - and I imagine it ran beautifully on faster processors. One thing that deserves a mention is the gorgeous 32-colour hand-drawn illustrations that formed part of the game's presentation.

[@ridiculous_gaming]

I am not into racing simulators, but I was hooked on Stunt Car racer, via my Amiga 500; fantastic times.

[@GioMarron]

Though I probably played Mastertronic, US Gold & Ocean games long before discovering Microprose, they soon became my favourite devs. My first real love was Microprose Soccer, made by the guys who went on to make Sensible Soccer and the game you mention, Cannon Fodder I’d LOVE to get back to playing these old C64 and Amiga games again. I miss them all so damn much

[@PLAN50]

I can't remember how often I played this one. Great memories!

[@Jacky_man542]

Loved this game. It was the first game where I started to use manual gears due to me been a massive F1 fan at this point. I also purchased a very basic pedal add on and this made the game just an amazing experience.

[@alho9231]

Love this game ❤❤ I used to play it on my Amiga 4030 as it does require a bit more grunt from the processor to play it smoothly. Spent a lot of my time on the Monza track coz it was one of the few tracks you could reach top speed while using the slipstream of the other cars. Oh and I used to cheat as you could cut across the chicane to gain a few secs...🤭

[@nextgengaming7803]

Oh my good lord memories back in the early 90s on my amiga 600. Played this for hours a day as a kid. I remember finding a button or setting on the game that launched the car like crazy off the line to get a fantastic start lol. What I loved about microprose was the game manuals. They were like Guinness World record books lol.

[@AlpinestarsR6]

One of the greatest games of all time! Incredible pace that you could push them cars at. Made you learn the craft of racing on the edge! Atari ST for the win.

[@MichaelMetalox-jo4lc]

When I see this game I remember my childhood where I played all the racing games from Geoff Crammond. it was a fantastic time with hours of racing.

[@djmace7566]

fantastic game that i played for many hours with my megadrive contoller. this and Indianapolis 500 my favourite racing games

[@ClassicTrialsChannel]

this game was a game changer in race games. bought it for my Atari ST first , then again when I got my A1200.

[@Flipper1974nz]

Me and my mate LOVED this game , would play it all night until the sunrise and the birds started singing

[@davideyres955]

I remember working out that racing a monza you could cheat by going into the chicane at the end of the start finish straight flat out and not breaking and hitting it just right and you’d jump and if you corrected it you could skip the chicane and carry pretty much full speed. But the game was brilliant and the control was just right to be able to drive it well.

[@Seventeen_Seconds]

I was 11 in 1991 and remember crash magazine what a blast from the past

[@vwsciroccoscala]

I played many hours on this game on my A600. Must dig it out and play it again

[@Max_Snellink]

Had the Amiga A500+ with a Meg upgrade and an external hard drive. Formula 1 was my favorite. Then stunt car racer. Micro machines. I'd watch real F1 then race along on the Amiga. FA18 Super Hornet was my flight sim fix.

[@seamushadron]

One of my favourite pc racing games, played all Crammond's F1GP for years 😊😊😊

[@bonno666]

I had this game too in 1993 on the PC. And I remember even a Intel 486SX33 was struggeling with the framerate. Not everyone had fancy DX processors and a fast videocard. Most of the time the CPU occupation was 100%. At the time I didn't know The Chain from Fleetwood Mac was the intro music. If you run it on a Pentium II PC the occupation is about 5% , so 20 times faster. But the game does not speed up.

[@sloppynyuszi]

Our 486 DX 2/66 ran it great! Loved this game!

[@bonno666]

@@sloppynyuszi It depends in what year, Those where still very expensive in 1993. And to keep up you had to upgrade your PC every year. Speeds went up that fast. It's not like that anymore. Off course you could upgrade the Amiga too and go for a 4000 but those where really expensive and shops that sold them where not here.

[@TotalCowage]

I still have my original, boxed version of F1GP, I think but am not sure decades later that it came with my A500 when I bought it second hand. I had a lot of fun playing it, but not perhaps the way it was meant to be played as most GPs quickly became a demolition derby as I rammed all my opponents and tried to break their cars so they'd go slower... I have vague memories of the game running slower than shown on this video though? I hoped to one day play serial link games, but by the time I got an A500 most people had moved on; so much so I bought myself a second A500 just to host matches for friends; Knights of The Sky, Stunt Car Racer, Populous 2... there were so many games I wanted to try, but I could never get it to work, and I think the second Amiga's port, or maybe the cables were broken. Shame. I think now you can maybe do it via Amiga emulation, which this video doesn't mention. There was a very old Kaillera client that did it over the internet, but WinUAE allows two clients on one PC... again, finding someone to play with is an issue, sadly.

[@UnitSe7en]

Best F1 game ever. On a 486 DX/66 PC it was great.

[@andrewfield4187]

If I remember correctly this was delayed by several months just prior to it's original release date and was gutted to hear this. However once it did come out it was so advanced over most other racing games that it more than made up for the delays

[@paulrnaylor]

The team was Jordan. The Jordan 191 was the most beautiful in F1 history. Also team i drove for in this gem of a game

[@seanmarsella3071]

Buzzin Hornets for ever.

[@broadbent96]

I used to freeeeeeeeeaking LOVE this game, as well as subsequent versions.

[@chrisayres7974]

Try AMS2 for amazing 90s F1 cars and tracks. Also AMS1 has a mod for all 4 Geoff Crammond games. It is amazing, you can race the original cars and sounds on modern tracks

[@bigzeddie76]

As a kid I swapped my Megadrive with my mate's Amiga for a few weeks just so I could play this game👌 13:34 he drove for Jordan, but was sent to prison! His seat was then filled by a young German...

[@TheBlacksheep-72]

Ah yes, God bless Gachot and his CS gas XD

[@timhaslum7461]

Myself and a couple of mates played this for hours, the multi player mode was inspired. We played no.2 and 3 also.

[@AJ-Bruno]

Most legendary game, cannot be beaten.

[@carlrobson5745]

would have been about 19 when this came out. Loved that game spent ages setting the car up with front and rear wing brakes gear ratios it was quite expensive when it came out did'nt leave much drinking money for the weekend after buying it.

[@Jimfowler82]

Stunt racer was my first crammond game.

[@macx]

Oh boy. I loved the game so much, played it the whole time. And Stunt Car Racing before. Memories...

[@carloscardoso7042]

Was the first decent F1 game ... unforgettable

[@Synthematix]

Vrooom on the Atari STE was my favourite

[@KayoMichiels]

If you get Uncle Art's Temporal Shift's album, in the bonus section, you get a remastered version of the songs he composed, including a reworked version of the Intro song!

[@djmace7566]

if you are a pc gamer Automobilista 2 has many of the tracks from the 91 season plus a car group that replicates that season. You can add a mod with the real liveries, overalls and driver names too.

[@philharrison5]

We used to love playing this game. Multi player was brilliant.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@philharrison5 I remember doing full races with my brother in hot seat multiplayer. Two hours per race

[@TheBlacksheep-72]

13:00 It's been a L-O-N-G time(!), but I seem to remember that if you pressed G (for 'Gap' ?) it then gave you the time difference to the car ahead and the car behind in the two-row information bars on the steering wheel.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

You're right! Just checked the reference card in the box, should have noticed that.

[@canvatanar]

A had an A500, and that was my favourite game :)

[@stovic1442]

I realise how old I am when I slowly remember as I'm watching this that I did in fact play the hell out of this game 😂

[@ezoray]

Great game, played it to death. I remember playing hot seat mode with a friend and getting annoyed at having him ram my car off the track. From what I remember the game was quite easy once you mastered it even on the hardest level. There was also a later white box release where it seems the AI was improved and I was getting rammed coming out of corners for being much slower than the AI cars. You should definitely take another look at Indianapolis 500. Try as I might I coudn't complete the full race, I got around three quarters the way there. I used the mouse for better control during the race but the full throttle or nothing on the button meant it was a nightmare getting in and out of the pits. A cool thing about the quick race was the fastest AI car, a gold'ish coloured one, started near the back with you so you knew you were doing all right if you could keep up with him.

[@GioMarron]

Honestly, you could’ve asked me to make every driver I’d heard of and I’d never have gotten Gachot but as soon as I saw his name, I have a vague memory of him being at Arrows. He was either teammate to, or was replaced by, JJ Lehto

[@mdwellington]

You just need to turn on caps lock to make Vroom run at the correct speed.

[@Mrdorf14]

Loved this game on the Amiga

[@adroharv5140]

I'm pretty certain this game wasn't locked to 25 frames at it's fastest. Far lower because giving it extra cpu only ever gets 12 maybe even when at it's fastest

[@blakesmith6303]

The PC version is locked to 25FPS and the Amiga version is locked to a measly 8FPS. It's possible to patch it but because the physics are tied to the framerate, unless you have a top of the line 060 accelerator card anything more than about 12-16FPS will cause the cars to perpetually spin making it unplayable.

[@adroharv5140]

@@blakesmith6303 the game even at 8 frames manages to carry a sense of speed and weight though so I don't think people lost any sleep over it. Very playable at this speed

[@mansellracing8690]

Tell you what i still have, On the PC though, Geoff Crammond's GP3 + 4 And i still have the Pcs that will run it to. I have just Recently brought an Amiga 500 In the Box Mint, £150 The one with the Cartoon on the box. I don't have any games anymore accept my box of copy's i had when i was younger from my Amiga days. GP was and still is an Amazing game, Can you imagine what could have been done with just a little more Memory, Or even a 1200 version of this game, It was Ground Breaking for the day. I use to love the original Hockenheim Circuit, I really miss it on the F1 Calendar with It's long fast straights. i think i have nearly every racing game on all consoles, Test drive 11 The duel was Great for the day, I have that still with the original Dial and Floppy and hard disk. Anyway love your channel my friend.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@mansellracing8690 Glad you're enjoying my videos and thank you for those kind words.

[@damag3plan]

Loved this game. Plus an Indianapolis 500 game I can't remember the name of🤔

[@TheBlacksheep-72]

'Indianapolis 500 - The Simulation' by Papyrus? Or if you mean the one with most of the season's circuits included, Indycar Racing by Papyrus?

[@stevesgaming7475]

I put literally thousands of hours info F1GP on my various amiga. Later on I got F1gpED which really added so much to the game and improved it even more with added realism! Codemasters/EA have had about 17 attempts at an F1 game in the past few years and although their games look stunning, it's STILL lacking features that Geoff Crammond added back in 1991. (btw autogears slow you down, manual gears will improve your time. it took me a while to figure that out back in the day.) One of my favourite things about F1GP and GP2/3/4 was that the AI cars made mistakes and crashed. To this DAY the AI is glued to the road on the Codemaster/EA game. They never make mistakes, there is a crash like once in every 14-17 races but no normal mistakes. The new games look nice but man they are so lacking in the realism department. You can't even run out of fuel, if your fuel goes to 0, you still keep moving but at 60mph. it's so poor.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@stevesgaming7475 this was one of the first racing game I ever played with manual gears and it's true, my lap times were always better. I only used auto gears when recording for convenience

[@pnvgordinho]

My brother and a friends of ours, loved to spend hours playing this game. I never liked it. F1 games I liked were vroom on the Amiga and Formula one on the Speccy. Formula one was so simple but additive.

[@raymoreton3184]

i love f1 been watching it since i was a little kid and still watch it today, i also love racing games f1 mostly i also brought myself in 92 maybe i found a used 500 for a decent price and had this game loads of others, the only thing i pref is flying stuff the racing stuff is still stunning fun, my fav comp is the amiga and i have a 1200, i couldnt afford a new one and couldnt find a used one this was my fav, the title sounds familiar isnt it the orig top gear ??

[@amytysoe2292]

did the amiga version actually ship with all the correct driver and team names in the game? The PC version had all the correct colours and numbers and team setups, but the team and driver names were all non-infringing (mclaren were Macpherson, that sort of thing) - but they could all be edited in the game and the manual had all the correct names so you could just enter them yourself.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@amytysoe2292 I had to enter the names myself before recording

[@carlrobson5745]

Another game I played was legend (four crystals of Trazere)

[@samcadwallader2899]

After mastering this game I used to love nothing better than putting auto brakes on, damage off and then switching the auto brakes off right into the hard braking zone in Monaco or Monza. Ram all the competition off the track and then drive it in reverse. I didn't buy any original games on the AMIGA other than this and Stunt Car Racer 'cos I thought Crammond deserved the pay day.

[@blankpage555]

Played from 1993 then went on to take my driving license aged 18 in 2 weeks, then found a sponsor and tried the then Winfield World Challenge in F Renault at Paul Ricard in 1998. I was not good enough.

[@fishler1]

I loved this game ❤

[@Sheik__Yerbouti]

I'm sure I read somewhere that the driver driving the F1 car on the front of the box is actually Geoff Crammond. It was a 1990 Lotus. It might actually say in the manual.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@Sheik__Yerbouti I'll check that out. The manual is in the box that I got 😁

[@ryansoucyracing]

First time watching your channel. You look like Zac Brown and Michael Andretti had a baby. It somehow lends more credibility to your commentary!

[@Spitfire67UK]

First Played this on a stock 1200 then a 030/50 and finally an 050/60 and it was sweet. Once you had that higher frame rate it made the stock performance look bad. It must have been terrible on stock 500.

[@pelimies1818]

Nice REView

[@aussie_retro_dude9253]

I just purched this game after watching this review 😊.

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@aussie_retro_dude9253 I was really happy when I found a copy at the Nottingham Market last month. Wasnt missing any of the instruction cards or disks either 😁

[@TheHumanPalindrome]

Such a great game.

[@alexshadowfax1119]

Another awesome shirt

[@fil_lokka]

I played the life out of this, even bought a second disk drive for it, 100% races with no assists... I had little social life 😂

[@chrisayres7974]

Bertrand Gachot was Jordan Ford with the 7Up logos

[@SteveP2000a]

You did some sneaky editing before you played, didn't you? 😂 The Amiga version I had didn't have the real driver's names. You had to know the helmet designs to edit the proper name to each driver, which wasn't an easy task in 1991 with no internet

[@UKGamingNetwork]

@@SteveP2000a yeah it was the first thing I did when I installed the game long before I decided to make a video for it. It was a lot easier to find the names than it was originally

[@davidlocke5016]

What a game❤❤❤

[@carlosfandango2419]

There is a mod for Automobilista that allows you to play any of the 4 Grand Prix games and it's very good.

[@christuckwell3185]

No way!?!?! Off to hunt that down

[@christuckwell3185]

Sadly the tracks aren't done.

[@merkyuk]

I played this endlessly

[@UItimateGuitarCovers]

Amazing game

[@ThomasJansen-z1p]

Bertrand gachot races for jordan. I thougjtt hé was the one that had to go to jail because of a fight. And the driver who replaced HIM was no one more than Michael Schumacher.

[@antonysnook4932]

Bertrand Gatchot drove for the Jordan Ford.

[@MonsalveSound]

what a game!

[@paulj978]

Did you ever re-review Cruise For A Corpse?

[@UKGamingNetwork]

Haven't covered that one yet, it's on the list. I did talk about Delphine when I did Another World though.

[@vinceely2906]

Did I ever win the championship after playing a full season? Did I f…

[@YTOnceAgain]

God, how I loved this game!!! And when Grand Prix 2 was released, it was time for a Windows PC 🙂. Here's a little more racing game nostalgia: kzbin.info/www/bejne/g3LOq6uQe82Zl7M There are quite a few cover versions around, but that's one of my two favorites.

[@MarkSlavin]

Gachot drove for wither Ligier or Larouse

[@gomezthechimp1116]

I've only just noticed that he spelt 'practice' incorrectly.