BRGoF25 - The King of The Monsters

Welcome to BRGoF25, a look at the Best Racing Games of the First 25 years of the 21st century. A love letter to the titles that defined the genre during this time of immense growth in the industry, transcended boundaries and broke the glass ceiling to become the very best that video games had to offer.

Inspired by Giant Bomb polling their users on what they say is their 10 best games of the 21st century, this series of articles will focus on the racing games that, in my opinion, rubs shoulders with the giants in the industry that make up what GB's users submitted themselves. These are racing games that you should find a way to play for yourself, regardless of your gaming preferences.

"If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."

It's appropriate to look at the way new realistic racing games are released on PC in terms of generational leaps in graphics, technology, and the depth in which it's trying to replicate the real deal. Some games are more evergreen however; rolling with the punches and able to keep up or get ahead of what the new kids on the block are capable of like iRacing has been. Two games in particular were so far ahead of the curve in terms of the experience that they provided out of the box, and what was capable when it got into the hands of modders, that it's taken a decade plus for fresh games to bring anything close to the table. These are realistic racing games still worth your time, and still worth their weight in gold with the same staying power and impact as the R35 Nissan GT-R. But one of these two games didn't make it onto the BRGoF25 list: because NASCAR Thunder 2004 did. And even if NASCAR Racing 2003 Season did get the nod instead, driving Godzilla in NR03 isn't quite the same as driving a GT-R GT1 modded into GTR2 to battle against the titans of the best GT racing class the world has ever seen.

Up next on my list of the Best Racing Games of the First 25 years of the 21st century: GTR 2 – FIA GT Racing Game, available on your personal computer.

GTR2 is the total package when it comes to realistic racing games on PC. A suite of driving school challenges akin to Gran Turismo license tests to get you up to speed on your controller of choice, with plenty of options to make keyboard and gamepad driving viable. Before you take the dive into the fully licensed FIA GT Championship you have a suite of custom championships that fully explore the car and track roster while being in a smaller, more approachable scale than hard fought multi-class racing of the big dance. Yes you can do online racing and you can time trial, but this was still the era that the offline single-player racing was at the forefront of the experience. Though lacking some of the complexity that has been introduced to iRacing and Automobilista 2, the artificial intelligence of the opponent racers still provides an engaging race that will ebb and flow as the conflict with the other class plays out. The ai in isiMotor games has always been seen as a bit rough around the edges, but the refinements made to fit a more dedicated licensed product shine in the best way when it does come time to take a crack at the Spa 24 Hour or the other custom endurance races.

The beauty of racing games will always be the ability to do a sport and the act of driving in a grander sense that most of us will not be able to do in this capacity due to the capitalistic barriers of entry that will always exist. To fully live that dream and experience what's possible within the context of scope of endurance and sports car racing, there is truly no better experience than GTR2 unless you just want to be a GT3 driver. The endurance races show off the game's strengths in an incredibly crisp package that will be different depending on which of the classes you drive them in. The full day/night cycle nails home the lonely grind of the night shift; and the heroes that are born out of a rally through the field in the middle of the night. The skies and cloud cover that changes at the hours tick away, and the chance those clouds turn heavy and the heavens opening; amplifying that desire for survival as the track surface dynamically changes under you. And with it being endurance racing, if you don't have the outright pace there is always a chance to race smarter, save some fuel, and make up the difference in the pit stops in a way that hadn't had this level of impact in a fully realistic racing games yet. It is all possible in GTR2; and much like Test Drive Le Mans you can run time-accelerated iterations of each race to get a taste of that experience without the full investment a 24 hour race requires.

But to have this all be possible and executed well on it's own is one thing, but to truly nail the landing it took a car and track roster that was up to the challenge.

After I fell out of love with NASCAR in the mid-2000s, something had to fill that racing void in my soul. My Saturday and Sunday mornings as a kid needed something else in there between playing racing games, and the offerings on SPEED TV were up to the task. In particular, the SPEED World Challenge and the American Le Mans Series were the big championships that started to open my eyes beyond the hegemony that NASCAR tried to sell. The cars that captivated me the most from these series were the Dodge Viper Competition Coupe and the Chevrolet Corvette C6.R. The Earth rumbled and shook as they flew across tracks like Sebring and Road Atlanta: they were as if Mjölnir had been turned into a race car. They left an unmistakable impression on me watching those races; and for a lot of people who play realistic racing games, they got the same feeling with the then called GT and N-GT class cars that made the base GTR2 so special.

It took a few years for GT racing to fully get back up and running after sharp rise and fall of the original GT1 in the late 1990s and for constructors to fully digest what was ahead of them in the new millennium. That new reality showed what it was worth come the 2003 and 2004 seasons of the FIA GT Championship that GTR2 brings to the virtual world. Enough time had past for both factory teams and privateers to get their hands on what's available, including the debut of the now-infamous Maserati MC12 GT1 which would define the GT1 category until the class was retired in 2011. The top dogs and the underdogs were all worthy of everyone's time, with the team at Simbin giving every car and livery on offer a tremendous amount of care on the graphical and audio side.

But of course, it is a racing game; and all these cars, from BMS Scuderia Italia's Ferrari 550 Maranello to the Spa 24 Hour-exclusive BMW Z3 M Coupe, are a blast to drive. The isiMotor that drives GTR2 excels with this balance of horsepower and torque, relatively crude aerodynamics, grippy but fairly basic tires, fairly long braking zones and one-dimensional driving aids if you need them. These are driver's cars that reward being pushed to their limits, but the experience of driving them within your own limits is still among the best that the realistic racing space will ever have to offer. You can drive harder or smarter, and either way this is the game to do it in with races that can challenge either way you like to drive. But what if you want more than just the classes that would become GT1 and GT2?

The beauty of the ISImotor wasn't always just in the core game, but in the fact that these were incredibly easy platforms to mod for. A massive chunk of the game's files are editable in notepad, if not in dedicated programs that read the data that's being outputted. Custom carsets using the vanilla roster are easy to create after all the new paint schemes are created, and the game shares similar file structures for tracks and car models with rFactor and F1 Challenge '99-'02 that preceded it. It is the place to be for single player road racing on PC with somewhat modern 3D graphics, and it isn't all that bad with what oval racing cars and tracks are available too. For the game's 15th anniversary a massive project was undertaken to update and modernize the game's graphics and textures, and paired with crew chief applications and apps for supporting modern wheels GTR2 continues to be a fully viable option for your road racing needs. Power and Glory remains one of the best mods within the paradigm, which redefined the already iconic cars from the 1960s and 70s from their appearance in GT Legends now with further advances at their disposal like GTR2's capability for weather and those custom championships.

I too did my fair share of modding, and learned how to modify .AIW and .CAM files for tracks to try and improve the offline racing and the spectator experience. I had to, in trying to make GTR2 as good as good of a offline league racing experience for when my GT1-inspired series was active on Grand Prix Rejects. In launching Powerhouse Takahashi in the middle of last year it did ignite the fire to play GTR2 and to try modding again, but with a different worldview and sensibilities to what I had when the GT Super Series was active. In any genre, a good video game is one that you are fully satisfied with the experience with the one, maybe two, playthroughs you do with it. A truly great video game will have that staying power for decades beyond it's creation regardless of how you play it: with or without mods. GTR2 has that in spades, and it's timelessness shines ever brighter as the game hits it's 20th anniversary this year.

GTR2 - FIA GT Racing Game was an incredible team effort which culminated the experience and lessons learned from the original GTR and GT Legends into one of the hallmark games of the PC realistic racing space. It wasn't just Ian Bell helping steer the ship that made GTR2 possible; everyone at SimBin and Blimey! Games bought in to make the game they wanted to make in the best representation of tin-top racing that gaming seen up to that point, and arguably better than what would follow for a very long time. No doubt in part due to development priorities being where they should be for making a good video game first.

While base GTR2 can be seen as that first iteration of the R35 Nissan GT-R, those mods feel like the multiple model revisions Nissan would do over the eighteen year run of Godzilla's production; ever improving one of the best modern sportscars ever made and allowing it to maintain serve as it's competitors finally caught up to what Nissan already had out there in the marketplace. It finally took the R35 to bow out of production for there to be a new PC realistic racing game worthy of the challenge. But if Le Mans Ultimate isn't quite what you're looking for, GTR2 will always be there to provide you a look at a world before GT3 ruined everything and have you coming back for more.

Just remember to install the V1.1 Patch and the No-CD Executable, okay?

Up next on BRGoF25: It's the GT3 that did not ruin everything, but rather grew the target on their back.