Kaemmer’s smash hit
“Dave Kaemmer is God!!!” Such was the overheated fanboy title of a thread that appeared more than a decade ago on Race Sim Central, a site that catered to the first generation of hardcore virtual racers. But in the years since, Dave Kaemmer has – astonishingly – graduated to even-more-mythic status as the co-founder and principal software guru of the online-racing leviathan iRacing.
“In my opinion, he founded the sim-racing genre,” says Tim Wheatley, who created the original Race Sim Central website and recently revived it. “I can’t overstate how important he is.”
Racing games have been a lifelong project for Kaemmer, a wiry, well-preserved 57-year-old resident of suburban Boston, Massachusetts. He was there at the birth of racing simulations for the masses, and he now stands at the pinnacle of what has improbably matured into a legitimate sport.
“It’s way beyond what I imagined it could get to,” he admits. “I look at the game today – and I call it a game because it is fun even though we didn’t set out to make it fun – and it blows me away because it is just like being in a race. For real racers, the greatest fear is not physical harm. It’s
