GAVIN RAEBURN
Although superficially similar, racing sims of the mid-Nineties such as Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 2 and arcade racers from the same period such as Sega’s Daytona USA were fundamentally different from one another. These two worlds collided in 1996, when a team from Codemasters worked with the British Touring Car Championship to create a PlayStation title that would appeal to both racing camps.
Former Codemasters producer Gavin Raeburn explains how the firm approached the task, “ was all about building a team and the foundations for what we expected to be a series of games. We were working within the budget and time available, which was limited, and the term ‘sim-cade’ sprung from that. We wanted realism, but we designed for a broad audience on a console that was primarily playing with a digital gamepad and likely owned a 14-inch TV.” In terms of his team’s inspirations, the time they spent observing the sport that their game was based on informed the way that it played far more than previous racers. “There were no particular games that influenced us, although we were leaning away from arcade racers
