Every year on Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of thousands of racing fanatics descend upon the city of Indianapolis to watch thirty-three people in aerodynamically-unsafe vehicles accelerate to speeds in excess of two hundred miles per hour while making nearly continuous left turns around an oval-shaped track. I’m told this is far more exciting than this description makes it sound, so in an effort to learn more, your humble editor took it upon himself to hop into the cockpit and go around in circles until he either won the game or threw up by playing Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, programmed by renowned racing developer Papyrus and released in 1989.

Title Screen, what up?

I will say this: Indianapolis 500: The Simulation is not kidding about the name. If you boot this game up expecting an arcade-style racer in the tradition of Pole Position or Outrun, you’re going to wind up sucking an awful lot of exhaust fumes. Payprus went to great lengths to ensure the game did an excellent job replicating the physics around which Formula-1 racing is based. You can optimize your car in a variety of ways, down to adjusting such nit-picking details as inner vs. outer tire pressure, gear ratios, how sensitive your shocks are, and even the amount of fuel in your gas tank. If you’re a die-hard gearhead, or just played enough Gran Turismo to be familiar with how to trick out your ride, you’ll be in seventh heaven. If you’re a clueless newbie…well, best of luck to you, rookie. The track is a harsh mistress, and she takes misconfigurations and unoptimized settings quite personally.

Qualifying without any other cars on the track.

I should note that while you need a copy of the manual in order to bypass the copy protection, actually having the instructions themselves will do you very little good if you’re not familiar with what the various settings on your car actually do. If you don’t know when you should go for hard versus soft tires, or how much fuel it takes to complete one lap, the documentation won’t turn you into a weapons-grade F1 driver. Your pit crew is more than happy to take your orders, but they don’t offer suggestions either, so in the end you either know your stuff or you keep tweaking and experimenting with your settings and car selection until you find a combo that works and save it for later use.

The closest to nature you can get at the track.

And if you thought customizing your car was hard, just wait until you get into a race. The game offers four options to allow for different skill levels and amount of time you wish to devote to rocketing around like a maniac. The newbie option is  a simple 10-lap run where car damage and yellow flags are turned off for your driver. This allows you to make as many mistakes as you need to while getting the feel for the controls. In my case, I was using the keyboard but Indianapolis 500 offers a joystick option which is likely the superior choice for driving control.

This will not end well…

The intermediate choice is a 30-lap race where yellow flags are enabled but your car still won’t take damage in a crash. Once you’ve mastered the ability to maneuver around the track competently, this is an agreeable compromise between short play time and the thrill of a slightly longer race where anything can happen. After this, though, the gloves come off. Choice three is a straight 60 laps around the track where you no longer get any help from the game: slam into another car or spin out into a wall, and you’ll be lucky if a caution flag is all you draw. Finally for those people with nerves of steel and the patience of a saint, you can simulate the full Indy 500 experience with a 200-lap, no-holds-barred race which should entertain you for two hours or more, assuming you can survive that long. No matter what your choice of race length, the AI drivers all play to win and will cut you no slack at all. If you want to cross that yard of bricks in first place, you will fight to the last sparkplug for every position change it takes to get there.

One lap down, nine to go!

Accidents, especially during the longer races, are inevitable. Bounce into another driver and you’ll watch the scenery swirl around you like the bullet time effect in a Matrix film until you get control. Bits and pieces of cars fly in all directions, smoke pours from engines, skid marks blacken the track (and your underwear), and little explosions dot the screen in case you didn’t realize you smacked into something at 195 m.p.h. The graphics, for a late 80’s computer game, are impressive, and far superior to other similar games of the time period such as Sega’s Hard Drivin’. Cars that wipe out during a race are not cleared from the track. Instead their empty shells litter the landscape where they succumbed to the pressure, creating hazards on every subsequent lap for careless drivers who don’t remember they need to stay out of the inner lane on turn three or reduce their speed to compensate for the burnt-out husks sprawled across a straightaway.

My pit crew is going to mutiny after this.

Indianapolis 500: The Simulation also recreates the best aspects of watching the race at home. The game can be paused at any time for an instant replay of the last 20 seconds’ worth of racing, so you can watch that seven-car pile-up over and over again, or figure out why you spun out when you took that turn too fast. Six camera angles are offered for your viewing pleasure: In-Car is exactly what you see when you’re racing, the default view. Behind is the view a few yards’ back from your car, so you can watch that turkey creeping up behind your wheel well and know the exact second his tire made contact with yours. The Leader option focuses the camera on the current head of the pack, in case you’re wondering what happened up at the front while you were wrestling with the idiot fighting you for 19th place. Sky is a helicopter-style camera which offers a moving aerial view from just above and behind your car. Track shows the action from a variety of fixed camera angles around the course, flipping from one to another and panning to follow the action as the cars roar past. Finally, TV combines Sky and Track views just like watchers at home enjoy, with multiple air shots of the action from a variety of cameras placed at higher angles. It’s difficult to articulate how much fun it is to watch wrecks unfold using these features, but believe me, it doesn’t get old.

TV Camera view from the demo.

Papyrus went on to create other major racing simulations, most notably the NASCAR Racing series published yearly by Sierra Entertainment through the early 2000’s until EA Sports black-flagged them by buying the exclusivity rights to NASCAR in 2004, shutting Papyrus out of the racing genre for good. It’s not hard to see why these games have such a rabid following, as Papyrus truly went the distance to make sure their games were technically accurate without foregoing little bells and whistles like ‘fun’ along the way. And while current racing games run circles around it, Indianapolis 500: The Simulation is still a fan-frickin’-tastic racing game when you consider what Papyrus was able to squeeze out of a 386 processor with standard VGA graphics. As always, enjoy your retro ad goodie:

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


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