In a surprising move, MicroProse has announced a renewal of its partnership with developer Geoff Crammond, creator of the Grand Prix series. This will see all four Grand Prix games to be released on Steam with a new title: Geoff Crammond Racing.
To the uninitiated, Geoff Crammond isn’t a racing driver. Rather, he is main developer of one of the most realistic open world racing sims of the late 1990s and early 2000s. So this is the rare video game where the game developer’s name is on the box art, similar to Sid Meier who happens to have had his games published by MicroProse back in the day.
The rechristening to Geoff Crammond Racing is “to ensure full separation from any official motorsport licensing,” the press release says.
The Grand Prix games were all licensed Formula 1 games, featuring real drivers and teams of a particular season not necessarily of the year of its release, with a few omissions despite having the full license.
Grand Prix 3, for example, is notable for having fictional driver “John Newhouse” in place of F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve who is not featured in any F1 game until 2000, which is peculiar considering he used video games to train for races back in the 90s (on Grand Prix 2, no less) and participated in online racing sim competitions during the Covid-19 lockdowns not in a fully kitted out sim rig, but rather with a controller. Then again, that’s just that fascinating quirks of Jacques Villeneuve.
But Geoff Crammond, the subject matter of this article, should be a familiar name already to Grand Prix fans, whose name is already on the big boxes. Crammond brought real-time physics, various driver assists like ideal racing line, telemetry (something modern games like Gran Turismo 7 is only adding recently), car setups and wet weather systems. These features are now standard in any racing game that dares to deem themselves as a racing sim.
The new Grand Prix re-releases as Geoff Crammond Racing do not have the F1 license, so some sponsorship decals that were accurate in the original release have been replaced with legally distinct swaps, updated modern logos or simply removed, though based on the screenshots available most of the trackside sponsors remain intact.
Whether more F1 drivers’ names have to be anglicised into something like Mike Shoemaker remains to be seen.
Thankfully, all Geoff Crammond Racing games will have Steam Workshop support so players can create their own custom cars, liveries, teams and drivers.
The F1 seasons Geoff Crammond Racing games covered (now sans F1 license) are as follows:
- Geoff Crammond Racing (GCR1) – “early 90s” (1991 season in Grand Prix)
- Geoff Crammond Racing 2 (GCR2) – “mid 90s” (1994 season in Grand Prix 2, with driver roster accurate to the 1994 German Grand Prix, after the death of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna)
- Geoff Crammond Racing 3 (GCR3) – “late 90s” (1998 season in Grand Prix 3, 2000 season available as an expansion pack)
- Geoff Crammond Racing 4 (GCR4) – “early 2000s” (2001 season in Grand Prix 4)
For the old guard of racing sim enthusiasts who have been keeping the game alive despite for the longest time being deemed abandonware, or to the new wave of racing sim goers looking for a more accessible way to get these classic PC games running, having all of Geoff Crammond Racing games on Steam is massive news.
Even bigger news, the reunion of MicroProse and Geoff Crammond isn’t just for these four re-releases. There will be “further announcements” coming as MicroProse is “officially back on the track at full speed.”
All Geoff Crammond Racing games are set to be released sometime in 2026 on PC (Steam). As such, instead of just an expansion, there will be indeed an F1 game released next year, four in fact. Just that there used to be official F1 games.