BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN RACING SIMS AND ARCADE RACERS, TOCA TOURING CAR CHAMPIONSHIP WAS WELCOMED BY FANS OF BOTH AND PAVED THE WAY FOR A LONG-RUNNING SERIES. TOCA PRODUCER GAVIN RAEBURN RECALLS HOW THE GAMES EVOLVED
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, “TOCA Touring Car Championship 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 and more towards sims,” Gavin notes. “The biggest influence was actually the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) series itself, and trying to emulate this as authentically as we could in game form. A key part of the magic of BTCC was the tightly contested races and limited contact allowed during racing. That invariably led to some interesting situations and battles, and as it was something we weren’t seeing in other racing games we were keen to include it in ours.”
The focus of the TOCA team was to closely replicate British touring car races, but of course it was equally important to make their game appeal to PlayStation owners. “A high level of authenticity and realism was key, as we wanted to accurately reflect what the fans of the sport were watching on TV as best as we could,” Gavin reasons. “But we also needed to deliver a game that a broad audience could play. We worked to build as good a core simulation base as we could within the limitations of our primary platform, the PS1, and of course within the limitations of our relatively small team size, which was around 20 or so people.�
