Le Mans 24 Hours video games
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A number of video games have been made of Le Mans 24 Hours and the Circuit de la Sarthe and competing cars have also featured in racing games like Gran Turismo.
1986: The first Le Mans video game was the arcade game WEC Le Mans, developed by Konami and released. For the following year, this arcade game was subsequently ported to the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, and ZX Spectrum by Ocean Software.
1997: Over ten years later, Sega released the arcade exclusive Le Mans 24. As a Japanese publisher, the game marked a debut for the 1991 winner, the Mazda 787B, before appearing in subsequent drving games including the later Gran Turismo series, the 1971 JWA Gulf Porsche 917K appears as a bonus car.
1999: two years later, Infogrames who incidentally absorbed Ocean, a French video game publisher, released Le Mans 24 Hours for PlayStation and PC. The game was developed by UK company Eutechnyx. In the US the game was released under the name Test Drive: Le Mans.
2000: In the following year the same software house released Le Mans 24 Hours on the Sega Dreamcast. This version of the game was originally planned to be a port from the PlayStation, but was eventually developed from scratch by Australian company Melbourne House which had recently been purchased by Infogrames. As with the previous PlayStation version, the Sega Dreamcast game was released in the US under their Test Drive brand as Test Drive: Le Mans.
2001: Following the release of the Dreamcast version of Le Mans 24 Hours, Infogrames and Melbourne House developed and released a port of the Sega Dreamcast game on the PlayStation 2.
2002: Finally, a PC port of the Le Mans 24 Hours game was created by another Australian video game developer Torus.
2004: The circuit appears in Gran Turismo 4 as the current layout and can be run with or without the two chicanes.
