F1 Pole Position 64

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F1 Pole Position 64
F-1 Pole Position 64 box art.
Developer(s) Human Entertainment
Publisher(s) Ubisoft
Platform(s) Nintendo 64
Release date Japan March 28, 1997
North America October 15, 1997
Europe October 15, 1997
Genre(s) Racing
Mode(s) Single player
Rating(s) ESRB: Everyone (E)

F1 Pole Position 64 is a Formula 1 racing game for the Nintendo 64. Based in the 1996 Formula One season, it was released in 1997. Known in Japan as "Human Grand Prix: The New Generation". Flags where added to the Driver menu, Japanese was replaced by English, Dutch, and French languages in the versions outside Japan.

The game featured all the tracks from that Formula 1 season, at a time where the racing began in Australia, and ended in Japan. Teams would be set up with relevant drivers, however there was a roster-feature included, which allowed the player to swap drivers from one team to another, and even removing a real driver an replacing him with unknown drivers, named Driver 1-6.

Grand Prix Mode allowed players to progress through the racing calendar, you could also choose single races or a time trial on various tracks. Battle mode allowed you to pick who you wanted to race against over a however many laps you chose. This added challenges to see if you could go from the back of the grid to 1st over one lap of Interlagos, Brazil, but because of the low difficulty rating of the game this was usually very possible. When racing in grand prix, the character D.Hill (Damon Hill, 1996 F1 Champion) would usually be your only competition for opening laps, and once he was overtaken, plain sailing through the rest of the grand prix would almost certainly allow you to win.

Graphics for the game were simple, given the time the game was released. The scenery of grandstands would build themselves as you drove around corners, rather than them already being there, but this did not affect the gameplay.

F1 pole position is a rather forgotton game therefore on the N64, which received average ratings from magazine and internet reviews, it was always going to be outdated as a game within a year, due to its sports genre. Fans of the game are likely to have moved onto F1 World Championship or Monaco Grand Prix