Le Mans 24 Hours video games
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A number of video games have been made of Le Mans 24 Hours. The race, the Circuit de la Sarthe, and competing cars have been featured in racing games such as the Gran Turismo series.
The first Le Mans video game was the arcade game WEC Le Mans, developed by Konami and released in 1986. For the following year, this arcade game was subsequently ported to the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, and ZX Spectrum by Ocean Software. The game broke down the race in four laps (two on daytime and two after sunset), divided as well into three checkpoints. Due to the limitations of the hardware, all cars have the same design and don't correspond to actual models. The advertising in both sides of the road is also limited to the name of the game and its creators.
Over ten years later, in 1997, 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 driving games including the later Gran Turismo series, the 1971 JWA Gulf Porsche 917K appears as a bonus car.
Two years later, the French video game publisher Infogrames, who incidentally absorbed Ocean, 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.
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. This was one of the most critically acclaimed racing games on the Dreamcast, often hailed as the single best driving game available for the DC. 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 in 2001. Then on August 13, 2001 Le Mans 24 Hours was released on the Playstation 2.
Finally, in 2002, a PC port of the Le Mans 24 Hours game was created by another Australian video game developer, Torus.
The circuit appears in Gran Turismo 4, released in 2004. The game uses the then-current layout and can be run with or without the two chicanes.
In Race Driver Grid, released in 2008, the player is able to race the whole 24 hours of Le Mans.
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