Sports Car GT

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sports Car GT
Developer(s)	Image Space Incorporated
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts
Platform(s)	PC (Win) PlayStation
Release date	1999
Genre(s)	Sim racing
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer
System requirements	(Recommended) 233 MHz or faster Pentium processor, 64 MB RAM, 4x CD-ROM drive, High Color 2-MB Video card, 320 MB Hard-drive space (These numbers must be increased if add-ons are used).
Input methods	Keyboard, joystick or Gaming wheel.

Sports Car GT is a racing game / simulation, published by EA (Electronic Arts). The game developers for PC were Westwood Studios and Image Space Incorporated. For PlayStation, the developers were Westwood Pacific and Point of View. Sports Car GT (often shortened to SCGT) was released in spring 1998 for Play Station and January 1999 for PC. The two versions differed widely, with different cars and a different graphical design.

Note: From this point on, all information refers to the PC version.

SCGT as originally sold featured a variety of cars; the Porsche 911 Carrera, Porsche 911 RSR, Porsche 911 GT2, and Porsche 911 GT1, BMW M3, Panoz Esperante and Esperante GT-R, Saleen-modified Ford Mustang, Vector M12, Lister Storm, McLaren F1 GTR, Callaway C12, Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR, Mosler Raptor, and two fictional cars; the Wiggler Motors Rattlesnake and GTR.

SCGT shows that its graphics are seven years old. It has various easily noticeable errors (many car's tires sink into the ground, and the shadows sit slightly above it). Typical polygon counts are in the low thousands. A major gripe of SCGT players is that the headlights have no effect on the dashboard view.

A large community of editors has formed around SCGT, although it was never as large as that of Grand Prix Legends. At its peak, the SCGT community centered around Speedsims.com, which featured a forum, file repository, and hosted individual's Sports Car GT webpages, which included an enormous list of all tracks in progress, abandoned, or available. Due to the inevitable loss of fans to newer and more advanced racing games, as well as other hobbies, Speedsims eventually went offline, a huge blow to the community.

Since the loss of Speedsims, sub-forums for SCGT at two of the largest sim racing forums, Race Sim Central and Black Hole Motorsports have filled the gap. The SCGT forum at Race Sim Central is larger and busier, while Black Hole Motorsports has a file database. At Race Sim Central files must be attached to posts in the forum which makes them harder to find.

This community has produced many more cars for SCGT; most add-on cars are endurance racers based on real-life cars which race in ALMS, FIA-GT, and at the 24 hours of Le Mans. Also represented are Formula One cars, Mini Coopers and other 1960s "tin-tops", recent Touring cars (a large number based on DTM), Drag Racing cars, vintage cars from the 1930s onwards, Trans-Am, and the occasional oddball (notables are the wheeled hot dog, Budweiser blimp, and batmobile).

The editing community have created hundreds of tracks, fictional and real, from Go-Kart tracks to multiple versions of the huge Nurburgring circuit. Most are built from scratch or modified versions of other SCGT tracks. Many historic tracks are converted from Grand Prix Legends, while most modern F1 tracks available for SCGT are converted from ISI's later developments, F12000 and F12000CS (not to be confused with F1C).

A plethora of individual-run sites also exist for SCGT. In recent years, these have declined enormously, but still there is a good number of sites out there.

There are a few on-line (multiplayer) racing organizations for SCGT, as well as off-line groups. These races normally use an anti-cheat program to keep participants to stringent requirements (cars, game settings, etc).

In 2005 the developers of Sports Car GT for the PC, Image Space Inc., released the massively popular multi-class sim rFactor and the successor to the popular GMotor 1 engine first used in Sports Car GT PC. Whilst it has no official FIA GT license its massive modding base, extensive multi-class (Non F1/Single seater exclusive) content, proper bug/patch support and upgrade options mean many view it as Sports Car GT's spiritual successor.