It was more or less by accident that Helsingborg-based Atod Games became racing specialists. They never really intended to specialize in racing and rallying, but already after their debut game Hot Wheels Extreme Racing, there were offers from various publishers to work on other racing projects. After the popular and successful Mobil 1 Rally Championship, Rally Championship Xtreme and Jeremy McGrath Supercross ’98, the ten young guys had defined themselves as race-savvy and technically proficient developers who, with surprisingly small budgets, managed to produce games that could easily compete with three times more expensive large studio productions. This in turn led to Atod Software in Helsingborg, Sweden, being bought by Warthog Games in the United Kingdom.
London-based Sci Games (which would later be bought by Eidos) had shortly before placed an order with the boys from Helsingborg for a rally game they wanted to compete with the immensely popular Colin McRae Rally, and while the British publisher signed a contract with then-WRC world champion Richard Burns to use his name in the title of a new rally game, Warthog Sweden had put together a pitch that included realism. Lots of realism.
Pete Hickman, Producer / Sci Games:
Warthog Sweden had made a name for themselves as a very knowledgeable and capable developer of rally games, which gave us a lot of confidence in their feel for the genre and their ability to do something new. We didn’t want Colin McRae Rally and we didn’t want WRC: The Game but something different, something more. We obviously knew how technically savvy these guys were and I think we were all very impressed with their first pitch.
Dennis Gustafsson, Game Director / Warthog Sweden:
I remember how simulator crazy we all were at that time. I played a lot of Falcon 4, while several others in the studio were crazy about Grand Prix Legends and various other racing simulators, so pretty soon we decided to make a pure rally simulator. The first of its kind.
Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
I had never worked with autophysics before I joined Warthog and I had never worked with a rally game, which of course I saw as a normal challenge. To get the job at Warthog, I had written my very first technology demo with advanced car physics which I showed at my interview and so I was hired on the spot. I had just studied mechanical engineering, I had studied physics and was genuinely interested in race simulation, I have always been very interested in motorsports and remember how much passion and enthusiasm there was in us to work on Richard Burns Rally. Of course it was different then and you couldn’t go online and read tons of information about tires and how the mass in a tire behaves on a race car, but for me and for us it was mostly about learning as we developed the game. I remember being insanely dedicated to what we were doing and determined to make something that would be more realistic than anything else on the market. I think the combination of my main interests with motorsports, cars and computers meant that I was able to learn a lot from this myself by programming, testing, programming and testing.
Before its time, 2004, Richard Burns Rally was of course ridiculously advanced in terms of things in the car being simulated, not least in comparison to the arcade-style competition that existed in the market at the time in the form of Codemasters best-selling titles, V-Rally and the WRC games signed by Sony itself and now that it’s 19 years past, Warthog’s game is more popular than ever. We asked both Dennis and Eero how the conversations with Sci were when they told us about their plans to emulate 100% real rallying.
Dennis Gustafsson, Game Director / Warthog Sweden:
Sci Games probably didn’t really know what they were ordering from us. When we talked about a rally simulator, I think they probably thought we might be a little more realistic than our previous rally games, but no more. When we started showing them a drivable game, I remember several people in the London office were a little shocked at how challenging it really was.
Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
Sci’s view of what a simulator was and our view of what a simulator was differed pretty significantly when we say that, I remember with great clarity. Of course, eventually the game became incredibly difficult and the threshold for a beginner was huge. But they agreed that we would deliver a sim, and so we did. I also constantly insisted that we recreate real rallies as much as possible, because I was genuinely more interested in that aspect than just making a fun car game.
Pete Hickman, Producer / Sci Games:
As a producer I never really experienced any kind of dissonance between what we wanted to do and what Warthog wanted to do, it was probably more that we realized early in development that it would take a special kind of marketing to get players to understand what we had developed. That, again, it was something different from the existing rally games on the market.
Dennis Gustafsson, Game Director / Warthog Sweden:
I remember how we had to sneak simulations in the form of different features into the game and hide them between the so-called milestones we submitted to get paid. Much of what makes the game so good even today, I want to remember, was developed with so-called guerrilla tactics, where we would do it at night and on weekends and sneak it into the game, so to speak. Among other things, we were very convinced that we should build roads with sloping sides, with camber. Just the way it looks in real life, so that when it rains the water can run into the ditch and not stay on the road surface. This was not something we communicated to Sci and many other things in the game. I remember how one of the guys spent an entire weekend writing a physics system for the cars’ radio antennas and how the antennas swung depending on the car’s movements. We realized then that we needed to use this to simulate the player’s view from the car, which made our “helmet camera” incredibly immersive.
Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
We decided early on that we would simulate all four wheels independently and that we would work with so-called multibody dynamics. Very simply put, I went in with the attitude that we would simulate the most important aspects of a rally car and so I could also eliminate other aspects that were not so important to simulate. I had read some really good research articles on what happens in a tire under heavy load and the interaction between the tire and the surface, which is obviously more sophisticated to simulate in a rally game than a racing game where you drive on asphalt, was obviously number one on the priority list. The interaction of the tire with loose materials was important, and it was equally important that we simulate the mass of the body in one way and the mass of the tires in another, just as it works in reality. In rallying, of course, the tires are not always in contact with the ground, and if, for example, you jump or lift over a bump and the tires are not in contact with the ground, this is something that can only be simulated if the tire has a certain mass and a certain inertia. I’ve worked with this a lot. The wheels, and especially the tires, took on a life of their own relative to the chassis, which is the basis of my multibody physics engine in the Richard Burns Rally. Another aspect that took priority was powertrain simulation, and I remember we focused on turbo, turbo lag and emulation of what the diffs did. When this was finished, a rally consultant named Simon Redhead was brought in, who knew Richard and who traveled from London to us in Helsingborg for several rounds and tested the game, with steering wheel and pedals, to make sure everything I programmed matched reality.
Simon Redhead, Rally Consultant:
I had known Richard since he was 16 and he was a very good friend of mine, so he recommended Sci to use my expertise and experience in rallying when he didn’t have time. He was the reigning WRC world champion and just couldn’t fly to Sweden in a heartbeat. That’s where I came around the corner, because at that time I was competing in rallies and also working as a rally instructor. This was the fourth rally game I had worked on as a consultant, and what set Richard Burns Rally apart from all the other titles was that you had to drive it as a driver as you would a real rally car. It was not a racing game, it was a full-fledged simulator and for me it was a more fun project to work on.
Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
I remember how Simon and I in particular worked a bit like rally drivers and chief engineers, in a sense. I would program and set up the game, he would repeatedly come to the studio and stay for several days and run the version I was working on at the time. The things he thought didn’t match, I reworked on the spot, and he tested again – and again. So we sometimes went whole days without sleeping to find the right feel and that final realism.
Simon Redhead, Rally Consultant:
It was about getting real statistics and measurements into the game to simulate a real rally, and my network of contacts was very helpful in that regard. We did all kinds of measurements and metrics to simulate what was happening with the chassis, tires, shock absorbers and brakes. It was really sad to see how it was more or less buried once it was released.
Dennis Gustafsson, Game director / Warthog Sweden:
One way we made it easier for new players was to build a rally school and we modeled and structured it after a real rally school in England that we all went to, to learn how to drive a rally car and get the experience of what a rally car feels like at high speed. We also built an arcade mode into the game, which unfortunately wasn’t quite ready for release in North America and Europe, but in the Japanese version of Richard Burns Rally there was an arcade mode that was much, much easier to play. I think if we had had time to finish that part and put it in all versions, the game would have sold much better.
Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
For me, the commercial part was largely unimportant. I remember not really caring about that, but just wanting to get as close to reality as possible. But of course… It was very, very difficult and I remember Sci not really understanding that we were simulating reality closer and more realistically than any other game. Toward the end of the development phase, we were told by Sci that we needed to use tools to make the game a little easier. Of course, it would have been nice to sell millions of copies, but I never felt any bitterness about that. Only joy. Perhaps what hit me the most was that it got pretty bad reviews from various gaming magazines that clearly hadn’t shown how real it really was or been informed by the publisher about what to expect from our game. It was just too difficult and was somewhat misunderstood as a result.
Pete Hickman, Producer / Sci Games:
From our perspective, it wasn’t so much about the difficulty, but more about the fact that shortly after release we learned that Richard had become seriously ill. A little over a year later, he passed away, which meant that the air disappeared from the project. But I think back to that whole time traveling from London to Helsingborg several times a month as a wonderful time. Me and the studio had a brilliant collaboration, I understood what they wanted to achieve and they understood that I had pressure on me from above and together we made a game that arguably achieved cult status. I remember all the traveling around the world that Dennis and I did, photographing and filming real routes and then recreating them with amazing detail and realism for the time.
Dennis Gustafsson, Game Director / Warthog Sweden:
I remember all that and look back on it fondly. One day some of us went to a junkyard, paid a certain amount to smash windows, drag exhaust systems to the ground and puncture tires with sharp objects to record many of the sounds. I also remember how angry Pete was when we sent in the completed game, or at least wanted to send in the completed game, but accidentally sent the wrong disc to London because we had a whiskey tasting that night, haha. The Sci office called a few days later and just screamed on the phone, to which I explained as it was, that we had messed up because we had poured strong goods into it, haha. That quickly became a funny internal story.
Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
It’s incredibly cool to see that the game has had a revival today and that so many people still play it and love it. I occasionally check out the community to read the news and see what the modders have accomplished and it always makes me happy to see how they are building on what we once made. In fact, I recently built a simulator rig at home for my son and one of the games I immediately installed was Richard Burns Rally with the latest version of the Next Generation Physics mod.