How Racing Games Help Automakers
For a lot of us, videogames are a huge reason why we are in to cars. Some of my favorite cars to this day are the once I remember driving in a videogame. The classic BMW M3 GTR in NFS, EVO 6 in Gran Turismo 2, the smooth handling of the Toyota 86, and many more. So, how does the licensing works for videogames to feature real cars? What were the first games to feature real brand cars? And how many older games had cars that look like Porsche but didn’t have any branding name?
Before we jump into how the licensing works, we need a little context. The first-ever racer was called ‘Gran Trak 10’ made by Atari released in 1974. This was before when we had controllers and players had to walk to an arcade to play them. I know. It's horrifying. The arcade machine had a real steering wheel and a gear shifter. Pretty ahead of its time for the mid ’70s. The first game to offer a third-person view from behind the car was ‘Pole Position’ which is the standard to this day. Because of influencing so many imitators, many videogame historians call ‘Pole Position’ to be one of the most influential games ever made. However, the first-ever game to use a licensed vehicle was ‘Outrun’. Released by SAGA in 1986, ‘Outrun’ featured a Ferrari Testarossa Spider. Which for the time looked amazingly realistic and it was definitely a Ferrari because it had a pixelated horse badge in the back. This is when car companies saw the chance to link the virtual world to the real one.
Outrun was a huge hit and inspired Poly’s Entertainment to make their own game with real cars. Poly’s Entertainment was an early 90’s development team within Sony. And they were to make a game for the company’s latest home entertainment system The PlayStation. They didn’t call it the PlayStation 1 because they didn’t know they were going to make new consoles in the future. Anyways, Poly’s released two games for the Motor Toon Gran Prix series. A cart racer that was heavily influenced by the famous Mario Kart series. Although the game looked like hallucinating jellos, critics praised the game for having more realistic handling than other games back then. But little did anyone know Poly’s was about gave us more of that feeling. After 5 years of development since 1992 to 1997, they released the ‘Gran Turismo’. A game that would change the course of the company and racing games as a whole. Upon release players and the critics praised the game for hyper-realistic graphics, driving physics and real-life car roster. The game had 140 cars of 11 different companies. Which is impressive for even today. Large companies don’t tend to work together that often unless they own each other. But here a videogame by Sony featuring real cars which people actually know. To this day Gran Turismo 1 is the bestselling game for the PlayStation 1.
But they had a competitor. Already in 1994 EA had released Need for Speed for the Panasonic 3DS which also had real-world handling and real car roster. The car roster was very little compared to Gran Turismos but NFS had a fuzz that Sony did not. Need for Speed had cops! Not only the player had to race against other cars, but they also had to dodge traffic and not get caught by the Five-O. Players loved it and police became a must for the NFS series.
But EA also had another gem that no other games had. Porsche!
So, the way licensing works for a videogame is that you have to pay the said company to use their logos and likenesses in the game. If you didn’t pay them, chances are that you’re going to get sued.
When EA released NFS Porsche Unleashed in 2000 they very wisely worded the contact so they would be the sole developers with the right to use Porsche branding in a game. Which was a huge advantage over other games? Do you want to drive a Porsche from your home? You need to buy Need for Speed.
In spite of the disadvantages of the other games, it was unexpectedly beneficial for another brand called ‘RUF’. ‘RUF’ was a German auto manufacturer who had been building their own Porsche inspired automobiles since mind-70’s. At first, they would tune up 911s and sell them on their own. But later they use to buy chassis directly from Porsche called ‘body in white’ and assemble the rest with their own parts. To the eyes of the German government, RUF was its own manufacturer. And after the EA-Porsche deal, other game companies including Poly’s entertainment would use RUF manufactured cars instead of Porsche. And to most of the gamers, that look was enough. Now because of the EA-Porsche deal, the world knows who RUF is. However, the EA-Porsche deal expired in 2016 and soon other games like Gran Turismo and Forza started to use Porsches in their own game and no longer needed the RUF workaround. But RUF cars are still seen in many games like Forza.
Talking about car branding, if you played Forza Horizon 4 back when it first released in 2018, you might have noticed that unlike the earlier game, Horizon 4 didn’t have any Toyota manufactured cars. And why was that? It sure was weird when back in 2017 Toyota simply stopped licensing its vehicles to racing video games. It was even weirder than the company, despite its size, never actually explained why that decision was made. According to many statistic graphs in Japanese newspapers show that Toyota's car sales increased with the rise of video games. But Toyota instead didn’t let games use their car by saying out of context stuff like; we don’t support illegal street racing to NFS and Forza, realistic cars in games make needs for car disappear or not wanting to have only old cars in-game. These arguments stand invalid as Nissan gave us all the old GTRs and players love to drive realistic cars in games. So, their argument falls flat. But last year in December Toyota did come back to Forza Horizon 4 with their 86, supra and Celica. Then what was that fuzz about? I don’t know. Big companies take weird all the time and they don’t have to tell us why.
Racing games sure has come a long way. And many of them sure helps out automakers by simply making fans of the manufacturer or popularizing an entire brand like RUF. Or if you don’t want to pay for a logo in your game, just simply model your own vehicles and name them like GTA. Who am I to judge?
