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Richard Burns Rally

The history of the Richard Burns Rally

A small Swedish 15-man team in Helsingborg put together the most celebrated rally game of all time 19 years ago, and today it's more popular than ever. We at Gamereactor contacted the old team to find out how the Richard Burns Rally was created.

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It was more or less by chance that the Helsingborg-based Atod Games became racing specialists. It was never really intended that they would specialise 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 racing-savvy and technically skilled developers who, with surprisingly small budgets, managed to produce games that could easily compete with three times as expensive major studio productions. This in turn led to Atod Software in Helsingborg, Sweden, being bought by Warthog Games in the UK.

London-based Sci Games (which would later be bought by Eidos) had shortly before this placed an order with the Helsingborg guys for a rally game that 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. A lot of realism.

Richard Burns Rally

Pete Hickman, Producer / Sci Games:
Warthog Sweden had made a name for itself as a very knowledgeable and capable developer of rally games, which gave us great confidence in their sense of the genre and their ability to do something new. We didn't want Colin McRae Rally and didn't want WRC: The Game but something else, 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 at the studio were crazy about Grand Prix Legends and several other racing simulators, which made us decide pretty quickly to make a pure rally simulator. The first of its kind.

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Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
I had never worked with car physics before joining Warthog and I had never worked with a rally game, which I saw as a normal challenge, of course. To get the job at Warthog, I had written my very first technology demo with advanced car physics that I showed during my job interview and thus I was hired, on the spot. I had just studied mechanical engineering, I had studied physics and was genuinely interested in racing simulation, I have always been very interested in motorsport and remember how much passion and enthusiasm there was within us working on Richard Burns Rally. It was obviously different back then and you couldn't go online and read tons of information about tyres and how the mass in a tyre behaves on a race car, but for me and for us it was very much about learning as we developed the game. I remember being crazy 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 allowed me to learn a lot of this on my own by programming, testing, programming and testing.

Richard Burns Rally

For its time, 2004, Richard Burns Rally was of course ridiculously advanced in terms of things in the car being simulated, not least compared to the arcade-like competition that existed on the market at the time in the form of Codemasters best-selling titles, V-Rally and the WRC games signed by Sony themselves and now that it has passed 19 years, Warthog's game is more popular than ever. We asked both Dennis and Eero what the discussions with Sci were like once they told us about their plans to 100% emulate real rallying.

Richard Burns Rally
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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 that we might be a little bit more realistic than our previous rally games, but no more. When we started showing them a driveable game, I remember several people in the London office getting a bit of a shock 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 quite significantly if we say so, I remember that with great clarity. Of course, the game ended up being incredibly difficult and the threshold for a beginner was enormous. But they agreed that we would deliver a sim, and so it was. I was also constantly pushing for us to emulate real-life rallies as much as we could because I was genuinely interested in that aspect more 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 and what Warthog wanted to do, it was probably more that we realised early in the development that it would take a special kind of marketing to get players to understand what we had developed. That 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 various features into the game and hide them between the so-called milestones that 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 did it in the evenings and weekends and kind of sneaked it into the game. Among other things, we were very convinced that we would have to build roads with sloping sides, with camber. Just as it looks in real life, so that the water can run down into the ditch when it rains and not remain on the road surface. This was not something we communicated to Sci as well as many other things in the game. I remember how one of the guys spent a whole weekend writing a physics system for the cars' radio antennas and how the antennas swayed depending on the movements of the car. We then realised that we should use this to simulate the player's view from inside the car, which made our "helmet cam" incredibly immersive.

Richard Burns Rally

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. In very simple terms, I went in with the attitude that we would simulate the most important aspects of a rally car and thus I was also able to eliminate other aspects that were not quite as important to simulate. I had read a couple of really good research articles about what happens in a tyre under severe stress and the interaction between the tyre and the surface, which is clearly more advanced to simulate in a rally game versus a racing game where you drive on asphalt, was of course number one on the priority list. The tyre interaction with loose materials was important and it was equally important that we simulated the mass of the car body in one way and the mass of the tyres in another, just as it works in reality. In rallying, of course, the tyres are not always in contact with the ground and if you jump or lift over a bump, for example, and the tyres are not in contact with the ground, this is something that can only be simulated if the tyre has a specified mass and a certain inertia. I worked a lot with this. The wheels, and especially the tyres, took on a life of their own in relation to the chassis, which is the basis of my multibody physics engine in the Richard Burns Rally. Another aspect that was prioritised was the simulation of the powertrain and I remember that we focused on turbo, turbo lag and emulation of what the diffs did. When this was done, a rally consultant named Simon Redhead was called in who knew Richard and who travelled from London to us in Helsingborg for several rounds and tested the game, with steering wheel and pedals, to make sure that everything I programmed matched reality.

Simon Redhead, Rally Consultant:
I had known Richard since the age of 16 and he was a very good friend of mine, so he recommended that Sci utilise my expertise and experience in rallying when he didn't have the time. He was the reigning WRC world champion and just couldn't fly to Sweden at the drop of a hat. That's where I came in because at the time I was competing in rallies and also working as a rally instructor. This was the fourth rally game that I had worked on as a consultant and what distinguished Richard Burns Rally from all other titles was that as a driver you had to drive it as you would a real rally car. It wasn't 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 way. I programmed and set up the game, he came to the studio repeatedly and stayed for several days and ran the version I was working on at the time. The things that he thought didn't match reality I reworked there and then, on the spot, and he tested again - and again. So, we went on for sometimes whole days without sleep to find the right feeling and that final realism.

Richard Burns Rally

Simon Redhead, Rally Consultant:
It was all about getting real statistics and measurements into the game to simulate a real rally, and my network of contacts was very useful in that regard. We took all sorts of measurements and readings to emulate what was happening with the chassis, tyres, 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 modelled and structured this after a real rally school in England that we all attended, to learn how to drive a rally car and to get the experience of what a rally car at high speed feels like. 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 which was much, much easier to play. I think if we had time to complete that part and put it in all the versions, the game would have sold much better.

Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
For me, the commercial part was largely unimportant. I remember that I didn't really care about that, but rather just wanted 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 faithfully realistic than any other game. Towards the end of the development phase, we were told by Sci to put in assistive devices to try to make the game a bit easier. Selling millions of copies would have been fun, of course, but I've never felt any bitterness about any of that. Only joy. Perhaps the thing that affected me the most was that it got pretty bad ratings from various gaming magazines that obviously hadn't been introduced to how real it really was or been informed by the publisher about what they could expect from our game. It was simply too difficult and was somewhat misunderstood because of this.

Richard Burns Rally

Pete Hickman, Producer / Sci Games:
From our perspective, it wasn't so much about the level of difficulty but more about the fact that shortly after the release we learnt that Richard had become seriously ill. Just over a year later he died, which meant that the air went out of the project. But I think back to that whole time when I travelled 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 has demonstrably achieved cult status. I remember all the travelling 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 with great pleasure. One day several of us went to a junkyard, paid a certain amount of money to smash windows, drag exhaust systems to the ground and puncture tyres with sharp objects in order to record many of the sounds. I also remember how angry Pete was when we sent in the finished game or at least we were going to send in the finished game but accidentally mailed 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 whereupon I explained just as it was, that we messed up because we poured in strong goods, haha. Those quickly became a funny internal story.

Richard Burns RallyRichard Burns Rally

Eero Piitulainen, Physics Lead / Warthog Sweden:
It is incredibly cool to see that the game has had a revival today and that so many people still play it and love it. I check in on the community from time to time to read the news and see what the modders have accomplished and it always makes me happy to see how they build on what we once created. 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.

Related texts

The history of the Richard Burns Rally

The history of the Richard Burns Rally

ARTICLE. Written by Petter Hegevall

A small Swedish 15-man team in Helsingborg put together the most celebrated rally game of all time 19 years ago, and today it's more popular than ever. We at Gamereactor contacted the old team to find out how the Richard Burns Rally was created.



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