Along the way, you’d have to weave in and out of other racers. Given just ninety seconds to make it as far along the road as you could. You controlled an F1-like car on a fast vertically scrolling road. Perhaps the first F1-ish game could be Speed Race from 1974.ĭeveloped and released by Tatio in Japan (Midway in the US where it was called Wheels), Speed Race offered some very simple gameplay.

Back then, gaming was in its infancy and games were very simple. It’s certainly the one game that kick-started the whole arcade and video game revolution in those early days. The Seventiesġ972’s Pong is often considered the first ‘proper’ video game. I don’t have to go back to the fifties (especially as video games didn’t exist then) for the first ever F1 game, but what could be considered the first F1 themed game is still very early in gaming history.

Italian driver, Emilio Giuseppe Farina would go in to be crowned the first official F1 World Champion. The first ever Formula One race was held in 1950 at the famed Silverstone circuit. So anyway, here we go on an F1 trip through gaming, spanning six decades. There will be links aplenty to gameplay footage of many of the games, a big thanks to the various YouTubers who complied the gameplay. Plus, a lot of the early games may not have been officially F1 licensed, but it’s very clear they were definitely F1 influenced. But I will be looking at some of the more notable F1 games to see how they’ve changed over the decades. Now, I’m not going to cover every single F1 game as there’s quite a lot of them and when you get into the latter games, they’re really just yearly updates. From the first ever F1 game right up to the latest in 2020. So I thought, to celebrate seventy years of Formula 1, that I would look at how F1 games have evolved through the years. Still, I’ve always enjoyed playing F1 games even if I really don’t follow the sport itself much anymore. Then, the blackest race weekend that was Imola 94 happened and for me, F1 died.

I used to be a huge F1 fan, mainly through the eighties and nineties with Ayrton Senna being my favourite driver. That’s quite a momentous occasion to celebrate. Formula 1 as a sport turns seventy years old this year.

F1 manager 2001