Remembering classic games: Mobil 1 Rally Championship (2000)

Prior to taking your first corner in this game, you could have been forgiven for thinking all that rallying stuff was easy enough, really. And it wouldn’t have been your fault - the ‘90s were dangerously good at conditioning you to think that you could probably dance an Impreza around a muddy hairpin if it came to it, thanks to arcade romps like V-Rally, Colin McRae Rally and Sega Rally.

And then you tried to navigate a corner of the Welsh countryside on a damp morning in Mobil 1 Rally Championship, watched a comprehensive demonstration of its extensive damage model, and remembered: oh, that’s right, cars break when you chuck them at trees, don’t they?

Seriously, as much as sneeze in these cars and you’ve lost your front bonnet. It may have been the photorealistic graphics (we can hear you sniggering, but listen this was the year 2000 and we didn’t know any better) that pulled us in. But it was the confrontational level of difficulty that kept us hunched over our beige keyboards, day turning to night, as we tried to master a uniquely slippy handling model.

Even better, for the first time here was a rally game that presented realistic stage lengths. Three minutes with V-Rally and you’re done. But Mobil 1 Rally Championship developer Magnetic Fields used Ordnance Survey maps of real locations visited by the British Rally Championship and presented humongous 10, even 15-minute stages. Some of them in the snow, or at night. All of them harder than a Sunderland bouncer.

By the end of some of those mammoth events, you were limping home with three gears, no headlights and a prayer, having dispensed half a Seat dealership’s worth of parts over the previous 20 miles of moorland. Sweaty stuff.

What a car collection it had. The Seat Ibiza Cupra Sport that graced the box. That gorgeous VW Golf GTI Mk IV with the blue Sony livery. The Ford Puma’s rally entrant. Thrillingly prosaic cars you’d see in every British car park at the time like Citroen Saxos, Vauxhall Astras and Nissan Micras, resplendent in rally finery and churning up a countryside path. It was such a kick to see something more than the usual assortment of Lancers and Imprezas - which did also feature, inevitably.

All this authenticity for the time made Mobil 1 Rally Championship players uniquely smug. Reckon you’re into rally, do you mate? What’s that you’ve got there - oh Sega Rally! Yeah, it’s fun. But cars don’t drive like that and look, your steering still works after you hit that grass verge. But no, you carry on if it makes you happy. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got fifteen minutes of surgical precision to pull off in an ailing Proton Compact, somewhere in the pitch-black Northern Irish countryside.