Spirit of Speed 1937

“People Only Love the Underdogs That Win.”

“At least you can start from pole!”
North American Dreamcast release, front cover.

Extry, extry, read all about it: The automobiles are off to the races! Why, it feels just like yesterday when I would have to hoof it on just my two hocks to get across the apple. And by the time I finally wound up at the hop, I reckon I’d be too joed to cut a rug — let alone put the moves on any of the sweetie patooties. Talk about gumming the works for this old pip! That’s why I tell you, these new-fangled “tin cans?” Well, they’re just the bee’s knees, I tells ya’: They get me from the cave to the clip joint while keeping my uprights feeling like eggs in coffee, you dig? And believe me when I tell you that the dolls out there blow their wigs when I show ‘em my motor vehicle, boy howdy! Now I’ve got the flames on me all hours of the day, and I couldn’t be more jazzed!

… You know, I originally had the idea that I would try to write this whole article in mock 1930s American vernacular,** but I’m honestly exhausted after just one paragraph of it. Goofy bits aside, there are folk out there who genuinely romanticize the so-called “good ol’ days,” and who wouldn’t mind seeing the clock set back something like nine decades. Oh, what a time it must have been back then: You had flapper gals, classic cinema, the advent of jazz music… white people quickly co-opting jazz music, institutionalized racism, crippling economic depression — nothin’ but good times all around, yessiree. But perhaps no aspect of that bygone era is more romanticized than its vintage cars, from back in the day before motor vehicles were held to any of those pesky “safety standards” manufacturers abide by nowadays. Boy howdy, am I sure glad that the latest and greatest in vehicular tech is so much more safe and reliable!

Of course, classic cars nowadays make for particularly expensive investments, reserved mostly for the inexplicably rich and famous. We don’t exactly get to see them out on the racetracks anymore, either — being made to square off against (and undoubtedly getting smoked by) the latest in automotive engineering. Hell, these hoopties of days long gone rarely even get to feature virtually in video games, because who would wanna drive around in some janky old jalopy when you can hit the nitrous at 300 miles per hour in some fancy Italian supercar? As such, classic car enthusiasts looking to so much as simulate the experience of driving their beloved Jenkins Model K or whatever have never really had much in the way of options… Save for one. With their dying breath, the infamous LJN emerged from the depths to spit out one final title in the year 2000: Spirit of Speed 1937 on the Sega Dreamcast. So, let’s give it the ol’ looksie-doo, and see for ourselves whether it’s the bee’s knees or a load of bushwa!

** This isn’t a joke. I legitimately considered writing this entire article while trying to keep up that obnoxious gimmick. As my editor / roommate was quick to inform me when I first pitched the idea to her: “That would get old after one paragraph.” She wasn’t wrong back in 2018, and she’s not wrong now in 2022.

“Pay off a Loan Shark With Big Hands…”

“It takes a real effort to lose on that circuit
with this car!”
European PC release, front cover.

Now, I know that I just made it out to be in the introduction that this game is LJN’s handiwork, but that’s not really entirely true. I mean, for starters, LJN was most infamously a games publisher — not a studio actually involved directly in games development. Secondly, LJN only really existed “in name only” by this point in the year 2000: They hadn’t seen a publishing credit since 1996, and would never be seen again after Spirit of Speed 1937’s release. More accurately, LJN had already effectively been reduced to a mere logo as early as the year 1990; when they were initially acquired by Acclaim Entertainment, and summarily saw their branding used primarily as a means of circumventing Nintendo’s restrictions on how many NES titles a publisher could release over the course of a year. And as a last point as to how LJN’s connection to Spirit of Speed 1937 is tenuous at best: The Sega Dreamcast version of the title isn’t even the game’s original release! As it turns out, it’s a conversion of a somewhat obscure 1999 PC title, with its very own weird publishing puzzle to be solved. This, folks, is what we like to call “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” I realize that’s a hell of a lot to unpack there right out the gate. So, let’s try and take this step-by-step, starting with the folk who actually developed Spirit of Speed 1937: The UK’s Broadsword Interactive.

Established in 1995, the studio began life as an offshoot of the television production company Broadsword Television, whose recurring shtick were TV programs attempting to blend primitive “virtual reality” with game show premises. British readers may be familiar with their flagship program Knightmare, which ran from 1987 to 1994 on ITV and dealt largely in kids getting into green screen Dungeons & Dragons-style shenanigans. For our American readers: Picture the oft-disastrous ‘Video Zone’ challenges from Nick Arcade, but with far more elaborate premises and even less visual feedback for contestants to work with. In any event, Spirit of Speed 1937 would mark the debut effort by Broadsword’s newly-established software development studio (putting aside their support work on converting Psygnosis’ WipEout to PC), as its premise was inspired by the team’s daily commutes past the historic Brooklands racing circuit in Surrey, England.^[1] The idea of developing a simulation racing game must’ve come naturally enough, but its historical conceit would be the truly inspired bit — the novelty of setting the game within a pre-war time period, and faithfully implementing the vintage vehicles and tracks to match. But rather than going the self-publishing route, the option for the game would be sold to MicroProse: A company perhaps best known for publishing the original series of X-COM and Civilization titles, who also held claim to a number of simulation titles under their belts; the likes of B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th!, and a long-running Grand Prix series of Formula 1 racing games. To say that Broadsword’s pitch for The Spirit of Speed (its original title, sans ‘1937’ subtitle) was well-received by the publisher would be an understatement: According to the game’s lead designer John Jones-Steele, MicroProse’s immediate response was to “[not] let us leave their office without signing a deal.”^[1b]

Before we go any further, I’ll have to explain the concept of “publishers-turned-labels”; seeing as it’s a term I only just now coined, and one which becomes a recurring theme throughout the rest of our story. As many of you probably already know, “publishers” in the video game industry are typically companies which contract and allocate budgets to development studios in order to produce games, which they can then go on to distribute and sell within the market. You can think of them in the same way as book publishers, who seek out / establish contracts with authors to handle matters of printing and marketing for their written works. But in the turbulent games industry, curious fates can often befall even the most respected publishers: They can get acquired and swallowed up by larger (often more financially solvent) publishers, who maintain the pretense of “keeping these legacy companies alive” by continuing to publish games under their names. But frequently, this front is just a façade: By the point these acquired publishers are folded into these larger companies, their operations are often ceased outright, where their value to their new owners is only in getting hold of whatever licenses / franchises / territorial rights may have been wrapped up in their acquisition’s rights-holdings. In this way, these former companies go on to exist purely on paper, serving as little more than a thin layer of obfuscation for their new ownership. Effectively, the company logos and branding seen on packaging are often all that really remains of the past publishers in question — mere “labels” to be printed onto boxes and manuals. Hence, my admittedly clumsy attempt at assigning a turn of phrase to this phenomenon.

Bearing all this in mind: It’s likely that Broadsword’s successful pitch had taken place at some point prior to the year 1998, when MicroProse were still an entity capable of arranging their own publishing deals. Unfortunately, it was in August of 1998 that MicroProse would face the prospect of imminent financial ruin, owing to a multitude of reasons probably not worth getting too deep into here. (Luckily, we just so happen to have an article on X-COM: Enforcer here on the site, which goes into some detail on the matter!) As such, the company would ultimately be forced to sell their corporate assets and branding to Hasbro Interactive – the games division of one of the world’s most successful toy manufacturers – for a reported $70 million USD.^[2] At this point, the bulk of Hasbro’s software catalogue had consisted of adaptations of their board game and toy products (such as Boggle, Monopoly, and RISK), with only a handful of video game-specific properties to bolster them; the likes of RollerCoaster Tycoon, a run of 3D Frogger titles, and… some odd game starring a sentient glove? I’ll have to look into that last one at some point. But with the acquisition of MicroProse, Hasbro now held rein over their lines of strategy and simulation games, and the ability to leverage MicroProse as a publishing label to market this expanded range of wares. This also meant that Hasbro would now assume the publishing rights to Spirit of Speed, and handle any further negotiations on the title’s continued production from that point forward. Where Broadsword had initially dealt directly with a publisher who seemed genuinely excited by the potential for their game, they would now be subject to the whims of a decidedly more dispassionate corporate entity.

What seemed to follow in the wake of this development was a deeply troubled development cycle for Spirit of Speed 1937, as instigated by a revolving door of producers hastily assigned [by Hasbro] to the project and just as swiftly replaced. According to Jones-Steele: “The major problem was that we ended up with two or three different producers, who each had different ideas about how the game should play. The first wanted an arcade game that anyone could pick up and enjoy; the next wanted it to have ultra-realistic [driving] physics. […] Our second producer left the project and then a new one came along and wanted something in between his two predecessors. In the end, we really ended up with physics that weren’t very good.”^[1c] To elaborate on what Jones-Steele is speaking to here: Spirit of Speed‘s driving controls and racing fundamentals bounced back and forth between a deliberate stiffness (which would’ve been accurate to the classic cars) and more simplified / responsive handling (more conducive to broad accessibility), and was ultimately decided to settle somewhere in the middle as development drew near to its close — at a point where it may well have been too late already to properly fine-tune and fully realize what that vision for the title should’ve entailed. Where Broadsword’s team may have had a more clear vision for the game prior to active development, it was Hasbro’s producers who conveyed and enforced what approach they deemed as “marketable,” and who ultimately had final say on that matter. But in a case where you had no less than three producers come and go on the project – each with their own idea of what would serve the game best – there was never a consistent concept that the team could pursue or adhere to.

For a point of comparison, I want to take a look at a contemporary racing title with a comparable concept: 1998’s Grand Prix Legends (unrelated to MicroProse’s own Grand Prix series), developed by Papyrus Design and published by Sierra Sports on PC. In a similar fashion to Spirit of Speed, Grand Prix Legends centers its selection of vintage cars / racers / tracks around the year 1967, in its pursuit to simulate that year’s season of the titular Grand Prix. From the very start, its vision seemed to be far more clear: To replicate that setting as authentically as was possible, and to convey the experience of driving vintage cars as accurately as they could. The end result is evidently one of the most immersive racing simulators ever produced — a genre “gold standard” which continues to be held and cherished to this very day, as players continue to support it by developing mods and populating its multiplayer. Naturally, none of this did the game any good around the time of its release: Grand Prix Legends was an abject commercial failure, which could only manage 200,000 units sold come the year 2004 — having moved only a few thousand with its North American distribution.^[3] Whatever audience there was for this style of racing game seemed to exist largely in Europe, if at all. Perhaps this was an example that Hasbro would’ve taken note of, and potentially influenced their own decision to distribute Spirit of Speed 1937‘s PC release exclusively within Europe – skipping the North American market entirely. It made sort of sense that the game should be geared more toward the European market, considering that many of the cars and tracks featured would be of European origin. You can either chalk that up to bias on the part of the game’s British development team, or as reflection of the fact that American and Japanese manufacture of so-called “performance cars” (as well as development of domestic racetracks on which to host them) didn’t really take off in earnest until the 1950s. Either way, it was likely that the European market was going to make up the bulk of sales for a simulation game of this nature, and so the effort [and financial resources] needed for North American distribution wasn’t seen as a worthwhile endeavor. Not for the moment, at least.

For whatever that national pandering was worth  – and following a short two week release delay documented on the Broadsword Interactive website – the European games press seemed to rate Spirit of Speed 1937’s PC release as largely decent. A reviewer by the alias ‘Melo’ for Jeuxvideo.com rated the game a 16 out of 20; praising the presentation and mechanical authenticity, but criticizing game slowdown when multiple cars appear on-screen simultaneously. In a closing statement, the reviewer says something to the effect of “Too bad, too bad, the rating would have been better!”^[4] While Spirit of Speed’s PC release is largely identical to its later Dreamcast release in terms of content (barring a small range of differences we’ll detail later), it seems as though performance on computers of the era was something of a consistent issue; where the game either wasn’t sufficiently optimized during its development, or was intended to target higher-end video cards than were commonly available to the likes of critics and consumers. Alternatively, this may have just been a bit of unfortunate luck across a small handful of reviewers’ computers (It’s not: The issue appears to stem from memory limitations within the game engine, and as such would be fairly universal), as there aren’t really all that many contemporary reviews of the initial Windows version for us to compare and cross-reference here: One gets the impression that Spirit of Speed’s release wasn’t particularly well-publicized — that the game hadn’t actually been picked up on the radar of too many other review outlets. As such, Spirit of Speed 1937 would have to wait another year to face more exhaustive scrutiny.

The year 1999 would’ve also marked the debut of the Sega Dreamcast outside of Japan;** with the console hitting North American shelves in September [and European shores in October]. Now, if there’s one major criticism I would say gets brought up most often when discussing the console (aside from its short lifespan and Sega’s general mismanagement of the product line), I’d point to its lack of third-party publisher support compared to its competitors — particularly where it came to the international market. And even among what felt like the small handful of companies that chose to do business with Sega in this period, most simply utilized the console to release enhanced ports of older titles and multiplatform releases — rarely developing much in the way of exclusive titles made to leverage the hardware. Included in this short list of third parties who published titles for the Dreamcast were everyone’s favorite envelope-pushers, Acclaim Entertainment: The publisher most beloved for their Turok series of first-person shooters, and most infamous for their series of bizarre and downright distasteful marketing stunts; such as encouraging drivers to rack up real-life speeding tickets as part of promotion for Burnout 2: Point of Impact, and offering to pay for advertising space on tombstones for the recently-deceased as part of Shadow Man 2: 2econd Coming’s marketing campaign. Classy stuff. In any case, Acclaim was one of the few third-party publishers to support the Dreamcast with at least a handful of [initially] exclusive titles; the likes of Fur Fighters, Tee Off, and TrickStyle. At the same time, it likely didn’t take them long to realize that developing titles from the ground up for Dreamcast was both a pricey and unprofitable endeavor, and so they just as readily published comparatively cheap conversions of pre-existing software to the flagging console; such as their licensed wrestling games, a pair of South Park titles, and – you guessed it – Spirit of Speed 1937.

“Your destiny is to become a bus driver
in Dusseldorf…”
German magazine advert.

Yes, Spirit of Speed would make its North American [and later Japanese] debut on the Sega Dreamcast, under the banner of a new publisher. Honestly, I can’t come up with a clear reason as to why the game changed hands here, and why Hasbro chose not to pursue publishing Spirit of Speed 1937 on the system themselves? While Hasbro Interactive admittedly dealt largely in PC titles and only occasionally dabbled in console releases, they actually did put their name to more than a couple of Dreamcast games; including none other than the North American release of Daytona USA 2001 — the remake of Sega’s classic arcade and Saturn racing title. Jones-Steele would mention there being a number of “available slots” for publishing titles on the Dreamcast – which Acclaim would’ve wanted to fill out in order to maximize potential profits – leading Acclaim to purchase the console rights to the game from Hasbro in order to publish it on the system under their purview.^[1d] But damn it all if there didn’t wind up being another layer of abstraction to this whole publishing fiasco. Because as it turns out, Acclaim also didn’t want to attach their name directly to the title, in spite of the fact they had clearly angled and negotiated in order to get hold of it in the first place! As it turns out, Acclaim also held claim to a couple of publishers-turned-labels of their own, which they had acquired earlier in the 1990s: Arena Entertainment and LJN Toys Ltd. Arena, for their part, was once a company closely associated with Sega’s hardware offerings — having been used in conjunction with a number of Genesis, Game Gear, and Sega CD titles. Acclaim had picked them up in around 1991, and saw fit to make use of them in further Sega publishing ventures until 1994.

LJN, for their part, is best known for its string of licensed titles on Nintendo’s console offerings, and have since come to be associated with the Angry Video Game Nerd in more recent years; with his unceremoniously dubbing their company logo “The Rainbow of Shit,” and repurposing their abbreviation to read as “Laughin’ Jokin’ Numbnuts.” Funnily enough, the actual company name was never intended to spell out any particular phrase on its own; instead being intended as a wink-nod reference to the initials of a Norman J. Lewis (written in reverse so as to partially obfuscate his involvement),^[5] who initially helped to establish and fund the company in 1970. LJN’s initial interests were in toy manufacturing, where properties the likes of E.T. the Extraterrestrial and the World Wrestling Federation made licensing arrangements to produce successful figure lines, and where original IPs including ThunderCats were invented to compete with market contemporaries. Despite the beloved nature of these branded figures and the short-term successes thereof, LJN was rarely (if ever) profitable, and was already in the process of being acquired by the media conglomerates at MCA when they entered into the video game publishing business in 1987. It was during this period between ’87 and 1990 where LJN published some of their most “notable” licensed titles for Nintendo’s Entertainment System; including the likes of Friday the 13th, The Karate Kid, The Uncanny X-Men, and Gotcha! The Sport! — the last of which came bundled with the financial baggage of a legally scrutinized line of paintball guns the company had briefly attempted to market, and which they ultimately took a huge loss on. As it turns out, marketing paintball guns to kids wasn’t exactly a slam dunk idea, considering the tendency of children to aim toy guns directly at each other’s faces! That, and the fact that cops have their own tendency to assume that kids with toy guns are carrying real guns, and to fire their own weapons at them without so much as a second thought.

Eventually, the deal with MCA collapsed under the weight of this perpetual financial turmoil, and LJN’s acquirers would promptly pass the brand’s proverbial buck onto Acclaim in April 1990. MCA would let the division go for a meager $30 million — not even enough to cover a $53 million after-tax charge they had incurred during the past four years of consistent financial losses on the part of LJN.^[6] Acclaim would promptly shutter their acquisition’s toy-making division, seem to force out the company’s founder in Jack Friedman (who would immediately go on to establish a new games publisher in THQ Inc.), and put the branding to use in continuing to publish licensed games for the NES and Game Boy — where having the secondary publishing label in their pocket allowed Acclaim to circumvent Nintendo’s limitations on how many games a publisher could release on their home console over the course of a given year. It was a practical arrangement that persisted until 1994, when Acclaim ultimately saw fit to dissolve the division entirely — having evidently run out of use for the label, save for a last pair of scheduled titles due to launch in 1995 and 1996 (the Game Boy release of NFL Quarterback Club, and an SNES tie-in to Cutthroat Island). I realize we’re skipping a few beats in recounting the story of LJN here (and barely addressing Acclaim’s own sordid history), but let’s just say for now that I’ve already got other articles in mind where I intend to cover them more in depth.

With both of these Acclaim sub-labels [in LJN and Arena] falling completely out of use by the mid-to-late 90s, it was assumed that whatever minimum state of operations would’ve been required to maintain them would’ve long since ceased by the year 2000. But when it came time for Acclaim to publish Spirit of Speed 1937, I suppose they inexplicably saw fit to revive one of these two names for one last hurrah. Again, I cannot fathom a particularly obvious motive for this. But given that LJN was always more closely associated with Nintendo, and that Arena were more closely associated with Sega, the choice as to which label should be used for this Sega Dreamcast release seemed fairly obvi– wait, what’s that? You’re telling me they actually ended up going with LJN? Huh. Didn’t see that one coming. I mean, granted: LJN certainly had more brand name recognition than Arena ever did. But was it all that great a reputation they had going for them, even at this point in history? This really is a case where their company’s infamy was already well-established long before James Rolfe and the Internet at large came into the picture: Let it be known that LJN had always been a laughing stock to some extent — since the moment the third console generation gave way to the fourth, and consumers could look back on the licensed hell they had suffered with newfound hindsight.

Naturally, this branding decision would perpetuate a rumor that Acclaim didn’t have confidence in Spirit of Speed, and chose the label specifically because of its association with lacklustre games / as a deliberate act of self-sabotage. This strikes me as an incredibly stupid theory, as Acclaim could’ve just as easily not published the damn game in the first place if they didn’t have any faith in it — let alone bother to acquire the rights in the first place. Plus, y’know: Publishers aren’t really in the business of deliberate self-sabotage / knowingly flushing money down the toilet. If I had to posit a more educated guess, the real reason was probably more to do with something legally or contractually obligated. Like, maybe the terms of one of their other racing game licenses (either F355 Challenge: Passione Rossa, Re-Volt, or the Jeremy McGrath Supercross series) barred them from releasing another racing game under their larger publishing label, for a period of time where said licensed title was still on the market? Or perhaps Acclaim’s own reputation at this time – known to be mired by financial woes on multiple fronts, and infamous for particularly juvenile publicity stunts – was somehow perceived to be even more toxic than the defunct label they were looking to dredge up? Unfortunately, this may well be another one of those mysteries we’ll never truly solve, and so all we can do is baselessly speculate. But enough talk about publishing rights and company names: Let’s get into what we know about the game’s marketing — or perhaps more accurately, its lack thereof.

As IGN’s Anoop Gantayat would report in a June 30th, 2000 preview for Spirit of Speed, it was their contention that the game should “take top prize for [the] most underhyped Dreamcast game ever.”^[7] Evidently, the title had made a singular appearance as part of a video wall at E3 in 2000 – a month prior to its release – where Acclaim proceeded to not field any inquiries on the subject from gaming press, or go on to arrange printed promotion across games magazines. The game’s original PC release, for its part, had at least received a minimum of marketing push; where in addition to single-page adverts run across German gaming magazines (I couldn’t track down any comparable English-language magazine appearances), both MicroProse and Hasbro had evidently “spent considerable time and money marketing the game with things like events at Silverstone”^[1e] — that last bit referring to a press event held at Silverstone’s ‘Coys International Historic Festival’ on August 2nd in 1999, and featuring no less than a “Microprose Spirit of Speed Pre-war Sports Car Race.” It would appear as though Acclaim, by comparison, were utterly uninterested in marketing Broadsword’s title. Where IGN’s Spirit of Speed preview goes on to speculate that the Dreamcast conversion had been “hastily slapped together,” and that it more closely resembled “what we’d expect of a beta version of a game rather than a final build,”^[7b] they were perhaps closer in their hypothesis than they may have reckoned: According to Jones-Steele, the game’s console version had only been afforded “12 weeks” to be completed; owing to the nature of how suddenly the rights to it had been purchased by Acclaim, and how promptly the publisher expected a shippable product to be delivered to them.^[1f] As a result, development of the conversion was respectively rushed, with the decision made to leverage the Dreamcast’s alternate Windows CE operating system [rather than the console’s own native code libraries] as a means of theoretically accelerating the porting process from PC.

Unfortunately, Sega’s support for this alternate OS was minimal at best, resulting in frustrated communications between Broadsword and the console manufacturer. When the former would message Sega to ask something along the lines of “why a certain function [necessary to their conversion] was unavailable,” the only responses they would receive were promises that the features in question were “still a year or so away”^[1g] — effectively useless reassurances as far as Broadsword were concerned, considering that their deadline landed long before that vaguely promised date. Naturally, Sega would never get around to updating compatibility / upgrading devkits to utilize any expanded range of Windows CE functions, as the system simply wouldn’t live long enough in the market for that to prove a viable venture. Ultimately, the version of the game Broadsword were left to cobble together for the console would suffer from egregious performance issues, owing to its inability to more effectively leverage and utilize the Dreamcast’s full capabilities. In any event, the port would manage to meet its deadline in at least some state of playability, and land on European store shelves on June 9th, 2000, with North America having to wait an additional two and a half weeks for a June 27th release. For better or for worse, Spirit of Speed 1937 had finally made its way to consoles – priced at a budget MSRP of $24.99 USD^[7c] – and the time had come for players to take the wheel.

** The release of the Dreamcast in Japan came nearly a full year earlier, in November of 1998. This seems to have been done in order to guarantee a larger selection of launch titles for these latter markets, with fifteen available titles nearly quadrupling Japan’s meager four.

“Race the Cream of World Motor Sport Champions.”

“Drive like a gentleman, but secure a victory
by any means possible.”
North American Dreamcast release, back cover.

The year is 1937, and the cars have taken over. A fledgling resistance group known as “The Spirit of Speed” are all that remain of the human race. Your mission? Beat the machines at their own twisted game, and win the big racing tournament to determine the fate of humanity. Luckily, you hold a secret weapon in your hands — perhaps the key to winning this whole damn war: A half-human / half-car genealogy, which enables you to immediately understand the inner workings of any motor vehicle you step into! Unfortunately, the car you share DNA with is an 1875 model of Grenville Steam Carriage, so you do require a second passenger at all times to constantly feed you coal and water in order to keep your motorized heart ticking. Will you be able to stave off the nightmare future as envisioned by Disney and Pixar? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have some racing fun along the way!

… So, it should probably go without saying that Spirit of Speed 1937 doesn’t actually have any overarching story or plot to it. There’s no overwrought campaign to plow through, or central character who you dutifully guide through the world of classic racing: It’s all just an excuse to drive historic cars on historic tracks, innit? And you don’t even have to jump through any hoops or advance a progression system in order to see them! All the content in the game is unlocked right from the start — between the fifteen available cars, nine playable tracks, and a range of thirty-five disconnected ‘Scenario’ missions you can embark on. On the one hand, this maybe makes a player feel as if they’re not really working towards anything — illustrating a failure to sufficiently motivate them to pursue a game’s challenges. On the other hand, the folk who are seriously passionate about these vintage vehicles and the era of racing they inhabit are probably going to want to have all that historical content available from the very start, without having to jump through all the hoops to unlock them. Personally, I think having at least a couple of unlockable bonus cars would have been a fun opportunity to include some even older vehicles (I’d have gotten a kick out of putting a Ford Model T through the paces), or even something like a completely anachronistic future car to upstage all the others in the game; but I suppose the developers were a bit too self-serious in their pursuit of simulation to opt for any of that. (There were plans at one point to include a supercharged ‘Streamliner’ model of the Auto Union Type C, which can even be seen in the game’s opening cinematic.**) And credit where credit is due: The seriousness with which Broadsword took historical authenticity is most certainly admirable, and results in a truly novel racing experience.

The bulk of Broadsword’s research and development seems to have involved directly contacting car manufacturers and historic racetrack owners, and politely asking them for whatever reference materials and schematics they may have had on hand. As it turns out, many of these rights-holders were more than happy to provide these documents to Broadsword for free, enabling them to render vehicles and courses as accurately as their technology would allow for — conveying accurate technical data for vehicles, and capturing many of the nuances of classic racing circuits. In example: Mercedes were more than happy to lend them detailed photos of their ‘Silver Arrows’ (the nickname given to their line of silver-sheen racing cars) to aid in their modeling, while the Brooklands Museum near the company’s studio went so far as to run some of their vintage cars around the historic track for the studio to further reference.^[1h]  Unfortunately, not every rights-holder Broadsword reached out to was willing to cooperate purely out of kindness: Several would hold their archives back for asking fees or demand royalties on licensing, which Broadsword was simply not in a position to negotiate or afford. Basically, if the developers couldn’t get the rights for free, they had to cut their planned inclusions from the game, which resulted in content already in the process of being designed (such as a course based on the Spa-Francorchamps circuit) being scrapped mid-development. In these instances – in order to fill out the game’s content – there are a number of “invented” cars and tracks on Broadsword’s part, which may or may not take inspiration from some of those real-life sources they failed to acquire. For example, the ‘Bonner Special’ and ‘Watson Flyer’ vehicles may not correspond in name to any real-life classic cars, but I’d be willing to bet that Broadsword still had some particular automobiles in mind when designing them. Just don’t ask me which, specifically: Classic cars are a little ways outside my area of expertise.

Of course, the attempt at authenticity doesn’t just comprise the collection of cars and tracks on offer: It applies to how each of them play and feel, as well as every other aspect of Spirit of Speed’s design. This is to say that if you come into the game expecting it to provide anything in the way of modern racing game amenities or design sensibilities, you will likely be frustrated and/or sorely disappointed. Just about the only anachronistic concession it’ll grant you is the ability to toggle between automatic and manual transmission prior to a race — where even with your car set to automatic, you’ll still have to gear shift down to ‘Reverse’ if you need to back your car up at any point. What I’m trying to say here is, Spirit of Speed is not a racing game: It is a racing simulation game – a major distinction, mind you – with a very specific era of automotive history in mind. As the game’s manual plainly states: “Spirit of Speed is an attempt to recreate the actual feel of old time racing. The handling on these old racers is primitive, to say the least.” And that is a vitally important note that Broadsword makes, as it is the core concept conveyed across every moment of gameplay. To better put you in the right frame of mind: Consider the fact that power steering for motor vehicles didn’t exist until 1951, or that ABS (Anti-lock Braking Systems) wouldn’t have been a standard feature across any of the cars featured in the game. Imagine how the lack of those amenities might affect how you’d have to approach driving a vintage vehicle. Then imagine no longer, as Spirit of Speed 1937 dutifully simulates the experience for you… as much as can be conveyed with a Dreamcast controller (or a model of system-compatible ‘Rally Wheel’) in hand. Mercifully, you won’t actually have to fight against the full 800kg weight of these vehicles as you put pressure on your analog stick. But you’ll still have to consider what going from center wheel to a full rotation with the flick of a thumb would equate to in that situation, and deal with the traction problems that might well cause.

Expectedly, the feel and feedback of driving vintage cars is Spirit of Speed’s most unique selling point, as well as its most contentious. It can’t be overstated how the game controls unlike any other [mainstream] racing game, and how off-puttingly that can register with both casual players and driving game enthusiasts. Unless you’re coming at this specifically from the simulation angle (or perhaps alternatively, as a fan of the driving mechanics in the original Mafia), you’re probably in for a bad time and a steep learning curve. Being acutely aware of this, the manual goes on to practically beg you to run the courses in the ‘Practice’ mode, as it will hopefully “save you a lot of frustration when going up against actual opponents.” But of course, that’s not how most players actually approach a typical driving game: More often than not, folk will dive straight into whatever the first available gameplay mode is to get their bearings, or otherwise hope to find a ‘Tutorial’ mode that spells out the controls and necessary functions to them. Naturally, Spirit of Speed lacks any form of tutorializing – a major omission, in my mind – and so you’re left with the game’s four available gameplay modes (‘Race Types,’ as they’re categorized in-game) in order to hone your driving skills: ‘Quick Race’ (simplifying your selection to a car and track, where the game fills out the rest of the pertinent details), ‘Single Race’ (allowing again for car and course selection, but allowing you to run a position-determining ‘Qualifier’ prior to the scheduled race), ‘Scenarios’ (a selection of thirty-five pre-configured race configurations), and ‘Championship’ (commitment to a full simulated season of races, determined by your choice of car).

Following a grainy faux-film FMV intro and the first of many long loading screens (this first runs something like 30 – 40 seconds), you’re taken to the game’s main menu. From here, you can select your race type, pick a vehicle, select the circuit you’d like to race on, and adjust most of the other options you’d expect to find in a racing game… save for any form of multiplayer. Yes, in a shocking lack of functionality, Spirit of Speed 1937 is a single-player only title. I get that it’s meant to serve as a more-or-less direct port of a PC title, and that you can almost excuse the lack of multiplayer options on that original platform’s end (so long as you’re able to pretend that online multiplayer wasn’t already in vogue by 1999). But not even hastily hacking together as much as a one-on-one competitive mode for the console conversion? Some would call that a deal breaker right out the gate, and struggle to fathom how the game even came to pass without it. For my part, I have to assume this was a feature Broadsword would’ve loved to have included as early as in development of the original PC game, but which simply turned out to be untenable given the litany of performance issues on that original platform — an issue which would’ve struck again with the way the Dreamcast conversion ultimately wound up, and would’ve resulted in any attempted inclusion running so poorly as to be absolutely unplayable. In some cases, it really is better for a developer to skip implementing a feature that has no hope of coming together in time, rather than to feel obliged to include it despite knowing that it will invariably disappoint players. At the very least, the game’s budget price point of $24.99 somewhat adjusts for / reflects this lack of content.

So, what do we have in terms of content for a solitary player? Quite a fair bit, I’d say; considering the race types on offer, and your ability to freely select between a decent range of distinct vehicles and tracks. But if I’m gonna be honest here, there’s only one game mode I personally bothered to mess around with at any length: The ‘Scenario’ mode, offering the thirty-five unique configurations of races divided across three difficulty levels (10 rated ‘Easy,’ 15 in ‘Medium,’ and another 10 in ‘Hard’); each with their own pre-selected cars, tracks, lap counts, and starting positions. In this way, you can experience the full range of selectable content available in Spirit of Speed, as well as getting to begin from a variety of starting positions without the need to run additional qualifiers prior to every race. As an added bonus, each scenario is accompanied by brief bits of written “story” text (roughly a paragraph apiece), setting up each mission and your racer’s role in them. These serve as some of the highlights of the game, setting up elaborate (albeit meaningless) period premises in order to try and motivate your racing. It’s here where a bit of Broadsword’s personality manages to shine through the rigidity of their simulation, and where you as a player get a sense for how something like a story mode set in this time period may have played out — putting aside the fact that there’s absolutely no continuity between any of the missions on offer.

Most of the race scenarios are pretty standard fare, simply detailing the car and course selection as well as your starting position. A number take this at least a small step further by introducing elements of national rivalry and pride, along the lines of “Prove your country’s engineering superiority to the rest of Europe at Avus.” But the most interesting by far are the more personalized scenarios, which actually serve to establish a character for you to embody and a challenge to overcome: Here you may find yourself racing “for the chance to join the Dust Devils racing team at their home circuit of Roosevelt,” or competing in front of a crowd composed of members of the ‘Gallic Women’s Suffrage Society’ (“Half the field in this charity race are women – drive like a gentleman – but secure a victory by any means possible”). Some see you competing for personal pride, such as a scenario where “you have been disrespected in public by a local hoodlum” and must subsequently “win back your honour on the track.” Lose that one, and you’ll be mockingly informed that “Your failure hangs over your family name for years to come.” Talk about adding insult to injury! Mean as some of these loss comments may be, they’re often kind of funny when divorced from a twenty minute time investment in a losing effort. Take for example a scenario with the condition that “you must win at Tripoli as your fiancee has threatened to run off with an Egyptian millionaire if you don’t;” where a win leads to the promise that “marriage looms,” while a loss unkindly informs you that “You’ve lost her! Looks like you’ll have to find yourself another gal!” Some other assorted one-liners I feel obliged to provide here include “Your destiny is to become a bus driver in Dusseldorf,” “It takes real effort to lose on that circuit with this car,” and a simple but effective “Sir you drive like an idiot!” Infuriating in the moment, to be sure, but funny to transcribe here.***

As I mentioned earlier, I really do feel as if the game is best enjoyed through its Scenario mode, serving as the most effective pick up and play option across the available game modes — more so than Quick Race, even. You’ll get to experience the full variety of Spirit of Speed‘s available content (if you play through all the scenarios), with more unique configurations of other competing racers than what is determined for you in the other game modes. (You do have to accept that you’ll never have customization / full control over what other racers appear or in what vehicles.) That being said, calling it “pick up and play” might be slightly disingenuous on my end: The typical race will still run you roughly twenty minutes on average, where shorter tracks often entail an excessive number of laps to compensate (as many as thirty) and longer tracks can take as long as five minutes to run just a single loop. When you add in the need to run qualifiers in half of the other game modes – effectively doubling your time commitment per course – you can begin to see how the minutes add up to hours, which not every player is going to want to commit to / have available to spare. The Championship mode in particular feels like an especially burdensome undertaking, as you’re locked into your singular vehicle across the range of the game’s courses — where many of the forced combinations of car and track will undoubtedly feel utterly incompatible with one another. (More on that later.) But I suppose I’m also not a hardcore simulation fan to begin with, and that some may appreciate feeling locked into a long-term gameplay commitment of that sort? It’s too bad then that you can’t actually go so far as to fine-tune or swap out parts on your selected automobile, which feels like it should be a major component in that sort of game mode.

See, that’s the odd thing about Spirit of Speed as a racing simulation game: It stops short of allowing you a peak under its cars’ hoods, which I feel like a classic car fan would likely wanna spend half their time doing in-game. Admittedly, I don’t know much about what makes cars tick – let alone how vintage vehicles in particular operated – and so I guess I can’t speak to whether or not tuning was even an option on the table for this variety of performance cars? At the very least, I would assume that we’re not in “stock car” racing territory here, where souping up your automobile is discouraged in the interest of parity: That’d require every car on the track to be of an identical make and model, which is almost never the case in Spirit of Speed — where every race seems to revel in mismatching participants against one another in wildly variable vehicles, and presenting the competitions as matters of “national pride” tied into which country’s car is superior. In any event, Spirit of Speed is clearly uninterested in (or otherwise incapable of) allowing for modifications to its suite of automobiles, and seems insistent that they be driven in the very particular manner they prescribe for each. Naturally, it’s on you to figure out for yourself what exactly that prescription may entail in a given vehicle, and to hope that it’s a methodology that will actually get you past the finish line.

Another shortcoming of the simulation depth is the lack of weather options or changing times of day, which really do go a long way in making more fully-realized racing sims (or even more casual driving games) feel fleshed out. The reason inclement weather is absent of course has to do with game performance, where something like rain would’ve undoubtedly eaten into the game’s already dicey framerate (more on that later). The loss here is more than just aesthetic, as slicking the roads with the likes of water and ice add another variable to your approach as a racer — having to more carefully manage speed and steering. Similarly, darkening the sky can make low visibility a factor, which I imagine would’ve been an even more pronounced issue in a period of time where roads weren’t dotted with street lamps or reflectors. It’s here where I’ll also note a lack in terrain variance and paving, which again strikes me as something a driver in the 1930s would’ve had to account for — where smoothed asphalt wasn’t always a guarantee, even on racetracks. What I’m getting at here is that Spirit of Speed presents the ideal-most conditions for racing at all times, which detracts from the reality and potential depth of the game’s simulation aspect. With all that in mind, perhaps calling the game a “racing simulation” is actually a bit of a stretch? Perhaps that’s owed to the revolving door of producers steering the game from one direction toward another several times over, and not allowing Broadsword to fully commit to it either being an arcade racer or more technical sim. “Too bad, too bad,” as they say.

With all that preamble out of the way now (plus a roughly minute-long loading screen), it’s off to the races! And likely the first thing you’ll notice on being dropped into the gameplay proper is that it’s not exactly what anyone would call a looker: Between low-resolution track texturing, generally sparse landscapes, a heavy reliance on 2D sprites for environmental elements (rather than proper 3D models), a near-total lack of lighting effects (save for standard vehicle shadows), and a complete lack of reflective surfaces; the vision of the 1930s that Spirit of Speed depicts comes across as noticeably flat and dull, and lacking compared to much of its counterparts on the console. I’ve seen the phrase tossed around that Spirit of Speed resembles “an N64 or PS1 game,” which is typically an unfair argument waged by folk who forget what those fifth-generation consoles were truly capable of pushing. But in the case of Spirit of Speed? Yeah, I can actually see it: Scale the output resolution back down to 320 by 240 pixels, crush some of the color depth, and it’s likely that Broadsword could’ve put out a last-gen version of this given the proper time and resources. Just about the only aspect of the presentation that really manages to shine through are the vehicles themselves, which are expectedly rendered in loving detail and at a much higher level of polygonal geometry than any other asset in the game. Sure, they might not be able to take visible damage, and the drivers sat in them are rather low-poly by comparison; but if you’re coming to the game just to ogle the vintage vehicles on offer, perhaps you’d get your money’s worth. Of course, this level of detail contributes to one of the game’s larger issues, but we’ll get to that in time.

The next thing you’ll likely notice is how slow you are to get out the gate at the beginning of a given race: Sputtering engines and tires spinning in place long before you gain any forward momentum, and agonizing seconds spent accelerating into so much as double-digit speeds. Naturally, this is somewhat authentic to how the automobiles of this era would’ve actually operated, where the dream of “going zero to sixty in [x] seconds” was still nigh unimaginable. This is just something you’re going to have to get used to at the beginning of races, as well as your tires additionally burning and streaking the moment you start picking up any semblance of speed — a factor which requires careful lightening and deepening of pressure on the proverbial pedal until the point where you’re past first gear. And of course, if you should ever happen to come to a stop at any point further in the race – whether as result of a crash or a need to utilize a pit stop – you’ll have to go through the same song and dance again and again over the course of a given run. But what makes this all the more frustrating is the fact that your computer-controlled opponents, for their part, seem to have it all down to a science: They’ll routinely roll right past you in the first seconds of a given race, demonstrating a mastery of acceleration that seems downright elusive to you as the player. This can come down to either their driving vehicles with superior acceleration to yours – more quickly able to get past first gear and leverage their full potential – or simply a matter of the AI having a far more extensive “knowledge” of effective motorsport procedure. In either case, it can make for a particularly discouraging start to your race, and make the rest of the course feel like a game of catch-up. And oftentimes, that’s exactly what the developers seem to intend across their scenarios.

Referencing the manual once again: “You may find that you are up against what appears to be invincibly fast opposition. Don’t worry, they’ll more than likely have to make more pit stops than you… then it’ll be your chance to sneak into the lead!” This is where the deliberate mismatching of vehicles begins to come into play, and illustrates how Broadsword sought to balance out the whole affair. Yes, you will often be made to race against cars that are straight-up better than yours in terms of performance and handling, to where you have literally no hope of keeping pace with them on the track. And in some scenarios, you might even be lucky enough to turn the tables on them — to be the one driving a veritable supercar against the sloppier jalopies. But in turn, these superior vehicles are in need of more frequent maintenance at the pit stops; in order to refill their fuel and oil, as well as swap out their chewed-up tires. For reference, you can press ‘Up’ on the D-pad [by default] at any time during a race in order to bring up a status indicator displaying the current status of each of these components, helping clue you in to if / when you’ll want to schedule a pit stop. A vital tool to be sure, and one you may as well leave up on the HUD at all times if you’re driving a car prone to burning these meters out in short order. Of course, it’s not as if the lesser-performing vehicles won’t need to go in for similar top-ups, or that they get to benefit from less time spent within: It all comes down to how much wear and tear your vehicle of choice winds up putting on your components over the course of a lap, and how many laps you’ll be able to manage before you wind up in danger of a blowout or engine failure.

Only a couple issues with this concept: While every track comes equipped with a pit lane (“Pit Stops are available on every track, but the Pit Lanes are not always obviously marked; they often appear near the starting grid. Generally, if it’s not the track everyone is racing on, it’s a Pit Lane”), not every race will actually see you or your opponents needing to leverage them. So let’s say, for example, that you’re simply being made to put in three loops across a relatively straightforward oval — something with an average lap time of 47 seconds, like ‘Brooklands.’ And let’s say that you additionally have the bad fortune to have a lesser vehicle in comparison to your opponents. Without either of you needing to leverage the pit stop in this shorter race… where’s your opportunity to “sneak into the lead?” Alternatively, let’s look at a standard race running the average twenty minute expected finish time: You can expect to make maybe one stop in a more stable vehicle (so long as you’re safe in your driving and sparing in your visits to the lane), and maybe two or three in a higher performance vehicle. A pit stop might run you anywhere between ten and thirty seconds, depending on how low you let your tanks and tires deplete. So, let’s just pull a number out of our ass here — something like twenty to forty seconds of additional time a supercar will have to spend in the pit when compared to a slower / less resource-consumptive car. In a race expected to run twenty minutes… that’s a pretty slim margin, isn’t it? It’s as if the game assumes a player should be able to run the track nearly perfectly – without any obstacles or issues in the way of their ideal lap time – to where that less-than-a-minute difference can prove truly significant in the final results. Unfortunately, this is pure fantasy on Broadsword’s part, for a multitude of reasons we’ll get into.

For one thing, race results are rarely (if ever) determined by photo finishes: At times I found myself trailing full minutes behind the lap leader across multiple scenarios, despite driving with what I felt was near-perfect precision. It often feels as though the moment that you lose sight of the opponents ahead of you, you’re effectively screwed, and already so far back from the pack as to never be able to recover. In races where you’re made to start from anything behind pole position, you can expect to watch your competition speed off at a seemingly impossible clip for you to match, and spend the next ten to twelve minutes dealing largely with feelings of discouragement as their distance only seems to increase lap after lap. The only thing for it is to either figure out how to gain that lead in the opening seconds of the race, or otherwise hope you’re on a track where the AI has the chance to wreck in some odd corner of the map so that you can overtake them in their rare moment of vulnerability. Because one thing’s for sure: Attempting to chase them down on straightaways always winds up being a losing battle, and you likely won’t have much more luck on the corners either until you completely master them. Beyond the supposed need for the computer-controlled opponents to utilize pit stops more frequently, it’ll often feel like you’re up against impossibly better racers than you, driving incomparably superior vehicles (even when they actually aren’t). What I reckon this comes down to is their pure mechanical precision in maximizing the potential of their vehicles, in a way which is not immediately intuitive to you as a player trying to learn the ropes of these odd cars.

See, a standard racing game with unique per-vehicle statistics primarily balances them against one another across two metrics: Acceleration and handling. Acceleration, of course, refers to how quickly a vehicle can get up to top speed, where handling can be described as how much speed you lose / need to drop in order to safely handle turns. In effect – if we assume all the drivers to be of equal competence and skill, but seated in disparate vehicles – the results of a race should come down to the length and frequency of turns and straightaways on the course in question — opportunities for a vehicle specced toward either end of the acceleration / handling spectrum to excel while the other ideally lags behind, traded back and forth as the circuit alternatively tests them. Obviously, I’m simplifying a lot here and disregarding the potential for a number of other possible vehicle statistics in a given game – as well as possible variances in course layout and terrain – but I’m not here to laboriously describe every detail of racing game design: I’m only here to laboriously describe the particulars of Spirit of Speed, and to convey how the acceleration / handling spectrum is effectively thrown out the window as a result of every vehicle handling like a stubborn jam jar lid. Which is to say, good luck taking any turn more sharp than a 30° at anything more than seventy miles per hour – dropping to roughly half the average vehicle top speed – if not having to come to an outright crawl to handle the occasional 90° box turn! For if you attempt to take turns at too high a speed, you can expect to careen completely out of control, and crash unceremoniously into whatever walls or corners will catch your mistake in order to punish you severely for them.

The game might not outright wreck your car as a result of hitting a wall at 100+ MPH, but it’ll routinely do the next worst thing: It’ll send you into a prolonged spin-out animation, which will inevitably end with your car facing the wrong direction after coming to a complete stop. From here, you’ll most likely have to spend a precious chunk of time shifting into reverse, re-orienting your car, shifting back into first gear, and beginning the agonizing process of accelerating back into your ideal speed. In a worst case scenario, this can take you a full thirty seconds to recover from — assuming you did not, in fact, completely wreck your vehicle in the process. Incredibly, this process is only made worse if you happened to take another car down with you, as the AI opponents seem hell-bent on getting in the way of your recovery every step of the way — blocking your turning by occupying the full horizontal length of the road, or otherwise giving you no room to maneuver around them until they’re well ahead of you. If there is anything positive to take away from this aspect of the game, it is the fact that AI is capable of crashing on their own, and often liable to get stuck in their own attempted recovery process; where they can sometimes take themselves out of the race completely as a result of their inability to pathfind back onto the track. But to hamper that with yet another downside: This struggle for your computer-controlled opponents to recover can also potentially render a race nigh incompletable, if they should happen to block a particularly narrow bit of track that you can’t otherwise circumvent. It is entirely possible for an AI racer pile-up to occur in some manner of archway or tight stretch of road, where it may be impossible for you to pass by or muscle your way through it. This worst case scenario is especially liable to occur in the ‘Pau’ and ‘Tripoli’ tracks, which both feature long stretches of close-quarters weaving through urban environments.

Returning to the subject of tackling turns: It’s never quite so simple as braking as you enter a corner in order to drop speed at the last second, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to drift in order to clear them in style. The only thing for it is to slow down well in advance of a turn – given how poor period brakes evidently function – and to very carefully negotiate your analog stick [or racing wheel] in accordance with how well your vehicle can handle steering — where even at lower speeds, turning the wheel too fast might result in a complete peel-out. You have to approach every turn with the same caution you’d wager on life or death, as one bad crash and recovery may well render a race unwinnable, even in a situation where your driving is otherwise impeccable. This is all accurate enough to the simulation concept, I suppose, but it sure doesn’t register to me as particularly “fun” to play or conducive to high-speed racing thrills. Past a certain point, you might get the feeling that you’re lacking some vital tool in your driving arsenal — that there’s some feature missing that may have at one point been intended to make these turns at least somewhat more tenable. And wouldn’t you know it, but you’d be absolutely right: The original PC release does, in fact, include an input which is missing entirely from this Dreamcast conversion! With the ability to ‘Accentuate’ on PC, you can more sharply turn your vehicle with something like a controlled skid — not quite turn on a dime, but certainly open an opportunity to quickly angle yourself without such a steep drop-off in speed. It’s a genuine game-changer in the original release, and a feature sorely missed with the transition to the Dreamcast — a maneuver that cannot otherwise be replicated by any strategic shifting of gears or application of brakes.

So, all the vehicles can barely turn or maintain top speed for more than a fleeting moment before requiring deceleration, you’re constantly made to keep an eye on a status indicator to make sure you’re not in danger of losing your tires or stalling out completely on the track, and your computer-controlled opponents are described by the manual as “invincibly fast.” Is there any other mechanic you have to worry about getting in the way of your racing experience? Well, there’s always the risk of overheating and seeming to spontaneously combust in the middle of a lap! Ostensibly tied in some way to your oil level (“Late 1930’s racing cars run pretty hot and use plenty of oil. Talk about viscosity breakdown!”), there’s the chance that your engine might burst into flames at any given moment, and take you out of the race completely. Without anything like a temperature gauge to actually alert you to when you’re running dangerously hot, you’ll have to figure out how to intuit when your oil is low enough in conjunction with how long you’ve been running at top gear for, and strategically ease off the gas in order to allow yourself room to cool down. Luckily, I can only report unexpectedly breaking down in this way just twice during my roughly twelve hours of playtime, though I still can’t claim to fully understand how and why I tripped whatever invisible meter governed this feature? At the very least, keeping your oil topped up does seem to mitigate this risk — keeping it somewhere above the 25% level to play it safe.

If you’re in a particularly self-destructive mood though, you can trigger an engine fire more deliberately by means of driving in the wrong direction and getting into a head-on collision with another vehicle. I feel like this is something that many players will inevitably wind up attempting when they feel a certain race is unwinnable and wanna go out with a bang, or simply to satisfy their morbid curiosity at a certain point. It doesn’t even make for a spectacular scene given that the cars will simply stop completely in place on crashing and burning, or otherwise just bounce off of each other if you’re not driving quite fast enough to trigger the explosion state. But still, there’s perhaps some fleeting fun to be had from smashing your toy cars together, I reckon. Of course, if you wanna make this happen, you’ll have to be careful about how far you drive with the ‘Wrong Way’ indicator on-screen, as you run the risk of the game suddenly declaring the race over and automatically booting you back to the menu. Talk about the game not having a sense of humor about itself! Funnily enough, this is the only instance in which the game will decide to end a race prematurely, as any other scenario in which your car is taken out of commission will simply leave you sat there staring at your smoldering wreck until you yourself decide to pause and exit. And when additionally considering the fact that you’ll have to sit through another thirty second load screen to get back to the menu, before another minute-long load prior to your next race attempt; that’s a lot of idle time for player frustration to mount, on top of whatever circumstances may have lead to your loss in the first place.

Of course, all these gripes and issues I’ve addressed are merely minor complaints compared to the game’s most glaring flaw: For as poorly as some of these primitive cars may run, the game itself is what ultimately stands out as the worst-performing invention on display. The average framerate is so utterly compromised as to feel like it’s constantly on the verge of freezing up completely — where the mere presence of an additional vehicle on-screen [on top of your own] will drop you down from the cap of thirty frames per second down into the lower tens. Factor in moments where you might have as many as five other cars on screen simultaneously – as well as particular courses (or just stretches within them) that seem to incur massive performance penalties – and we’re talking the potential to drop into single-digit territory here. Just about the only other racing game I can think of with worse performance is… well, I guess that credit would go to Spirit of Speed’s own PC version, as it turns out! Maybe that goes to show how far Broadsword actually came in optimizing the game for Dreamcast? But really, the state of performance in the game is dire, and speaks to why so many of the expected graphical effects for the generation didn’t make the cut: How’s a developer expected to program rear-view mirrors while in cockpit view if they can’t even properly project what appears in front of you without tanking the framerate? And to be clear, these performance drops absolutely compromise your ability to effectively drive; where missing frames hinder your ability to effectively time braking and turning, or to otherwise dodge obstacles / maneuver around other vehicles. I’m willing to accept that I’m not particularly in tune with how the game expects me to control its cars, but there were definitely instances in which I felt the framerate itself was responsible for my inability to keep myself on the track or from avoiding crashes.

Phew, that sure was a lot of criticisms in a row I just levied against the game! I don’t usually like to dwell on the negatives for so long when discussing a game’s systems – even when it comes to some of the dirt-worst games – but y’all understand why I had to get all those complaints out of the way here, yeah? Spirit of Speed 1937 is a game which the casual racing game consumer simply isn’t gonna give a fair chance; between its inescapable performance issues, potential difficulty adjusting to its incredibly particular controls, and the time commitment required across its lengthier races on offer. It all makes for a tough sell, to say the least! But let’s say we’ve already accepted alienating that contingent by this point, and narrowed our scope to the hardcore racing sim fans and automotive historians — the sort of folk who are willing to potentially overlook uneven framerates and sub-par presentation, in the deliberate pursuit of those challenging controls and long-term commitments. Is there any chance that Spirit of Speed might still appeal to whatever niche audience of 1930s racing enthusiasts may exist out there? I can’t say for sure, given that I can’t count myself among that presumably small contingent, but I get the impression that there’s still something here that they may be able to latch onto. For as nearly impossible a prospect as I may have made winning races out to be, there are ways to accomplish the feat for those with the dedication to see them through. What it all comes down to is patience, practice, and truly picturing yourself behind the wheel.

The first thing I imagine a prospective player is going to want to do is commit all nine of the game’s tracks to memory, in order to know when and where they’ll need to decelerate and how best to negotiate given turns. Of course, you’d still have to consider the fact that different cars are all going to have to take those turns at different speeds and angles, so committing all the unique ways those fifteen vehicles handle is likely gonna be a necessary step as well. But if the appeal of Spirit of Speed is truly in simulating the stiff handling and eccentricities of these automobiles, I suppose that the learning process is actually part of the fun for some: Coming to understand the vehicles’ limitations and how to compensate for them really does set the game apart from most other racing titles on the market. Of course, there might also be folk who come into Spirit of Speed with a favorite vintage vehicle already picked out, or who’d otherwise choose to focus on mastering just one out of the lot — deciding what car feels most familiar to them, and committing to it on the spot. For them, maybe the Championship mode is the way to go, as they see how their automobile of choice can potentially overcome the competition. By the end of my time with the game, I personally found myself leaning toward the Bugatti Type 35 B, simply because its handling felt the least stiff to me and enabled my tackling turns at a speedier clip — even as my choice meant I largely spent races watching my opponents zooming past me on every straightaway. That’s the other thing about learning to love Spirit of Speed: You’ll have to accept that you can’t place first in every race. You didn’t see Louis Chiron on some unbeatable streak before clenching the French Grand Prix, right?

I’d also recommend changing up a few game settings in order to make yourself more comfortable for the long road ahead. Deciding which camera perspective works best for you is probably gonna be key, and I can’t imagine that the default placement (which oddly places your vehicle in almost the dead center of the screen in a way which blocks most of your forward view) is gonna be most folks’ favorite. Honestly, I imagine most simulation nerds are just gonna want to immediately switch to the first-person cockpit view, which is both completely understandable and probably the most practical — in terms of both visibility and maintaining the game’s performance. As a matter of interest, there’s actually one track that will actually force you into one of the first-person perspectives, even if your preferences lie elsewhere: France’s scenic Pau, also known as “the one that’s set inside of a town.” My best guess is that this is a concession for how poorly the game would perform with your vehicle on-screen on this particular track, as the scenery itself already takes a toll on the framerate just on its own? But also, it’s probably the course that you’d most benefit from getting to play with the camera behind your car; as the winding and narrow roads are so treacherous, that you’ll likely want to zoom out in order to make sure you’re not at constant risk of clipping edges. Funnily enough, the instruction manual attempts to put a spin on this forced perspective by stating that “Due to the exciting, twisting and close nature of the Pau track, camera views are restricted to Cockpit and Bumper views only.”

You can also change up the controls if you’re so inclined, which I felt compelled to immediately do on my end: Having the gas and brake pedals on the triggers and gear shifting on face buttons just didn’t work for me, and so the ability to swap out the ‘A’ and ‘X’ buttons for acceleration and braking [respectively] while putting gear down and up on ‘L’ and ‘R’ was much appreciated. The only thing you’ll have to look out for here is how the game will let you inadvertently accelerate your way out of the pit stop screen if you set the pedal to any of the face buttons, which will in turn necessitate having to additionally hold down your brake button in order to keep from peeling out of the pit prematurely. Oh, and one more important setting to tweak: Go to the audio options, and go ahead and turn the ‘Engine’ volume wayyy down. Your ears will thank you. Evidently, the Brooklands Museum did allow Broadsword to record authentic engine noises from their selection of classic cars (“They let us put the microphones in and around the car, so you got the sounds directly from the real thing. We used those sounds wherever we could in the game.”^[1i]) – which is certainly an admirable effort – but the audio they recorded is of such blown-out quality as to be completely deafening. But hey, maybe that’s all part of the immersion for you? If you’re looking to replicate the authentic racing experience, then by all means: Crank up the volume and put your ears directly against your speakers, in order to better imagine that you’re right there in the cockpit.

What I mostly imagine would keep folk invested in the game though – besides whatever love of the setting and the classic cars they bring in with them – is the satisfaction of overcoming all the odds in order to squeak out satisfying wins. And believe you me: Scoring wins really does seem to come down to the very last second, if not something contingent on a fair bit of luck. But when you can manage the feat, it really does leave you feeling like you’ve accomplished something — like you’ve tamed some unwieldy beast, and emerged victorious against invincible competition. Sure, you can probably overcome most racing game challenges by modifying whatever modern-day supercar at your disposal and timing nitrous boosts. But can you get a metal deathtrap on wheels across a dusty finish line in the face of seemingly perfect driving machines? Now there’s a true test of vigor, I tell you what. And maybe this’ll all come easier to a more seasoned simulation veteran — someone who can more easily figure out the ins and outs of these uniquely stubborn vehicles, and who would be more eager to learn the topography of these classic courses. And to them I would say, take the challenge: Pay your respects to this bygone era, and demonstrate your true devotion to the love of the sport. Who knows? You might accidentally find yourself enthralled by this goofy little game, and come away with a newfound appreciation for this period in racing history.

The thought that Spirit of Speed 1937 keeps having me come back to is how genuinely neat the concept of it is on paper: A driving game set in an oft-forgotten and neglected period in the history of motorsport, which does away with all the modern amenities and comforts we’ve been spoiled by in modern titles. There’s something to be said for a game which does its best to immerse you in such a particular moment in time, and which challenges you to overcome some of the same struggles racers would’ve faced nearly a century ago — putting you in their proverbial shoes, and feeling the full weight of that foot pressed against the primitive pedal. It’s just a shame then that Spirit of Speed couldn’t quite live up to the full potential of that idea, being hamstrung by its precarious production and inability to solve for crippling performance issues. Plus, there are certainly a few comforts and additional features they could’ve been able to implement, which would’ve made the process of playing the game more accessible and customizable, without compromising on their vision: More control over race conditions, a more substantive range of game options, and functional mirrors in the cockpit view; just to name a few features that are conspicuous by their absence. But more than anything, what Spirit of Speed was in most desperate need of was a more stable framerate and the addition of a multiplayer mode. With those two fixes alone, the game would probably dodge most “worst of” lists, and at least elevate itself to the level of respectable obscurity. But why stop there? In this ideal scenario – where Broadsword were given more time and freedom to complete the game as they saw fit – I can imagine at least a couple more tweaks that they could’ve seen fit to implement, which may well have secured the game a more appreciated place in racing games’ own history.

If Broadsword were willing to make a bit of acquiescence on their premise, they may have saw fit to include something like an optional “driving assist” mode for those thrown off by how the game controls: An effective easy mode for those looking for a more accessible racing experience, which could be accomplished by making steering more responsive and allowing for simplified shifting into reverse (if not outright allowing a button to be bound to that gear). Streamlining recovery from crashes or otherwise sparing players from the complete stoppage it punishes them with might also be a feature less patient players could benefit from in this mode, and allow them to get back on the track and up to top speed that much faster. And hell, why not go ahead and remove the need for pit stops from this mode too? Whatever it takes to please the more casual consumer, and potentially invest them deeply enough in the game to consider recommending it to friends? Of course, putting all this behind an opt-in means that players can still elect for the game’s more deliberate and challenging handling model — the mode the game was more intended to be built around. For them, I’d offer something like a proper training mode: Call it something cutesy like a “Licensing Exam,” and teach players how to account for all the intricacies of the vehicles and how to properly approach particular moments in the race. I, for one, would’ve much appreciated some sort of guidance on what an ideal turn is actually meant to look like, and I’m sure many others who’ve bounced off the game would’ve liked to have known as well.

Beyond that, I think including more in the way of historical flavor certainly wouldn’t have hurt. There are already a few nice touches as is when it comes to elements of the menus – even more so on PC, where loading screens are given lovely little postcard backgrounds to match the tracks – but they could’ve taken it a bit further with more detailed descriptions of car and course provenance or more scenarios rooted in historical races. Sure, maybe not all of the cars and courses may match perfectly with something like the 1937 race season, but there’s certainly enough in the game to roughly approximate at least a few events out of history; such as John Cobb’s achieving the Brooklands track speed record (143.44 miles per hour) in a Napier-Railton, or Marcel Lehoux’s victory in the 1930 ‘Grand Prix de Pau’ with a model of Bugatti. And yes, I did have to look both of those apparently historic events up on Wikipedia. But the point I’m trying to make is that a game like Spirit of Speed 1937 could serve as a beginner’s primer to some of said history, and possibly intrigue folk enough to want to educate themselves further on the subject and the sport. From there – with more in the way of the ability to create your own scenarios within the game – prospective players could use the game to recreate other races of interest to them, and extend Spirit of Speed’s longevity as a simulation title. Of course, the game we got is all we have to rate here. And as far as Spirit of Speed 1937’s release on the Dreamcast is concerned, it’s difficult to overlook just how deep its flaws run.

Still, I think there’s something to be said of its potential appeal to folk looking for “something new” (ironically rooted in very old history) when it comes to racing games — something truly unique not just for its time, but which hasn’t truly been replicated in the two decades since its release. For the classic car enthusiast, there’s really not much further back you can get in terms of historic vehicle and course selection than what Spirit of Speed has on offer, and so it may be worth its weight in gold for that aspect alone. But for the casual racing fan simply looking to put pedal to metal and experience the simple thrill of the race? I reckon Spirit of Speed was never gonna appeal to them, almost regardless of how well-crafted the final product wound up being: We’re talking about a game here intended for one of the most niche of audiences, whose design choices are very deliberate and intentional in attempting to court that small contingent. I feel like that aspect gets lost sometimes as folk rush to declare it “the worst racing game of all time” or whatever other hyperbole springs to mind. Let us be clear here: There is certainly far worse than Spirit of Speed out there, in terms of awkward handling and poor performance or whatever other components of design may come to mind. But Spirit of Speed seems to get the crosshairs put on it primarily for its refusal to kowtow to the casual player; which when combined with its underperforming elements – as well as the legend of the LJN label slapped onto it – concocts a recipe for some serious amounts of overreaching. Spirit of Speed certainly isn’t perfect, and most certainly isn’t for everybody. Hell, it’s absolutely not for me, for one. But I still can’t help but walk away from the wreck with some sort of appreciation for what Broadsword set out to do, and a sense that maybe they landed closer to their goal than some folk are willing to give it credit for.

** As a matter of interest: I did find a 2012 YouTube upload (by a user ‘JaNeineSchwarzWeiss’) demonstrating a model for the Streamliner in action within the PC version of the game, which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to figure out how they were able to load and play it. What I ultimately landed in was a thread on the TenTenths.com forums, where a link was posted to a mod enabling the vehicle to be driven in-game. What’s of particular interest is that while the site hosting the download for the mod is long-since defunct, and I can’t figure out a way to get hold of the files for myself; the impression that the forum thread and download page description leave me with is that an actual member of the Broadsword Interactive team had been the one to leak it to the community. There’s a lot of mentions of the WIP car model having been “released to [the community],” and folk assuring each other within the forum thread that an official patch for the PC release was supposedly due to arrive at some point in 2003 — implying that one of the posters had an inside line to the Broadsword team, and that there were still folk on staff trying to support Spirit of Speed in some capacity.

*** Lucky for me, I didn’t actually have to go grinding out scenarios just to read the win / loss messages: The PC version of the game stores its Scenario data in easily-accessible plain text files, which also (perhaps inadvertently) enables you to create your own custom scenarios — complete with control over the course, lap count, and other cars. Naturally, I had to test this out for myself (🔊).

“Defeat Here Surely Sounds the Bell for the British Presence in This Great Continent.”

“So near but so far… Maybe another day.”
European PC release, back cover.

Needless to say, Spirit of Speed 1937 did not set the world on fire with its Dreamcast release, or inspire much in the way of a “vintage vehicle racing game” revival. What it seemed to serve as more than anything was a lightning rod for drawing highly critical reviews, and giving games writers an excuse to opine on the state of Acclaim at that moment in time — proving that the whole LJN ruse had done little to actually distance the real publisher responsible from their product. Beyond that, you may be surprised to hear that critics were somewhat divided as far as their experiences and appreciation for the game’s execution; where some would find the game to be entirely unplayable, as others actually seemed to immediately intuit the controls and admonish the game as being too easy! While scores generally lean toward the lower end across the board – usually citing the presentation and performance – I’ve rarely seen such disparity among reviewers with regards to how the game actually plays, where the uniquely stiff controls seem to have divided critics — likely depending on their personal familiarity with more simulation-focused titles. What’s largely consistent across even the lowest-scoring reviews though is praise for the novel premise, and for Broadsword’s dedication in realizing these vintage vehicles and circuits. Of course, that small praise would rarely save the game from achieving some all-time low scores as it made the rounds across review sites of the era.

Jeremy Dunham for IGN would score Spirit of Speed as a 2.2 out of 10, opening his review with reminiscence of what he previously regarded as the all-time worst racer: “Not too long ago I had to tackle South Park Rally, thinking I had played the worst driving game ever made. After all, with control and play issues like those, there was no way it had any competition… right? Wrong. With a capital ‘W’ […] Unlike most racing games, Spirit of Speed doesn’t want you to go in the direction the course is following. Instead, it prefers that you slam into guardrails, obstacles, and every possible object on the side of the road. You don’t get any extra points for this, you can’t unlock special cars with it, and you won’t see a hidden ending. No friends, what you will get is the sad realization that the control is worse than you can ever imagine.”^[8] In moving to criticize the graphics, Dunham seems to get hung up on his hyperbole: “Zipping along at what has to be a brisk 10 frames per second, the poor quality backgrounds chop like the Hudson River (and if they had an odor would probably smell just as bad). […] It’s as though LJN decided to create a Dreamcast game with the Net Yaroze and only ported it half way!” Kudos for remembering that Net Yaroze even existed, I suppose, but an odd point of comparison to be sure.

From here, we can look to GameSpot’s Frank Provo, who saw fit to award the game a 1.9 out of 10 — where his primary point of pain seemed to be in getting a handle on the game’s balance and handling: “While 15 cars may seem adequate, the CPU always opts for the faster vehicles. Sure, you can use that slow Bugatti if you wish, but you’ll never win – not ever. Thus, Spirit of Speed 1937 lacks key options and imposes ugly constraints on the features it does have. […] Careful turning is important, and – as an added bonus – skilled braking is actually required to navigate the game’s more difficult twists. All this is nice, but upon closer inspection, the game goes to hell in a handbasket. Once you’ve achieved any semblance of speed, controller responsiveness dies, leaving you guiding a stiff vehicle through an endless array of hairpin turns. Miss a turn and you’ll crash. Twitch a little bit and you’ll crash. If skill prevented this, that would be one thing – however, the game randomly throws your car into skids or sticks it to walls, utterly without warning or explanation.”^[9] After closing their review by performatively declaring that “Spirit of Speed is pain personified,” the title would go on to win GameSpot’s ‘Worst Game of 2000’ award in the site’s year-end review.

To provide an example of a low-scoring review with a completely different take on the game’s controls, we can consult ‘Mad Carl’ of Planet Dreamcast, whose final score lands at 1 out of 10. Curiously, he seems to go against all conventional wisdom as to how the game is meant to be played, and seems to prosper for it: “There’s an attempt to include pit stops so your tires and oil can get a change. However, it’s so frustrating to deal with, I just quit doing it after awhile. After this, not only did I suddenly start to win races left and right, I never once had a race-threatening issue with my tires, oil, or gasoline.”^[10] Moving on to matters of handling: “The controls are passable. But without the need to even so much as tap the brakes removed from the game, who cares if steering is adequate? I can maneuver this car so well that it’s almost as if I’m on a rail. But it doesn’t matter when nothing else of interest is taking place. Your hands will never be so bored holding a Dreamcast controller. […] I won every stinking race. I never felt one iota of difference in the way any of these cars handled.” Curious testimony indeed, compared to what is easily the most common complaint about the game. For reference, he does claim that “drove every car in the game” before reaching this judgment, so make of that what you will. For point of contrast, James Joy of GF3K.com would award the game one of its highest review scores (7.8 out of 10), while going on to actually praise the controls and their apparent intuitiveness to him: “Don’t bother with all the reviews floating around stating how this can be compared to a 300 pound mountain of crap, because its just not true. While it may not take advantage of the Dreamcasts’ ability, (this could be done on the N64), it is a solid NOSTALGIC experience. The control has to be one of the nicest features to this title. Ubi Soft take note, when doing a racing game, *ahem* Speed Devils, I don’t want to feel like I’m driving a hovercraft. When playing this game you KNOW you’re on the ground. The car sticks, and if you get into an accident its only your fault.”^[11]

For the last contemporary review we’ll be pulling from, I have a treat in store for y’all: JM Vargas makes his triumphant return, as a contributor to the website DC Swirl!  For those of you who don’t know, we’ve sampled his 2000s era reviews twice so far on this website (in the cases of Fight Club and Resident Evil Survivor); and every time I’ve come across them, I find myself agreeing with most of his takes and nodding in approval at some of the deep-cut games references he makes. (Our email inbox is always open, Mr. Vargas!) In the case of Spirit of Speed, JM would award the title 3 out of 5 ‘Swirls’ — the cutesy metric by which DC Swirl evidently rated Dreamcast games. Expectedly, JM spends a good chunk of the article defending this evaluation: “Why the three swirl rating then, which is higher than what we gave Sega Rally 2 (arguably a much-better game than this one)? Two reasons. First, Spirit is a ‘niche’ racer that isn’t trying to be the ‘all-around’ racing game to please all racing fans, but a semi-accurate recreation (mixing real-life history, racing circuits, vehicles and arcade physics) of what professional racing was like in 1937, when TV ratings or the safety of the spectator weren’t given more priority than racing as fast as humanly possible, safety and everything else be damned. Despite a number of flaws, Broadsword Interactive has succeeded in giving this DC racer an identity and unique market that no other racing title is trying to cover (unless you count the superior two year-old PC game Grand Prix Legends from Papyrus).” The second reason he goes on to lay out is the game’s budget price point: “If The Spirit of Speed 1937 were asking us to pay $40-45 for the privilege of reliving the racing spectacle that people were exposed to back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Depression, then we’d be much tougher on it and demand higher frame-rates, multiplayer support and a much-reduced wait for the game to load. But since we’re only being asked to pay $20, which is the price to see two Hollywood blockbusters at most movie houses in the country these days, we cautiously suggest to you that there is just barely-enough gameplay fun for a single player (preferably a car buff) in this game for the asking price.”^[12] A fair and measured evaluation as always from Vargas.

Unfortunately, the budget price didn’t amount to much in the way of units moved for Spirit of Speed 1937‘s Dreamcast release, considering the fact that the game wasn’t marketed at all (not to mention its mostly dire critical reception). By 2003, only 16,255 copies of the game were reported as sold within North America,^[13] ranking it somewhere among the thirty lowest-selling games in the console’s all-too-brief history.** For an even more shocking statistic: The game’s Japanese localization would only sell through a sobering total of 39 copies (according to Dreamcast Junkyard’s Mike Phelan), which surely has to be some sort of all-time record low across the entire games industry? Honestly, I’m more surprised by the fact that Acclaim had even bothered to try and sell it in that market in the first place, and that they managed to partner up with Taito Corporation in order to distribute it in-country. In any event, Spirit of Speed has come to represent not only one of the most critically reviled titles in the console’s library (whether deservedly or not), but also one of its least successful financially as well. Whatever money Acclaim had invested in producing / securing the game for their Dreamcast line-up would’ve undoubtedly failed to have been recouped, and contributed to an already precarious financial situation the publisher was desperately trying to climb out of. What’s more, they were probably already acutely aware of how few copies Spirit of Speed was likely to sell before the game had even hit shelves, as well as the fact that its reception with critics was gonna be savage. But Acclaim had no choice but to go ahead with printing it anyway – apparently brute-forcing it through Sega’s certification process (according to unverified testimony we’ll cover in a minute) – in the desperate hope of earning back any portion of their initial investment.

What I was particularly fascinated to discover were comments by supposed quality assurance testers for the game across YouTube — primarily converging on this upload (titled ‘History’s Worst Sim – Spirit of Speed 1937’) by racing game enthusiast channel ‘GPLaps.’ Here, I found one self-proclaimed play tester [for the PC version] by the username ‘Lee Evans’ claim that the game had been “torn apart during testing,” with the team having just come off the back of QA for other Hasbro-published titles including GP 500 and Grand Prix 3. Their claim reduces the issues during development down to the supposed fact that “Hasbro didn’t care and released it anyway,” before theorizing that claims in the instruction manual about the authenticity of the poor handling came down to “an excuse” on the part of Broadsword — a poor way of conveying that “they just wanted people to know that these cars wouldn’t handle like an arcade game.” Further testimony by one ‘China Fox’ – a tester for the PAL Dreamcast release, specifically – erroneously cites THQ as the owners of LJN, before going on to claim that the publisher “kept submitting it to Sega even though it was broken and they never fixed anything we told them they needed to.” They then claim to have had some authority over certification, detailing that “In the end we saw what they were doing and it was just wasting certification resources that we said ‘Fuck it’ and just passed it for release.” I’d urge you to take both these accounts with a grain of salt; for as valuable as insights from quality assurance staff may be, they often lack the full context and understanding of a game’s actual development process — being some degrees removed from the inner workings of the studios responsible. For that angle on the story, we have to look to members of the game’s development team. And luckily, we now have John Jones-Steele’s testimony to help fill in some of those long-standing blanks.

According to Jones-Steele, Broadsword had hoped to establish a franchise around the Spirit of Speed branding, and had already schemed up a sequel by the working title of ‘Spirit of Speed 1938’ to enter into development shortly after its predecessor’s release. This iteration would’ve sought to amend the lack of multiplayer support with a four-player local split screen mode (no indication as to if it would’ve supported online play as well), in addition to further developing the team’s original hopes for a more ultra-realistic / simulation-focused take on 1930s racing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be: “The publishers were keen, too… until the reviews started to come out! We tried to explain that the issues were due to the game being changed so much from the original vision, but by that point it was too late. They’d spent considerable time and money marketing the game with things like events at Silverstone, and the return just wasn’t there.”^[1j] The interview conducted by James Harvey doesn’t get around to addressing a persistent Internet rumor that the game had further been intended to be converted for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance – a claim which appeared to perpetuate from an uncited sentence on the game’s Wikipedia article (which I took the personal liberty of removing) – but does indicate that John is still somewhat hung up on the idea of doing right by Spirit of Speed’s concept: “I keep resurrecting it every so often. On my PC, I’ve got some folders like ‘Spirit of Speed 2002’ and ‘Spirit of Speed 2012’ from where I started work on a new version, but something always came up before I could finish it. […] When I retire in the next three or four years, I plan on building Spirit of Speed again on the latest consoles.”

Now, something else that Jones-Steele neglects to mention here was a more focused attempt by Broadsword in 2002 to produce a ‘Spirit of Speed 1957,’ which actually got as far as establishing an “official” subsection within the RingCar.com driving enthusiast forums. Though these forums are poorly archived (to where I can’t track down any of the posts that would’ve been made to that Spirit of Speed board) and long-since abandoned, what I was able to find was a post announcing the launch of the section on November 1st, 2002, which directly names “JJ-Steele” from Broadsword as its dedicated moderator. The post goes on to state as follows: “If you read the posts there you’ll see that Broadsword’s hand was forced in the ’37 case, they did not want to release the game but they were forced to do so by the publisher, and now they want to make up for the result by including us all in the development.” I would bet that Jones-Steele himself had likely been the one to disclose that bit of insider information, and that the establishment of this board within an already-established / otherwise unaffiliated car enthusiast forum was a legitimate move on the part of Broadsword (odd a choice as that may be, compared to simply establishing a forum on their own website). Further testament as to the authenticity of this speculated sequel would appear on other online forums as well, which would similarly refer to it as “SOS 57” and imply that Broadsword had made some sort of announcement planning to invite members of these forums to “beta testing.” Naturally, none of these plans for this particular iteration of sequel materialized into anything substantive, likely as result of Broadsword’s inability to find a publisher willing to fund development of it. But it’s still interesting to see just how dedicated the studio were to doing right by the racing sim community, and how Jones-Steele has evidently held onto this dream for something like the past twenty-two years.

If Jones-Steele does eventually return to developing a successor to Spirit of Speed, he’ll have to do it without the support of a Broadsword Interactive behind him. It’s fortunate that the state of Spirit of Speed 1937’s release didn’t immediately doom the studio, and that the team were able to persist as game developers over the course of the next decade; focusing for a time on sport and racing titles, before taking a rather drastic turn in around 2003. The entry in this earlier catalogue most worthy of note is 2001’s Paris-Dakar Rally – released for PlayStation 2 and Windows – as published by Acclaim (using their actual branding this time). While not quite so infamous as the similarly titled / themed Paris-Dakar Rally Special on Famicom (a truly surreal cartridge deserving of a future article), Broadsword’s second stab at a racing simulation title was received in much a similar manner to Spirit of Speed; where despite massive advancements in game performance and immersion, critics again honed in on what they perceived as “bad controls” and punishing physics simulation. As a largely off-road racing game in line with the titular real-life rally event, Broadsword again attempted to tackle a specific niche within the world of racing, and seemed to divide players with how uncompromising they were in their depiction of that style of driving. From what I played of it, I’d have to agree that it makes for a pretty brutal racer — throwing your car across bumpy dirt roads, and enduring so much damage as to require dedicated ‘Repair’ and ‘Rescue’ buttons. But unlike Spirit of Speed 1937, you can actually find folk who seem to swear by this game’s attempt at simulation, and who still harbor fond memories of it decades later! It’s almost like a glimpse of what Spirit of Speed’s legacy could have been.

By this point, Broadsword had to accept that a future in driving simulation games wasn’t going to be viable — that their particular style of design wasn’t going to catch on with the broader audience, and that their reputation within the genre at this point was in tatters. And so came the pivot: Broadsword would now produce dance and rhythm games, beginning with 2003’s Dance:UK for the original model of PlayStation. This title would establish something of a franchise for the studio; with ‘Dance’ titles appearing on the PS1, PS2, Xbox, GameCube and Wii. What began with step-based rhythm games in the tradition of Dance Dance Revolution would eventually evolve to support the PS2’s EyeToy USB camera – beginning with their 2006 release Dance Factory – as well as their own ‘AirG’ mini-guitar peripheral designed for 2008’s PopStar Guitar on the Wii. These games must’ve proved moderately successful for a time for Broadsword to continue developing them, as well as earning them some industry accolades;***  but it’s clear that diminishing returns would’ve had to have kicked in past a certain point, and that the studio’s inability to successfully diversify their portfolio (such as a panned trilogy of classic fantasy adaptations on PS2; including takes on Aladdin, Robin Hood, and The Snow Queen) would’ve eventually caught up with them. Despite Broadsword’s self-proclaimed “reputation for bringing projects in on time and on budget” (as per their company website), and a move to a new office in 2008 as part of a “continuation of Broadswords growth;” the contract offers from publishers eventually dried up, and the development studio appeared to close shop in September 2009. There was an attempt to keep the Broadsword brand alive as a publishing label (‘Broadsword Publishing Limited’) between 2009 and 2013, but I can only find a single credit to their name: An obscure 2010 iOS title, Attack Kumquat. With the end of the publishing venture in 2013, the company’s principals all seemed to go their separate ways, pursuing other roles in tech and software publishing.

Maybe that seems to y’all like an unceremonious end to Broadsword’s time in the industry. But if you think that’s a sorry way for a company to go out, I would point you back in the direction of Spirit of Speed’s publisher in Acclaim Entertainment; whose final years were marred not only by their distasteful / infamous marketing campaigns, but also by a series of lawsuits revealing a culture of utter mismanagement and long-running executive embezzling. To quickly run through a timeline of events (something I eventually hope to cover in more depth in a future Acclaim-centric article): After attempting to position themselves for years as a company who had gone “To hell and back” (as per the title of a Next Generation feature on the company),^[14] as well as a massive round of restructuring in 2000; Acclaim were positioning themselves as a publisher on the comeback trail, whose return to form would surely prove profitable in the years to come. Selling off stock shares in order to shore up additional funds couldn’t hurt either, and the company was finally able to report profitable earnings by early 2001.^[15] The New York Times claimed Acclaim were “Back in the Groove” come March 2002,^[16] crediting their “moving decisively to cut costs” and “slashing its payroll by about 200 employees, to 600.” But the odd thing was, the bulk of their software output were still critical and financial flops, and folk were wondering how they could continue to report profits? This fact seemed to finally catch up with them in the back half of 2002, as the company were forced again to cut costs and re-shuffle their corporate structure in order to stay afloat. The next time The New York Times would cover Acclaim – nearly a year to the day later – their headline would read “At Acclaim, Too Many Lawsuits, Too Few Hits.”^[17]

By March 2003, Acclaim were named in no less than six separate lawsuits — “several of which accuse Mr. Fischbach and several colleagues of defrauding investors by conspiring to conceal information that showed the extent of Acclaim’s problems, while manipulating investors with statements they knew were false.”^[17b] Not only that, but the company had gone and lost some of their most potentially lucrative IPs over the course of the last several years, including alienating cyclist Dave Mirra with their marketing of BMX XXX — a game rooted in the same engine / gameplay which had driven the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, and which Mirra would go on to sue Acclaim (to the tune of $20 million USD) for publishing it and marketing using his image without his express permission, thereby “degrading his image.” In summary: Acclaim had been lying the whole time about their financial numbers in order to appear more stable to investors, had lost access to their strongest IPs, and been made to deal with multiple simultaneous lawsuits; all while executives were secretly plundering whatever meager money the company held in reserve in order to facilitate their personal purchases of “homes, stock and other purposes.”^[18] To top it all off, their games largely stunk and their marketing tactics had made them industry pariahs. In any event, the company would ultimately be crushed under the weight of all this come August 2004, when they were made to declare bankruptcy and their few remaining IPs of worth were divided amongst other publishers. Investigations into the company following their demise would reveal the full extent of executive corruption, and shine light on the economic disparity between the company’s executive class and lower-rung employees. To this day, Acclaim is a name synonymous with failure and seediness in the games industry, as well it should be.

I suppose this is also where we should briefly cover the demise of the Dreamcast itself. As it turns out, Sega had never managed to turn any sort of profit with it; only managing a meager 15% of market share in the console market, having sold roughly six million systems by the point of its announcement of discontinuation in January 2001.^[19] Jeremy Parish’s decade-retrospective / memorial for the console on behalf of 1UP would eloquently summarize the details of its demise; addressing the matter of Sony’s market domination with the PlayStation 2, as well as highlighting some of Sega’s own errors in their approach to marketing it: “While it would be easy to point an accusatory finger at Sony and blame them for killing the Dreamcast by overselling the PS2, though, there’s a certain level of intellectual dishonesty in such a stance. The fact of the matter is that Sega had done a lot of Sony’s work for them with a series of poor decisions that began late in the Genesis era and continued to dog the company throughout the Saturn’s erratic lifetime. The company’s poor U.S. support for hardware like the Sega CD, the 32X, and the Saturn made gamers gun shy. Many consumers felt burned after investing in expensive Sega machines and finding the resulting libraries comparatively lacking next to the competition’s, and the Dreamcast was regarded in certain quarters with open distrust.”^[20] While the death of the Dreamcast would mark the end of Sega’s hardware manufacturing endeavors, they would of course persist in the games industry as a publisher and developer of software, in a capacity they continue to operate in to this very day. While most agree this transition has been for the best for Sega, there are those who still hold the Dreamcast near and dear to their heart, and who continue to wonder “what could have been” had it been given a fairer shake?

Which brings us back to Spirit of Speed 1937, and what it represents within the brief history of the Dreamcast: A niche game for what would historically serve as a niche console, further symbolizing the way in which third-party North American [and European] publishers largely seemed to view the platform as a dumping grounds for slapdash conversions and designated C-grade titles. The system was rarely utilized to its fullest potential by developers (outside of Sega themselves), who were seemingly instructed by their publishers not to treat it as a truly viable long-term competitor in the console market. In that sense, they all collectively helped to fulfill their own prophecy, by not supporting Sega’s console in a capacity which could’ve possibly helped it to overcome the hurdles that laid ahead of it. All too often, all they’d rise to deliver were titles the likes of… well, like Spirit of Speed, I reckon. Which isn’t to say that publishing Spirit of Speed was some sort of deliberate act of contempt or defiance on the part of Acclaim and Broadsword, but simply an observation of the fact that they were willing to push through a blatantly unoptimized (and arguably incomplete) game to the system, knowing full well it’d fly largely under the radar. And where Sega for their part were just happy to have any support from third parties, it’s perhaps in their willingness to let such a product slide past their certification process that we see the danger to that kind of desperation. At the same time, what other console at that time would’ve so readily accepted a game as odd and eccentric as Spirit of Speed? I dare say it’s commendable that the Dreamcast would be willing to provide a home for such a novel release, and to give it the opportunity to reach as wide of an audience as the platform was able to serve. (Whether or not Acclaim were necessarily interested in advertising the game to that audience, of course, is another matter entirely.)

Whether you care for its premise or not, Spirit of Speed represents something truly interesting and unique within its genre, and may well hold appeal to a contingent of car enthusiasts looking for a trip to motorsports’ past. And while its execution is decidedly more uneven than a Montana backroad, I’d still contend that it’s not entirely irredeemable: I really do think there’s something here for those with a love of vintage vehicles, or for those who are looking to test their racing sim skills against something that challenges their every instinct and pre-conceived notion. Honestly, I’d even recommend it to those with just a fleeting interest in either category, if only to gain a bit of historic perspective on the hobby. But if there’s one message I really wanna convey to everyone who may read this, it’d be this: Not every game has to be for everybody. Developers should be allowed to pursue such niche subject matter as a game about 1930s racing, and put their hearts into creating it; even if they wind up falling short of expectation, or if the theoretical audience for it falls well outside the “casual consumer” base. I will happily trade you whatever dozen interchangeable AAA racing games – designed to be as accessible as possible, and gussied up with all the cutting-edge graphics – for another deliberately inaccessible title along the lines of a Spirit of Speed. Hell, I’d love to see whatever Jones-Steele eventually manages to cook up on his own, and would happily pay for that ahead of most any other major label racing game! In an industry defined by risk-aversion and adhesion to established formula, Broadsword delivered something that they hoped would genuinely excite and shake up the driving genre. And though they may have stumbled in spectacular fashion – due in at least some capacity to circumstances beyond their control – you should absolutely respect their attempt to do so. Consider that our kiss off to this collection of tin cans.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get dizzy with a proper dime of a dame! Abyssinia!

** For reference, that all-time worst-seller record (at least within North America) would go to Acclaim and their release of ECW: Anarchy Rulz, which only managed a dismal 4,990 units sold. Granted, a version of it was also released on PlayStation, which moved somewhere in the neighborhood of 110K copies. In either case, it’s a pretty lousy wrestling game in itself, and likely worthy of an article one of these days — one where I’ll get to share my opinions on the titular wrestling promotion itself.

*** So, there’s a claim on the old Broadsword Interactive website that they were at one point “nominated for a Develop Industry Excellence Award, Innovation for Dance Factory.” The only problem is that the history of the Develop Awards (named for the UK trade magazine behind its production, ‘Develop’) are so poorly documented, that it’s difficult to actually verify the details of their past years’ nominees. The only archived list I could find which included Broadsword came up on a Polish-language games news site, and covered the event’s 2004 awards; in which their title Dance:UK received nomination for a ‘New Console IP’ award, and where the company themselves were dubiously “honored” as a nominee for ‘Most Improved Studio.’

[1] b c d e f g h i j Dickinson, et al. Dreamcast: Year Two. Publishing details TBA. (Preview provided by James Harvey.)
[2] “Hasbro Buys MicroProse.” WIRED. August 12, 1998. Web.
[3] Goble, Gord. “History of Papyrus Racing Games.” GameSpot. June 8, 2005. Web.
[4] ‘Melo.’ “Test du jeu Spirit of Speed 1937 sur PC.” Jeuxvideo.com. December 8, 1999. Web.
[5] “A Recap of Industry Headlines – Jack Friedman.” Toys & Family Entertainment, Volume 5 Issue 7. aNb Media. June 2010. Print. (Scan available)
[6] “Company News – MCA Taking Loss in Sale […]” The New York Times. January 23, 1990. Print. (Scan available)
[7] b c Gantayat, Anoop. “Hands On: Spirit of Speed 1937.” IGN. June 30, 2000. Web.
[8] Provo, Frank. “Spirit of Speed Review.” GameSpot. August 15, 2000. Web.
[9] Dunham, Jeremy. “Spirit of Speed: 1937.” IGN. July 11, 2000. Web.
[10] ‘Mad Carl.’ “Spirit of Speed 1937.” Planet Dreamcast. August 3, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[11] Joy, James. “Spirit of Speed.” Gaming Fanatics 3K. July 18, 2002. Web. (Archive)
[12] Vargas, JM. “1937: Spirit of Speed.” DC Swirl. July 7, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[13] The NPD Group documented North American sales data for the Dreamcast on a weekly basis during its lifespan, which has since been compiled (in part) on Sega Retro. The last full sheet made available to the public (possibly as result of some party breaking confidentiality, and widely distributed via a post to the ‘rec.games.video.sega’ newsgroup) was their data accounting for sales as of January 2003, which can effectively be used as a near-final measure of the system’s impact in North America.
[14] “To hell and back with Acclaim.” NEXT Generation, Issue 40. April, 1998. Print. (Scan available)
[15] “Acclaim Makes Some Money.” IGN. January 16, 2001. Web.
[16] Strugatch, Warren. “Acclaim Entertainment: Back in the Groove.” The New York Times. March 31, 2002. Web.
[17] b Strugatch, Warren. “At Acclaim, Too Many Lawsuits, Too Few Hits.” The New York Times. March 30, 2003. Web.
[18] Maragos, Nich. “Former Acclaim Execs Sued By Trustee.” Gamastura (Game Developer). August 31, 2005. Web.
[19] Pham, Alex. “Sega to Quit Production of Dreamcast Console […]” Los Angeles Times. January 31, 2001. Web.
[20] Parish, Jeremy. “9.9.99, A Dreamcast Memorial.” 1UP. September 3, 2009. Web. (Archive)