The late 1990s was a wild time to be someone interested in Formula One video games. Each year saw the release of multiple titles, some with an official license and some without, and with quality ranging from carefully-crafted masterpieces to rather subpar efforts destined for the bargain bin. Johnny Herbert’s Grand Prix Championship 1998 (quite the mouthful of a title) unfortunately falls into the latter category, with very few things working in its favour.
Gentlemen, borrow your engines!
JHGPC (still a mouthful!) was published by Midas Interactive Entertainment in Europe under their then-new Arena Games budget label and Intense Entertainment Interactive in the United States (with the slightly different title Johnny Herbert’s Grand Prix World Champions). According to the manual, Johnny Herbert also did more than lend his name and face for the game, with the claim that he was actively involved in the game’s development. While a small Slovakian studio called Reality is listed as the sole developer, the game engine is actually an evolution of the one developed by Teque London and used in games such as Power F1 and Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions (the latter also published by Midas around the same time as JHGPC). The same engine would go on to be used for a dozen or so budget F1-style and motorbike racing games up to the early 2010s with very few updates in between, including some given away as tie-ins for various Nestlé chocolate products. So JHGPC at least has many siblings in the video game world!
More false promises than Bethesda
Early promotional materials released in the spring of 1998 promised a release in April, real 1998 cars & season, 17 tracks, customiseable cars and online multiplayer with up to eight simultaneous players. Also, somewhat like Prost Grand Prix, there were plans for an online competition with over 1000 players!
I was promised the real 1998 season, not this!
What ended up hitting the store shelves in Europe in the late summer (and 30 September in the U.S.) failed to deliver on all of these early promises; the 12 teams (one of which is a duplicate) and 24 drivers featured in the game are fictional (to the point of not even having made-up names, instead being just “Team 1”, “Driver 2”, etc.) with liveries somewhat resembling a variety of mid-to-late 90s F1 teams. There’s a silver car with “North” stickers, definitely-not 1998 Williams, the lovechild of 1994 Footwork and 1996 Minardi, faux-Ligier and faux-Prost and so on. Car customisation is also limited to just changing the team and driver names to one’s liking. The amount of tracks has been reduced to 15, and most closely resembles the 1995 calendar although the order is completely reshuffled, with Brazil and France gone entirely. Additionally, since the track names are based just on their nationality, TI Aida is bizarrely moved to China and Nürburgring to Austria to avoid overlap (while Imola stays “in” San Marino). Online multiplayer is also cut down to six players maximum, and if there ever was an attempt to host a competition any information about it has been lost to time.
Eye candy for the near-sighted
As for the “stunning 3D graphics” and “superb sound” that were also promised, well… the graphics are mostly alright. The cars and some trackside models look decent for their time, if not the best, and the car textures are a bit too low-res so the liveries end up being quite blurry. The advertisement boards – a seemingly random smattering of actual F1 sponsors, at least three different tyre manufacturers and a variety of other brands – stand out especially well with relatively high-resolution textures.
Ah yes, Electronics Boutique and Top Gear Magazine, well-known for sponsoring the Italian GP at Monza.
On the other hand, some trackside scenery such as trees are painfully low-resolution, looking like a much earlier DOS game. While you won’t really notice it when blasting through a fast circuit at 180+ mph, it sticks out like a sore thumb in slower tracks like Monaco or during the unskippable “grid walk” when starting a race. The visual presentation during the race is also very barebones, as the HUD and in-race menu consist almost entirely of plain text, with only the rev counter and upcoming corner display given some extremely basic graphics (and even those are taken from other games using the same engine). The HUD also doesn’t scale well to the highest resolutions the game can run at.
The HUD in pretty much all its glory. Look how tiny the rev graph is!
The sound, well… the less said the better. The game has no music soundtrack whatsoever (or at least I couldn’t get it to work), and the few sound effects the game has are very typical for the era, with just one monotonous engine noise, generic tyre squeals, a bit of crowd noise and the rather odd sound which indicates your car is not on the tarmac. As a peculiar detail, sound is completely absent when viewing cars from the “TV broadcast” camera angle, regardless of the race being live or a replay.
The keyboard controls are a bit finicky as well. A lot of non-alphanumerical keys are reserved and cannot be remapped in the options menu – for example, you can’t use the arrow keys to control the car, so you’ll either have to use the traditional Grand Prix 2 layout or figure out a WASD-style config. The pause key is also bound to the spacebar for some reason, which on my test computer made pausing the game extremely difficult due to the high key repeat rate.
Brutally unrealistic
Although as part of his endorsement Johnny Herbert claimed that the simulation was “the most realistic he’s ever driven”, the driving experience leaves much to be desired. With minimal realism settings it feels like an OK-ish simcade when driving alone in free practice, with only the occasional driving mistake (such as hitting the kerbs too hard or going wildly off-road) sending the car spinning. However, even with these settings racing against the AI is hazardous, as they have no awareness of the player’s existence and any contact will send the car bouncing wildly like a pinball into a seemingly arbitrary direction. Also, even on the lowest skill setting the AI is fast; just keeping up with them will require a decent amount of racecraft. The game also lacks a proper weather system completely, with the only option being for fog – either on, off, or random.
Finally, a Silent Hill racing game!
Enabling more realism settings ups the difficulty massively as the car will spin from the tiniest mistake, with taking the corner just slightly wrong or going ever so slightly off the track (even on a street circuit like Adelaide) being instantly rewarded with your car pointing the wrong way regardless of your control inputs. The spinning doesn’t feel natural in any way and feels more like your car being pushed in a random direction by an invisible hand. The damage model also really emphasises the fragility of F1 cars, as even the slightest contact will bend a wing or wheel and repeated hits (or just one hard hit) will very easily incapacitate the car, either due to the car becoming uncontrollable, the wheels literally falling off, or the engine conking out. Combined with the AI drivers running around like headless chickens and the tracks often having much less run-off than in real life, this makes any attempt at actual racing nigh-on impossible.
The typical end result when trying to race at Monaco with this AI. Also note the disparity between the detailed car model and the low-res tree sprite.
Changing the car setup (in a menu the game calls “Workshop”) can also lead to rapid changes in the car’s balance. Reducing downforce just a bit too much will make the car spin out in high-speed corners. Having too much rear downforce compared to front downforce will, in turn, stop the car from steering entirely in the same corners. While these two examples have some root in realism, the changes are too drastic. Fine-tuning the setup is also tedious as, contrary to what the manual says, the Workshop menu isn’t instantly accessible in free practice and any changes will require entering the pitlane – and even then you can’t change the gear ratios. Instead, it’s quicker and better to just exit to the main menu, change the setup there and restart the practice session to see how the car now behaves.
Fun for the whole family
JHGPC offers the standard single weekend and championship modes, as well as a “trainer” mode where you follow another F1 car to learn the track – similar to some license tests in Gran Turismo 4. Multiplayer options consist of a two-player splitscreen mode which is more commonly seen in console games, and network play for up to six players. However, as it relies on the outdated IPX protocol it would take some effort to get it running these days. Unlike console titles of the time, the splitscreen mode also features the full grid of AI cars for maximum possible carnage.
Speaking of running the game – it’s practically impossible to run it on a modern PC. The framerate is glacially slow due to 3D hardware incompatibility, assuming the game even starts up. Even on a retro machine like the Windows 98 laptop used for this article, it requires a specific set of hardware and drivers to use all of the graphical effects, and even then the game just sometimes decides to stop working altogether and requires a full reinstall. So whatever spaghetti code was used to make this game was left quite uncooked.
Conclusion
JHGPC tries so hard to be a good game, but falls short in just about every aspect. The graphics are not bad by any means, but some details are outdated and the overall tone of everything feels just a bit dull and unpolished. A music soundtrack or even a bit of audio commentary would have made the game far less monotonous in the audio department. Finally, the driving physics fail to balance realism with driveability, which is further hampered by the awful AI. All in all it’s a great shame, as while the game doesn’t offer anything special in the single-player mode compared to other similar titles, split-screen racing against a decent AI with decent driving physics could have been great fun – assuming you have the hardware to run the whole thing in the first place.
Final rating: 1½/5. Johnny No-Goode.