Sports Car GT! It's old and gone now, but it was my favorite game for a long time.
From the 'Top 5 PC games' topic: Nobody's ever heard of it, but this game was as fun as it gets. It was the little game that could. It started as project by a then-unknown studio called ISI. It bounced around between three publishers while it was in development, and the series it was meant to simulate went broke before the game came out. After all the delays the game was cobbled together and released as a low-budget game by EA. Nobody really paid any attention to it. It was a hodgepodge of random cars and tracks with outdated graphics and no clear market. It wasn't realistic enough to be a pure simulation, but it was too realistic to drive off the pure arcade crowd.
And it was absolutely brilliant. It was easy enough to sit down and drive a race without any preparation, but challenging enough to keep you interested. The AI was superb for its day - the AI cars felt like humans, since they could beat you but also make mistakes.
But the best part about SCGT was the mods. Anybody with a modicum of computer savvy and Notepad could edit the game. The SCGT community was small, but the modders were talented and prolific. They made hundreds of tracks and thousands of cars. If you could dream it, they probaby made it: 1000 mph dragsters, RV's, boats, blimps, F1 cars, anything. One SCGT mod ended up morphing (via a VERY long process) into a full retail game (the GTR series).
ISI didn't intend for SCGT to be modded, but they realized that it had turned their little unwanted game into a legend. When EA chose ISI to make their F1 games, ISI made sure to make the games mod-friendly. When ISI went independent again, they made rFactor, the ultimate mod-friendly racing sim. A lot of us like to think of it as Sports Car GT 2.
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