No racing series had offered console players so many forms of motorsport in one package since Codemasters’ own Race Driver series back in the 2000s. From there, PCARS’s extensive career mode offered players the ability to live out their own racing driver fantasy, with the option to progress through single-seater categories all the way to ‘Formula A’ or take a completely different approach and climb from Ginetta Juniors and GT4 sports car racing up to LMP1 endurance racing.

Project CARS allowed players to begin in kartingWhereas Gran Turismo will always start players off doing two lap Sunday Cup races in underpowered Japanese Kei cars, PCARS allowed players to kick off their virtual racing driver career in karting – just as all the real world international level drivers do. But unlike the likes of Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport, where the emphasis has always been heavily on collecting production road cars, PCARS aimed itself as a motorsport simulator from the very beginning. As a racing game, Project CARS was not unique in offering hundreds of cars of every kind of class and purpose possible and a huge roster of tracks on which to race them on.

While simracing is dominated by the PC platform, Project CARS was a breath of fresh air in how it embraced the massive console market to offer a genuine simulation racing game experience on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In doing so, ‘PCARS’ becomes the latest in a very long list of franchises – that includes Burnout, SSX, Command & Conquer and many more – that have been unceremoniously cast into the ether after being acquired by EA, who took over ownership of the Project CARS title by buying Codemasters, who had themselves purchased SMS in late 2019. Originally set up using an ambitious crowdfunding model by developers Slightly Mad Studios (SMS) – putting the ‘community’ into ‘Community Assisted Racing Simulator’ – the franchise has been brought into the pits for the final time after three mainline entries and a mobile spin-off.

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