PHOTO: Brendan McAleer, Driving
Pistols at dawn! They were two of the most powerful
supercars ever made, a brace of weaponry intended to do battle in Group B,
possibly the deadliest racing series ever conceived. Both these warriors
carried a rampant stallion as part of their heraldry, but the battle-lines were
drawn along ideologies as well as homelands.
On one hand, the Ferrari F40 was a screaming menace, a car
born phoenix-like from the ashes of a failed racing program. The last car to be
personally touched by the coldly calculating mind of Enzo Ferrari himself, it
was a widowmaker forged of carbon-fibre, kevlar, and high-revving horsepower.
The Ferrari F40 was designed to celebrate Ferrari’s 40th anniversary.
wikimedia, Driving
At the other end of the field, the Porsche 959 represented
relentlessly Germanic engineering, combining twin-turbo power with clever
all-wheel drive and a slippery shape. At home enduring LeMans or racing across
the Egyptian desert past the pyramids, it was a technological tour-de-force
with a top-speed of 317km/h.
They should have met in the field, in the hands of skilled
racers with thousands of hours of track-time under their helmets. Instead,
twenty-five years ago, the F40 and the 959 clashed with 10-year-olds at the
helm, thanks to the efforts of a small gaming studio in Vancouver BC. It was
one of the greatest supercar face-offs of all time, and it coincided with the
birth of the videgame industry. Today, you can pilot any number of cars in
Forza or Gran Turismo.
The Porsche 959 was also conceived of as a glimpse of what
the future might hold for the 911.
wikimedia, Driving
Back then, Test Drive II told you to choose your weapon, and
The Duel was on.
Some years before that, a puzzled-looking Pierre Berton
furrows his brow at a failed guess on Front Page Challenge. It’s 1983, and
while the four journalists assembled to field the challenge are erudite and
well-educated, they’ve just encountered a generation gap. “Don’t video games
turn your brains to mush?” one asks.
Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember grin at the question. The pair
have just successfully brought their first creation, Evolution, to market,
earning enough cash to put a Supra in Mattrick’s driveway and a Z/28 Camaro in
Sember’s. University’s been paid for too.
It’s the first mass-marketed video game in Canada, and its
name befits a burgeoning growth that will see Vancouver become an eventual
epicentre for game development. Mattrick will eventually buy out Sember, and
their company, Distinctive Software Inc., will be acquired by Electronic Arts,
becoming EA Canada.
Today, EA Canada has a huge campus out in Burnaby, employing
approximately 1300 people as the largest and oldest studio in EA’s global
operations.
Back in the early 1980s, Brad Gour, son of the local zone
manager for Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche, showed up at DSI to an interview
that he thought was going to be little more than a chat amongst early computer
hobbyists.
“When I arrived,” he says, “Don Mattrick’s Porsche 944 was
outside with the word ‘Evolve’ on the personalized plates.”
Having grown up around the latest from Germany rotating
through the driveway on a regular basis, Gour was something of a gearhead, and
a perfect fit for the growing company.
The first iteration, Test Drive, was quite primitive, but
brought something revolutionary to the table. For the first time in a game, the
player was seated in a point-of-view position behind the wheel, looking out
through an electronic windscreen. The inspiration came from a recording made in
that same 944, driving the old Sea-to-Sky up to Whistler, with the cliffside on
the right and Howe Sound to the left. Several cars were selectable, including a
Ferrari Testarossa or a Porsche 930, but the driver raced against the clock,
not an opponent.
“It was the most amazing thing I’d ever done, and I was
hooked immediately.” For Erik Kiss, working on getting The Duel to run on the
Apple IIGS was a dream job. “I started at DSI while in my third year of
university, trying to earn the degree I’d assumed would be necessary for a
boring career in banking or some other lame, but computer-related, work.” It
turned out to be the entry point into more than two decades of work in the
gaming industry, including founding his own company and launching a cart-style
racing game.
He wasn’t the only young gun to come aboard DSI for the project. In fact, when
Kris Hatelid, main programmer on the Commodore 64 version and composer of The
Duel’s in-game music came to Vancouver, he had an embarrassing admission to
make. “I didn’t have my driver’s license when I wrote that game,” he says, “At
some point, Don flies me up to see the progress I’d been making. I get to the
office and he offers to loan me a car, and I have to explain that I don’t
drive. Pretty awkward.”
The hours were long, though the work was rewarding. Amory
Wong, now a high school teacher at Carson Graham in North Vancouver says of the
process, “At the time, we didn’t have very large teams, so each of the lead
programmers did a lot. [We] had to code, make builds, and do a lot of testing.
We also didn’t have much in the way of project managers, so it was just up to
the team to get it done.”
While by modern standards, The Duel is somewhat blocky and
archaic, every effort was made to provide a very high level of realism. This
extended to recording audio from actual cars to get the sound just right, even
though it would be compressed and then played out through 1980s computer
speakers.
“Recording actual car noises is pretty standard now, but at
the time it felt like an extravagance,” says Bruce Dawson, one of two programmers
working on the Amiga version of Test Drive II, “Don Mattrick was supposed to go
pick up the Ferrari [a 308] but he got busy with some paperwork. I picked up
the car, did the audio recording, and then put as many miles on it as possible.
I dropped by my little brother’s place to show him my ‘new car’ and generally
had fun. I accidentally kept it past the closing time of the rental agency so I
had to find a safe place to park it overnight. I ended up sleeping in the car
just to make sure nothing happened to it. That was a good day.”
By and large, the rest of the programming passed without
incident, and Test Drive II shipped to homes all across the country in 1989,
published by Accolade. It did well critically, and was feverishly received by
budding gearheads everywhere. Two goliaths, right from the pages of your Dad’s
car magazines, and you could drive them yourself.
Today, Test Drive II is something called abandonware,
meaning that so much time has passed since its release it is no longer
supported. It’s an orphan, and while still under general copyright, is free to
play if you load an emulator on to your computer to slow it down to the speed
they ran at in 1989.
For me, to do so is an instant time-warp back to the
Ladysmith basement of my friend Darcy Kulai, more than two decades ago. The
fuzzy synthesized bass hums through the headphones as the Accolade logo flashes
on screen, and then a red F40 appears, its window sliding open so that the
driver can give you the thumbs-up, then exit stage left, pursued by the silver
959.
Scrolling through the detailed spec-sheets, I choose the
959, just like I always did when I was a kid, and pick a computerized F40 as my
opponent. Selecting somewhere in the middle of the ridiculous twelve different
difficulty settings, the loading screen goes blank briefly, and then we’re out
on the road, with an electronic humming meant to represent the idling flat-six
engine.
The timer counts down, I press forward and the artificial
squeal of tires comes through the speakers. The Porsche gets the holeshot, just
like it always did twenty-five years ago, and then it’s through the first
digitized corner, the pixel at the top of the steering wheel twitching to the
right, then the left.
It looks completely outdated, blocky, and slow, and jerky.
Nevertheless, it’s magic.
Everybody on the small team behind Test Drive had a
different favourite. “I preferred the elegance of the 959,” Dawson states,
while Kiss says, “I always liked the F40.” Gour muses over the problem. “My
father being associated with Porsche, I had a natural favourite. Today I think
I’d go for the rawness of the F40 as it still looks great and the 959 has been
exceeded in every way by modern 911s.”
In many ways, that’s The Duel’s story too – outclassed by
any modern racing game, it’s nonetheless interesting as a pioneering
front-runner, and for nostalgia’s sake too. It blazed the way for the Need For
Speed series, a very popular title for EA, and heralded the rise of racing
games that tried to be more than just icons moving around the screen.
Today, Don Mattrick chairs Zynga, a maker of casual games,
and reportedly has a collection of cars that’d make an oil baron jealous. Kris
Hatelid is a security architect at Microsoft, Bruce Dawson works for Valve, and
both Erik Kiss and Brad Gour now do consultancy in the gaming industry. Amory
Wong teaches a new generation the math and computer science they need to enter
the industry, should they choose to do so. He also has a 959 of his own – a
Honda CBR959RR.
Both the Ferrari and the Porsche are extremely rare cars,
restricted in importation and limited in numbers. The future belongs to a new
race of supercars: outrageously-powerful hybrids perhaps more in the image of
the hyper-competent 959 than the no-holds-barred F40.
However, there was a time when these two ruled the earth,
clashing together like Godzilla and Mothra. Test Drive II was never a duel to
the death. Instead, it ensured an electronic way to make sure the F40 and the
959 would be forever immortalized in pixels, bytes, and at least one young
man’s imagination.
Anatomy of a Duel
A direct descendant of the 288GTO, the F40 was one of the
most raw and unruly supercars the world would ever see.
Ferrari, Driving
Ferrari F40
Engine:
2.9L twin-turbocharged V8
478hp @ 7000rpm
425lb/ft @ 4000rpm
Transmission:
5-speed manual gearbox
Chassis:
Steel frame, carbon-kevlar composite body
Mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive
Weight – 1100kg
Performance:
0-100km in 3.8 seconds
Top Speed ~324km
Designed to celebrate Ferrari’s 40th anniversary, the F40
was the last machine to be personally approved by Enzo himself. Direct
descendant of the 288GTO, it was one of the most raw and unruly supercars the
world would ever see – in an age of traction control and clever differentials,
it’s also not the sort of car we’re likely to see again.
Power came from a 2.9L V8 with twin IHI turbochargers,
bringing power to a stout 478hp. For the time, this was rocket-propelled stuff,
and with a curb weight of just 1100kgs, it’s still impressive today. Moreover,
power varies on most dyno-tested F40s, leading some to believe that it was
actually making slightly closer to 500hp.
Whatever the case, it was fast and it was brutal. The weight
was kept down by a body composed of carbon-fibre and kevlar, stretched out over
a spine of steel. There was no air-conditioning, no stereo, no carpeting, and
not much of a trunk. Peer through the slotted rear lexan window and you could
see the twin intercoolers that formed the lungs of the beast.
The F40 did not and does not suffer fools gladly. It is
extremely twitchy to drive, and the throttle must be managed carefully to avoid
certain doom. However, with a skilled driver at the helm, it is incredibly
fast, with a slightly modified version having cracked the 360km/h mark at
Bonneville.
In total, 1,315 F40s were built between 1987 and 1992. Not
all survive, thanks to their fearsome dynamics.
As a road-going car, the 959 had all manner of technologies
we now take for granted, from adjustable-height suspension to all-wheel-drive.
Porsche, Driving
Porsche 959
Engine:
2.9L twin-turbocharged H-6
450hp @ 7000rpm
369lb/ft @ 4000rpm
Transmission:
6-speed manual gearbox
Chassis:
Aluminium, composite unibody
Rear-engine, all-wheel-drive
Weight – 1450kg
Performance:
0-100km in 4.1 seconds
Top Speed ~314km
If the 959 is a few tenths off the officially reported
numbers of the F40, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily slower. Thanks to an
upright driving position, sequentially-turbocharged engine, and
torque-distributing PSK all-wheel-drive, the 959 could be driven at the limit
far more safely and effectively than the Ferrari. Essentially, you needed to be
skilled to pilot the Porsche, where you needed a centipede’s-worth of rabbit’s
feet not to die in the F40.
Built to compete in the doomed Group B series, just as the
F40’s parent 288GTO was, the 959 was also conceived of as a glimpse of what the
future might hold for the 911. Indeed, from certain angles, the car looks much
like the 993 generation of cars, the last of the air-cooled 911s. Turbocharged
versions of those would likewise have all-wheel-drive, but be fitted with
turbochargers in parallel rather than sequentially.
In 1986, racing versions of the 959 were campaigned both at
the gruelling 24 hours of LeMans, and in the Paris-Dakar rally. In the latter,
they finished first and second, their iconic Rothman’s livery becoming an
instant part of the Porsche story. The LeMans outing was no less successful,
finishing first in class and second overall.
As a road-going car, the 959 had all manner of technologies
we now take for granted, from adjustable-height suspension to that clever
all-wheel-drive. The wheels had hollow-spokes to save weight, yet just like a
normal 911, it was comfortable and easy to drive. The difference between it and
the F40 is that between a loyal hunting dog and an ill-tempered tiger on a
slightly too-short leash. The argument could be made that you really need both.
source: http://driving.ca/ferrari/auto-news/news/the-duel-ferrari-f40-vs-porsche-959
http://www.fzrestoration.com
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