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How Richard Burns Rally’s stayed at the very top
Get the inside line on the decade-old racing game the community keeps on making better.
Mitsubishi’s Lancer Evo is a rally icon
© Ondřej Zeman/YouTube/Richard Burns Rally
The world of video games tends to live by a mantra of the-next-game-is-the-best-game, with new releases sending the old into the dust. In a medium that, certainly at the mainstream level, relies on up-to-date technology to provide a foundation, this is to be expected. As graphics improve, AI grows more complex and software is taught to utilise processing power more efficiently, players naturally shift to the frontline of this advancement.
No genre is this more keenly felt in than racing games. With each new Forza Motorsport, the old one starts to die. This rule remains true for almost any franchise you care to mention: Gran Turismo, DiRT, Need for Speed – the list goes on.
Much of the time, a game makes most of its revenue in the first few weeks of sale. Customers play it for a while, then eventually they put it aside in favour of the next big thing. Give power to the community, however, and this cycle of continual birth and sacrifice can be broken.
Sometimes, a game sticks with you. You keep on playing it, making friends through it, mastering it. Eventually, you find you love it so much that you want to give back to it, the scene and the fans. Richard Burns Rally is one of those games.
Originally released in 2004 on PC, Richard Burns Rally continues to enjoy great respect and admiration from its player base thanks to the efforts of a dedicated community of modders striving to evolve and expand the initial offering. Such labours have resulted in a rally simulation that attracts the most enthusiastic of fans – the vast majority of which will tell you that, thanks to the mods, this 12-year-old racer is still the very best available today.
"RBR is still the only true rally simulation out there. Gamers can feel that about it," declares Gunter Schlupf, a German better known amongst the RBR community as WorkerBee. His claim to fame is the creation of the immensely popular Next Generation Physics (NGP) plug-in. The update enhances everything from how tyres interact with different surface types, to adding whole new drive chain systems (rear-wheel drive, for example), and from suspension improvements to alterations regarding tyre degradation.
The sensation of a simulation is, clearly, what WorkerBee is looking for and it's what his NGP creation is geared towards providing. He describes the original 2004 release as a game that "had only a few features" and "had not been finished", but as a simulation it's "coded almost the exact way I would do it". A sizeable portion of the simulation focus was the result of the guidance of 2001 World Rally Champion Richard Burns himself, with the physics model focused wholly on recreating a car as opposed to making a game out of driving cars.
This is what has allowed WorkerBee to dive into the physics model, reverse-engineer it and make the required alterations to improve it.
WorkerBee is not, however, a video game designer or programmer by trade. He 's worked as a software engineer for the past two decades, and prior to that he was a car mechanic. A combination of these two skills have allowed him to create what is now one of the most popular and widely-used mods in RBR's mod-heavy history.
Designers creating new cars and tracks to unleash upon the Reddit community typically use his physics models as their foundation, building their own frameworks around it as one would design the body of a car around the necessity of housing its engine.
This avalanche of cars (and tracks) has caused some problems, however. New players coming into the game can find the entrenched community, its huge volume of content and its game-chaining mods, such as NGP, difficult to penetrate. The process of actually installing the game is also no simple matter, with an entire wiki available that takes you through the steps. Simply locating the most up-to-date downloads is difficult for a newcomer, which can make practising for regular leagues and tournaments challenging.
It's here that the role of curators come into play, individuals who essentially take up the task of community management in their own free time – a task of no small importance given that original developer Warthog Games no longer exists.
"When it comes to the tracks, it's been a long process of finding the best tracks and discarding the poorly-made ones," explains American Otis 'Deadstump' Clapp, curator of the r/simrally Reddit board. "Since the release of NGP we've given up using the 'normal' cars [that came on the original disc] and now use the NGP-supported cars exclusively because they work so much better."
Deadstump hosts a weekly rally event for visitors to r/simrally, the track and car selection of which is determined by himself and is made up of returning favourites as well as any quality new additions that he might stumble upon. The event represents a good way for new players to get involved with RBR in a social setting, as well as helping them set up their own home version of the game with the best (often most recent) mods by having someone else make the decision for them. For veteran players, Deadstump's rallies are a good way of embracing a competitive environment without having to commit to anything more time-consuming than one session a week.
In part, Deadstump enjoys spending his time curating RBR content specifically because of the sheer volume of it.
The fact that the likes of WorkerBee are capable of releasing an updated physics model that causes the need for curators is testament to the original quality provided by developer Warthog Games. Made in conjunction with the expertise of the late Richard Burns – who passed away in 2005 after a battle with cancer – the 2004 release marked a high point for simulation within the rally genre. It should come as no surprise, then, that car- and driving-lovers flock to the game and its modding community.
Like WorkerBee, DeadStump is a keen car enthusiast. Once or twice a year he acts as a marshal at live rally events, mirroring his online hobby when it comes to making sure competitors are able to race within a safe and structured environment.
"I became aware of rally driving during the time when Richard Burns was racing," explains Deadstump. "To be honest, I didn't like him then because he didn't drive for Subaru any more when I started watching. He and [Marcus] Gronholm were my 'bad guys' when they were at Peugeot. Looking back, though, he was a great driver and a good sportsman, and his death really sucked."
Like many fans of the game, then, Deadstump's original love for it didn't revolve around the legacy of Richard Burns himself. Players wanted a great rally game, no matter who was involved. However, since Burns' death, some players have reconsidered his role and come to appreciate it in a more rounded way. Certainly, a case could be made for the continued and increasing strength of RBR playing a part in the world champion's legacy.
WorkerBee, for instance, is slightly more prophetic on the impact that Richard Burns has had on the wider legacy of the game. "I think we [the community] appreciate that Richard was able to get involved in the development of the game, even though he was dealing with his illness. I mean, if he'd dedicated 100 percent of his time to driving in rallies, then maybe RBR wouldn't exist at all."
No matter how much Burns might be in the thoughts of the current community, it was his involvement that helped provide a physics system that WorkerBee was inspired to understand and alter in order to improve further. Those improvements triggered a volume of content that requires someone like Deadstump to curate and, in turn, that allows a game to survive that, by modern standards, should have disappeared long ago.
"I still remember the first time I was 'sitting' in a car in the RBR rally school," remembers WorkerBee. "Even when you were driving around slowly, it was so good at reproducing the feel of a real car. That absolutely convinced me that this was a game capable of feeling like a real rally. Basically, I wanted a game where I could drive, not a game that I could play, if you get the point?"
Four years after winning the World Rally Championship, and less than 17 months after the initial release of the game, Richard Burns lost his battle with cancer. As a lover of driving and racing, there is poignancy to the continued legacy of his being a game that allows players to attain that feeling of driving rather than playing.
It's that essence of true driving, inspired by one of the greats of the sport, that has allowed RBR to continue to enjoy such a long run. By abandoning the 'play', those people with a real interest and understanding of engineering and car physics can use their talents to continuously improve the core systems. RBR is not so much a game to be won, as a skill to be mastered.
Longevity at the top, then, as in so much of sport and life, is about concentrating on constant improvement as opposed to the attaining of immediate wins. It's the journey that's important. More than a few sims could learn a thing or two from that.
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