(This DevLog covers the GCR series as a whole. Most of the technical detail below comes from GCR4, since that is where the work is furthest along, but the same approach applies across all four games.) Hey, racing sim fans and retro gamers!
Welcome to our first DevLog about the GCR game series, formerly known as Grand Prix. In this update, we want to share where development stands, the improvements underway, the challenges we’re working through, and how you can help us shape parts of the games.
What This Re-release Is (and Isn’t)
We want to make it clear: this project is not about changing the simulation. Things that ‘go under the hood' are exactly why people still love and play these games after all these years. That pure feeling of racing a V10 car through a racing weekend or a full season is not something we want to mess with.
Our focus is on bringing the series forward in a way that makes it stable, fast, and straightforward to run on modern hardware. We want them to run properly on today’s PCs without the usual pile of workarounds, wrappers, and playing with configs until something finally works.
We are also dealing with some unfortunate licensing issues, which means we can no longer use some of the original names, brands, teams, drivers, and sponsor material. More on that shortly.
But the important thing is this: we want the games to remain as open and easy to modify as possible. We know how important modding is to Grand Prix community, and we want to make sure you have room to play with the game files, change things, restore some things back, invent new things, and generally do what racing sim fans have always done best.
The Big Leap Forward – DX8 to DX11
Grand Prix 4 was built on DirectX 8, which was cutting-edge technology at the time. Back then, it allowed the game to push a lot of work onto the GPU and use some very advanced effects for a racing game of that era.
The problem is that DirectX 8 is now very old and incompatible with modern systems. Many of you who still play older PC games know the drill: sometimes they run ok, sometimes they do not run at all, and sometimes you spend hours figuring out why you have no sound or can’t run it fullscreen. You can always use a wrapper of course, but that sometimes comes with a different set of problems.
So instead of relying on an external wrapper, we are doing the harder thing: modifying the game’s source code and moving the renderer to a relatively modern (DirectX 11) backend.
That is not an easy job. Much of the original rendering code is extremely low-level, and large sections are written in Assembly. Still, this is the proper way to do it. It gives us much more control, makes the game behave better on modern systems, and gives us a stronger base for the future.
Shaders
Another benefit of moving to a more modern graphics backend is that we can now use shaders.
In simple terms, shaders are sub-programs that tell the GPU how to draw things. That can mean anything from UI elements to car reflections, lighting, and many other visual effects.
In the original game, a lot of this was buried deep inside the game’s code. It worked, and it worked very well for its time, but it was fixed and hard to change.
Now, most of those graphical effects live in separate .hlsl files instead. That makes them easier to adjust, easier to fix and test, and potentially even opens extra options for modding.
To be clear, we are not trying to turn the game into something visually unrecognizable. The game would still look and feel like the way people remember. But having editable shaders opens up a lot of possibilities for the community.
Licensing Problems
Another big problem we are dealing with is licensing.
The original licenses that allowed the games to use the certain motorsport brand, team names, driver names, sponsor logos, and related material have expired. That means we cannot simply ship the original branded content again.
This is frustrating for us too. These games are all tied to a very specific era of racing, and we, as many of you, have a lot of nostalgia for the original teams, cars, drivers, and liveries, from what was possibly one of the greatest eras of that certain motorsport. But the reality is simple: if we do not have the rights to use something, we cannot include it in the re-release.
There are just south of 300 brands included in Grand Prix 4 in one way or another, across tracks, car liveries, textures, menu images, and other in-game art. That adds up to thousands of textures and images that need to be checked, replaced, or cleaned up.
Naturally, for the third-party brands one of the first things we did was try to contact the rights holders. There is just one small problem: actually reaching the right person at a large company in 2026 is sometimes near impossible.
Our PR team has sent thousands of emails and made hundreds of calls. The results were not quite as impressive as those numbers sound. When we do manage to reach the right people, the response has often been very positive. Only a few companies have directly said no. The bigger problem is that most requests either never reach the right department, get stuck somewhere inside the company, or disappear into the mysterious corporate void.
That said, we do already have some very big names on board, and we are genuinely thankful to those companies. Work on this front is still ongoing.
Asset Updates
Because of the licensing situation, we had to make a lot of changes to the game art.
The majority of these changes are focused on replacing logos, brands, and other material that we cannot use anymore. In those cases, the original branded art is being replaced with fictional logos and fictional names.
We are also making a small number of other fixes to the models and textures where needed. For example, some old UV coordinates caused track textures to appear stretched or distorted, so we are cleaning up a few things like that.
We are being careful with these changes. Updated models should still work with the original game’s textures. We know some of you will want to bring back the original look in your own installs. That is why we want to make the files as exposed and easy to change as we reasonably can.
As of today, 1,987 textures have been replaced or updated. In practical terms, changing those back would mostly be a matter of replacing texture files, assuming you have the ones you want to use.
The same goes for names. Team and driver names are now stored in a simple .json text file, so changing them should be much easier than digging through old binary files. We want this to be easy even for people who have never modded the game before.
Community Vote: Help Us Name the Grid
This is the part where we could use your help.
Since we cannot use the original team, driver and sponsor names, all of them need replacing. Some of that work is already done. If you look closely at the screenshots further up, you will spot a few of the fictional brands our art team has been quietly slipping in.
The rest of the grid is still open. We would much rather it came from you than from us.
For this first round we are after the eleven team names on the 2001 grid in GCR4. Driver names get their own round in DevLog 2, once the teams are settled.
What we are looking for
Names that feel like they belong on the 2001 grid without being the real thing. Think of it as inventing a team that could plausibly have existed, rather than disguising one that did.
Suitable: Scuderia Rosso. Modena Corse.
Not really suitable: Fararri. Ferraro. Definitely-Not-A-Ferrari.
We know the second kind is funnier. The problem is that a deliberate near miss is exactly the sort of thing that lands us straight back where we started, and we have had quite enough licensing conversations for one project.
A few ground rules:
- Period appropriate
- It should look like it belongs on a car in 2001
- Original, not a misspelling
- No real team, driver or sponsor names, and nothing that is obviously one of them with the letters shuffled
- Nothing offensive (we will quietly bin anything that is)
- You do not need a name for every team. One good one is plenty
Two ways to submit, pick whichever suits you:
Post in the pinned thread on the GCR4 Discussions board. This is the one we would recommend. Half the fun is reading what everyone else comes up with, and we will be in there replying.
Or use the submission form if you would rather not post publicly - https://tally.so/r/pbQREE No account needed, and nothing is required beyond the names themselves.
What you get
Any name that makes it into the final game gets a credit in the game itself, under whatever name you ask us to use.
On top of that, everyone who enters goes into a random draw for a digital copy of Throttle Trace, our newest racing game, out tomorrow in Early Access. It is a very different beast to GCR, two inputs only, throttle and brake, but there is a proper simulation running underneath it, tire wear and heat and fuel and aero, and it ships with a track editor and Workshop support. If the modding talk further up this post is the bit you cared about, it is worth a look.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4535730/Throttle_Trace/
What happens next
Submissions are open until Wednesday 14 October. After that we will pull together a shortlist and put it to a public vote in DevLog 2, and the winning names go into the game.
One small note. By submitting a name you are happy for us to use it in the game.
That is it. Go on, surprise us.
