Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing

Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing is a racing game built on the license of then-Formula 1 world champion Nigel Mansell, and on the Super Nintendo it offered one of the most comprehensive attempts of its time to simulate a season of circuit racing. The player progresses through a career from the lower classes up to the pinnacle of motorsport, having to handle not just the races themselves but also qualifying and the gradual buildup of their driver's experience across several seasons full of different circuits.

The game tries to combine arcade controls with respect for real tracks and car behavior, so corners and braking points require practice and feel rather than just flooring the accelerator. Gameplay also includes setting up the car before a race and tracking your position in the overall championship standings, which forces the player to think of individual races in the context of the whole season rather than as isolated drives. The rear-camera view behind the car and the smooth scrolling of the track represented solid technical performance on the SNES, even though the graphics naturally don't reach the detail of later generations of racing games. The music and engine sound effects round out the atmosphere of a professional racing circuit, and together with the presentation of the season and titles, give the game the stamp of an official motorsport license, something players at the time valued in few other racing games on the platform.

At release, it was one of the few more seriously-minded licensed racing games on the SNES that tried to approximate the structure of an actual Formula 1 season instead of just a collection of unrelated tracks. Today it's seen as an interesting probe into the early era of licensed motorsport games on consoles, valuable especially for fans of nineties Formula 1 and for collectors mapping the development of the racing genre on 16-bit platforms, even though the controls and pace may feel archaic to today's player.

Why play it: Fans of nineties Formula 1 and collectors mapping the development of the racing genre will be pleased by Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing's serious take on the season, even though the controls and pace feel archaic today.