Classic F1 games: Super Monaco GP

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Super Monaco GP appeared on Sega, Amiga, Atari and other formats in 1989

Codemasters’ F1 2009 game was seen on video for the first time yesterday – which led to lots of comments about favourite F1 games of years passed. Guest writer Gerard Hetman remembers Super Monaco GP.

Produced by Sega for the Genesis/Mega Drive platform, Super Monaco GP was released in 1990 after being styled on an arcade-based game of the same name.

With two modes of play, an awesome soundtrack, and many lifelike features (including a grid girl appearing at the start of each round) Super Monaco GP is still widely played and remembered today, and helped inspire legions of F1 fans the world over to develop their first interests in the sport.

The basics

The Genesis/Mega Drive-based version of Super Monaco GP contains two main game play modes: "Super Monaco GP" and "World Championship." In the "Super Monaco GP" mode, players first qualify and then race a five-lap contest similar to the arcade game. Through the race, new position limits force the player to maintain top positions, or the race will end. Winning the first race put the player into a second, rain-filled race with the same demands. Bagging the second race win rewards the player with little more than a shot of a podium ceremony and a trip back to the start menu.

The "World Championship" mode is the centrepiece of the game, and gives players the chance to experience the ups and downs of the Formula 1 circus. Each of the 16 circuits used in the 1989 season is contained in the mode.

These were Jacarepagua (Brazil), Imola (San Marino), Monaco, Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez (Mexico), Phoenix (USA), Circuit Gilles Villeneuve (Canada), Paul Ricard (France), Silverstone (Britain), Hockenheimring (Germany), Hungaroring (Hungary), Spa (Belgium), Monza (Italy), Estoril (Portugal), Jerez (Spain), Suzuka (Japan) and Adelaide (Australia).

The game contains 16 one-driver teams which bear loose resemblances to real-life drivers and teams of the era. The teams are broken down into four groups, based on team competitiveness and prestige. Players start off with the Minarae team, in the "C" group.

The teams and drivers (with nationality) are:

"A" Class

Madonna A. Asselin (France)
Firenze F. Elssler (Austria)
Millions G. Alberti (Italy)
Bestowal A. Picos (Brazil)

"B" Class

Blanche J. Herbin (France)
Tyrant M. Hamano (Japan)
Losel E. Pacheco (Spain)
May G. Turner (Great Britain)

"C" Class

Bullets B. Miller (USA)
Dardan E. Bellini (Italy)
Linden M. Moreau (France)
Minarae Player starts game with team

"D" Class

Rigel R. Cotman (Great Britain)
Comet E. Torino (Finland)
Orchis C. Tegner (Sweden)
Zeroforce P. Klinger (West Germany)

After selecting between an automatic, three-speed, or seven-speed transmission at the start of each Grand Prix weekend, players can take as much free practice as they wish, before running a one-lap qualifying session. After setting a place on the grid (players start no worse than P15, even if they crash on their qualifying lap) they are allowed to select a rival for the race. If a player challenges and beats the same rival twice, they normally get an offer to join that team, hence giving them access to more competitive cars with which to score more points and, eventually, win the championship.

Here’s a video from the first round of the game in "World Championship" mode:

Players get points for finishing in the top six, and keep progressing through the seasons until they win their first World Championship. Besides bragging rights, wining the championship also gets the player a ride with Team Madonna, if the player has not already earned the seat.

Beating G. Ceara

At the first race of the title defence season, the player will be surprised to find he’s being challenged at the first race by a new driver in the Bullets team, G. Ceara – an obvious replication of Ayrton Senna. Ceara quickly proves to be quite a challenge, and if the player cannot beat the talented newbie, he’ll find that Madonna will drop him in favour of Ceara, sending the player packing to a lower-tier team. From there, the goal is to progress back up the ranks and win a second World Championship.

It is almost impossible to keep up with Ceara. Although it takes several near-perfect laps to catch up to and overtake him, the good news is once he is passed, Ceara is relatively easy to keep behind. Once he’s beaten twice, Ceara becomes a non-factor in future races, and even the least skilled drivers should have little trouble running away with the title in the Madonna Car.

However, Ceara keeps challenging the player while driving for Bullets, and it’s quite funny that after each victory, the player keeps getting offers to replace Ceara with the Bullets team! Here’s an excellent demonstration of a challenger beating Ceara at Imola. Note the impressive sub-50s lap times:

Upon winning their second drivers’ title, the player beats the game, with a montage of the competing drivers set to a nifty theme song as the parting shot.

Realisms and simulations

Super Monaco GP offered an impressively lifelike depiction of F1 given its enormous limitations. While the area surrounding the driving surface at each track is featureless, the backgrounds and cityscapes for each circuit are ultra-realistic, from the forests of Hockenheim to the airfield at Silverstone to the deserts of Phoenix.

While the team names are not exact, each team uses the corresponding colours of their assumed real-life counterparts-the only exception is Madonna, who swapped the red and white Marlboro colors (as the team is presumably based around McLaren) for a more child-friendly yellow and red scheme. Each rival driver also has a unique personality, reflected in the on-screen comments they offer when accepting or offering a challenge.

Moving up to the top teams is the key objective for every player, but Super Monaco GP mirrors real F1 in the manner that drivers can also be dropped for poor performance. Indeed, players can choose to rival a team lower on the pecking order?óÔé¼?ª but if they lose to a lower-ranked rival, they will be challenged at the next round by the same driver, who has an eye on the player’s race seat!

While the game dose offer passwords to save progress, the combinations of letters and numbers are extremely complex, and take a great deal of time to write down and then re-enter. As a result, if you are playing Super Monaco GP on Mega Drive/Genesis, make sure to have plenty of time on your hands!

The game also has several bugs, most notably the flying flagman at the end of races (below). In terms of faults, it is truly difficult to see what could be made much better in the game. One glaring fact that shows up is players always have ideal weather for each round, but unlike the real-life circuits, this does not detract from the action on the track.

Real stories

Super Monaco GP cartridge
For fans such as me, Super Monaco GP offered an introduction to the world of F1 that I would never have had otherwise. Growing up in 1990s America, before the internet and with little American involvement in the sport, F1 was an unknown commodity outside of motorsport circles in the USA.

I got my copy of the game from my uncle as a birthday present in 1992. In the ensuing years, I played the game frequently and became a bit familiar with the sort, despite having no other exposure to Formula 1. I’ve been raised in a sports-mad family, but most of our focus has been on the tradition big three American sports of baseball, basketball, and my personal favourite-American football.

It wasn’t until 2007, when Lewis Hamilton’s win at Indianapolis gained front-page attention in the American sports media, that I acquired a true taste for F1. Despite seeing the United States Grand Prix disappear from the calendar just as I was becoming interested, I dove in at the time and have never looked back. As I play the game now, it is quite interesting to drive the tracks that, for many years, I only referred to by the name of the country they were in. But now, I am able to add names to the faces and the places I have recognized for so long.

Super Monaco GP was followed by a sequel, Ayrton Senna’s Super Monaco GP II, which featured Senna as a character in the game, as well as in marketing and promotions for the title. Today, the game is immortalised in countless YouTube clips, as well as with a Facebook group created by longtime fan Liz McLaren. Copies of Super Monaco GP are never hard to find in used game shops worldwide, and if you have an old Sega Genesis or Mega Drive laying around , it will surely be worth a few moments of your time to fire up and jump back to the days of Senna, Prost, Mansell and the rest?óÔé¼?ª

This is a guest article by Gerard Hetman. Want to share your passion for your favourite retro F1 game? Write us a guest article.

30 comments on “Classic F1 games: Super Monaco GP”

  1. Ah Super Monaco GP!

    I can entirely sympathise with this giving you an interest in F1, it was the same for me. I must have first played this game when I was about 6 or 7 (the mid-90s) and it got me interested in racing.

    I managed to beat the game at that age, I think I deserve a cookie for that! ;)

    1. Very good- I diden’t beat it until a few years ago ;)

  2. Haha – memories! I remember going for the flag man each time at the finish!

    1. HAHAHA! Glad I wasn’t the only one!

  3. Super Monaco GP was my first exposure to the sport as well, though I was too young to watch the races at that age. Nevertheless I played this game a lot and always enjoyed the challenge of trying to win the championship in a lesser car.

    It wasn’t until 1996 when I got a Playstation for Christmas along with the fantastic original Formula 1 that I picked up the sport full time. I’ve watched nearly every race since Melbourne ’97.

  4. Very nice article….although i was into consoles when i was younger, i had completely forgot about the genesis and mega drive. thanks for the trip down memory. however i must admit that i never played that specific game…

  5. Did he just take Rivazza in excess of 200mph?! Haha! Great stuff.

  6. The first game I ever owned! I can still remember the menu music.

    Very much worth downloading a Megadrive emulator for. Not that I’d endorse such a practice, naturally… :P

  7. I had this on the game gear. I remember being astonished I could hear speech on a console!

  8. A very good game, that was. Used to play it when I was younger.

    I have to say, though – you can’t beat Grand Prix 4. I lost 2 hours last night to that game – far too addictive.

  9. OMG! This game was nowhere near as good as rFactor… why didn’t people just wait 15 years for rFactor to come out?!

    1. Mark Hitchcock
      20th August 2009, 17:18

      haha damn, you beat me to it :p

    2. Hahahaha :D

  10. I look forward to a review of Geoff Crammond’s Formula One Grand Prix

  11. If you’re looking for a retro F1 game, F1 97 is the way to go. I last played it only a few months ago ’cause my PS3 broke, and even now the arcade mode in particular is still great fun.

    1. That game has an excellent cheat where you can have almost muppet-style flappy mouth figures of Murray and Martin plopped at the bottom of the screen, lip-syncing with the commentary. Very gigglesome!

      1. All the cheats on F1 97 were amazing :D The wipeout mode was funny and the big wheels.

        That game was perfect with the arcade mode and grand prix mode.

        1. I do miss it, but I no longer have any form of Sony-branded console on which to play it.

  12. At least it was better looking and played better than Nigel Mansells Grand Prix on the Amiga though.

    I struggled through a world championship when I was younger. Why did I do it, why?
    I found some nostalgic pics here.
    http://www.lemonamiga.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php%3Fid%3D1439
    Maybe Nigel Mansells GP was only £9.99?
    Thank goodness I only had to wait a couple of years for Geoff Crammond to come along with Grand Prix.

  13. Any chance of one of these articles on the heroicly vintage game that was vrooom!!!?

  14. It was a video game that got me into F1 too! Only in my case, that game was Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix (circa 1994?). Just the intro sequence to that game gave me chills!

  15. I collect consoles and I have countless numbers + games. I couldn’t remember it untill he mentions the bug. When you drove into the marshall with the flag and he flew!! that brought it all flooding back to me then!!

  16. My first racing game. Oddly enough, my father picked this up as a gift for me one day and it came as a double-pack with a Michael Jackson adventure game!

    This game was also the first ever recipient of a perfect 10.0 rating by the gaming magazine EGM, which I find fascinating.

  17. night rider Atari
    Revs Sir Geoff Crammond
    GP4 As Above

    In between the classics would be-Out Run, Crazy Cars, Crazy Cars 2, Lotus Challenge, Ferrari F40(Codemasters). And the best off all Grand Prix Legends. Sir Geoff is the comman theme.

  18. Good article – never noted the game before – possibly to old even then – playing with classic cars and bikes – but it made me reach for my copy of grand prix 3 – it has the original leaflet with microposes other games on it – may load it on and give it a whirl again – again good article

  19. Doh! It was Night Driver Atari 2600 with paddle steering.

  20. Thanks for all the comments guys- glad so many of you remember it!! I honestly diden’t learn about the flag man until many years after I started playing, so credit to you all for beating me to it.

    As for the Geoff Crammond games, I have heard all good things about them, but I don’t think we ever got it on our side of the AtlanticI did this article because I have loads of experience with the game, but I have yet to try the Geoff Crammond creations.

    1. In fact one major bonus about Geoff Crammonds Grand Priz was the unique multiplayer option.

      You would take it in turns to race and then control would go back to AI and the next player would race. It meant for the first time a group of friends could race F1 against each other. We always had one friend who would be more of a demolition derby driver. I don’t think that really changes. :)

  21. Great article. That realy was a great game, but what about Grand Prix Circuit? That game was ausome for it’s time and I spent hours imagening to beat Ayrton Senna on a race :)

  22. My main hobby is Formula One, and it’s just because of this game :-)

    My parents bought me a Megadrive in Christmas ’96 (yes, very late for this console, but it was cheap…) and this game came in a 6 games cartridge.

    I absolutely loved (and still love) it :-)

    And I am proud of having been able to defeat G.Ceara way before Youtube was around :-D

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