Retro Review: Ford Simulator

Although I work in the IT industry I've never really been one for games. I'd describe myself as a very casual gamer who maybe spends a couple of hours a month gaming, and I'm an impatient sort who wants to make quick progress so I tend to stick to simple fast-paced games. As a car enthusiast, naturally it is driving games that appeal most to me and nowadays there is no shortage of ultra-realistic games and simulators to suit all tastes. I grew up in the simpler time of the late eighties and early nineties though, and here I look back at a very odd, obscure and crude program (I hesitate to even call it a game) from 30 years ago that played a part in shaping my childhood.

What kind of super-realistic simulation awaits when I press the space bar?

As its name might suggest, Ford Simulator is an 'advergame' created for one single purpose: promoting the Ford Motor Company and its products. It was a DOS program that came on a 5.25 inch floppy disk (who remembers those?) and I believe was given away by Ford dealers in North America, so I haven't the faintest idea how we came to acquire a copy in the UK. Published in 1987 with stunning CGA graphics that rendered everything in turquoise and red, it features a selection of the US Ford, Lincoln and Mercury range for the 1988 model year. This was the first of five editions that would run until 1994, all with the same intent but updated with newer cars and better graphics, although none were exactly cutting-edge.

The finest range of new cars 1987 has to offer. I suppose they're vaguely recognisable.

The buyer's guide is best described as an early attempt at those car configurators that all manufacturers now have on their websites to allow you to design and order your perfect car, but without being able to see what it actually looks like. There are no images beyond some tiny and basic line drawings that look vaguely the same shape as the real cars, so everything is described by reams of text in the default DOS font. It lacks intelligence as you can choose an option package and then add options from that package individually as well, and once you've done that you can print out a sticker detailing the spec, which you presumably then had to take to a dealer if you wanted to actually order that car. Finally there are some simple algorithms to calculate the repayments (at list price naturally), but the system allows you to enter any values so you can create a payment plan that suits you but isn't possible in reality, which isn't very useful.

28 grand's worth of American Granada on a very silly finance package

That's all rather dull, so maybe the driving part will be more exciting? The 1980s were a real low point in American automotive design so the sixteen drivable cars include such delights as the forgettable Mercury Topaz, the badge-engineered Mazda 121 that was the Festiva, and Detroit's hideous attempt at an Escort. Most interesting from a European perspective is the inclusion of the Merkur Scorpio and XR4Ti, unsuccessful and short-lived US-market versions of the Granada and Sierra. This is one area where the original appears better than Ford Simulator II, a so-called simulator that only allows you to drive one car! In practice though, because they all drive the same way there is no real point in offering a choice of car.

This looks a bit more promising - now we can go for a drive!

Yes, you read that right: the driving experience is absolutely identical for every single car from the little Festiva to the V8 Mustang so it in no way simulates how any of these cars would drive in the real world, and seems to have been programmed to make it as boring as possible. The dashboard is always the same and the only noteworthy feature is that the digital clock in the centre console actually works and shows the current system time, which must have been quite sophisticated in 1987 yet doesn't add anything to the experience. In keeping with the American nanny-state safety-first attitude of the 1980s, you have to press S to "fasten your seatbelt" before it'll let you pull away, which is just an annoyance.

Why do I have to fasten a non-existent safety belt before I can drive?

The controls are quite bizarre, not least because you get two accelerators! Caps Lock acts as a normal throttle (and why use that key?) while repeatedly tapping the space bar is supposed to provide quicker acceleration for the drag race. On manual cars, gears are selected by pressing the numbers 1 to 5, and another odd key assignment sees Alt used as the brake, but the left and right arrows for steering are at least logical. The steering itself is utterly horrible though and it's virtually impossible to stay on the track in any bend as it reacts so slowly and jerkily. It doesn't keep turning if you hold down the key so you have to keep jabbing at it to add more lock, and doesn't even self-centre when you let go, so anything other than the straight-line drag race is tedious.

If real Fords drove like this there's no way I'd buy one

Don't expect realistic speed either as performance-wise every car is the same: no matter whether you choose a family hatchback, a big 4x4, a sports coupe or a luxury sedan they all accelerate at exactly the same glacially slow rate and top out at 96mph, the only difference being manual or automatic transmission. Acceleration is so slow it isn't even possible to get into top gear before the end of the quarter-mile drag strip, but on the other tracks once you've eventually reached maximum speed you don't ever need to slow down, and the PC speaker sound of the engine running flat out soon starts to grate. All tracks are completely flat and billiard-table smooth so there is no need for any suspension model, and with next to no scenery flashing past and no body roll you don't get any sensation of speed. If you stop on the grass at the side of the track it's game over as the car simply will not pull away and just sits there never moving regardless of how hard you rev it, which is frankly pathetic.

Flat out at 96. I'm pretty sure a Mustang GT can go faster than that.

Touring mode is just an aimless cruise around empty roads with no real purpose except to familiarise yourself with the awful driving experience, the other three events are simple time trials with no leaderboard, and that's as competitive as it gets. There are no other vehicles anywhere and the only obstacles are the cones in the slalom. Hitting these doesn't do anything other than make a beeping noise and give you some penalty points as there is no damage model whatsoever. I suppose Ford didn't want a game where their perfect new cars get damaged but a driving simulator with no consequences of the way you drive is pretty damned unrealistic.

Uh oh, I'm about to hit that cone. Don't worry though, nothing will happen to the car.

There had to be an educational bit and every driving experience ends with an "infocenter" showing off two of the advanced technologies found in Ford cars, including how such dull things as rack and pinion steering and independent suspension work. The graphics and animation are pretty dismal and don't really show you anything meaningful, my favourite being the demonstration of a turbocharger providing extra power by drawing another line on a graph! Made in the days before mice, the program has an over-reliance on odd function keys to make things happen, mostly F3 and F8 to navigate around the infocenter.

Wow, that's really convinced me to buy a turbo Ford

The final part of the experience is a pretty standard feedback questionnaire, asking what you thought of the program, how likely you are to buy a new Ford and if you want them to send you any more info on particular cars (but it only allows you to request brochures for two models). Remember that Caps Lock is the accelerator in driving mode? That was a stupid choice as it messes with the capitalisation when typing text here. Of course there was no internet in those days so you had to print out your answers and post them to Ford, and I wonder who ever bothered.

How do I rate this game? I don't think Ford really want to know...

That's your lot, and within an hour I'd seen it all and got bored with it - even as an easily-impressed young child I remember it being a dull experience that I never spent much time on, and if I was an adult in 1987 I probably wouldn't have thought much of it either. I'm left scratching my head trying to work out what the point of Ford Simulator actually was. There's no competitive element to interest even the most casual gamer, it's so laughably far removed from reality that it utterly fails at being a simulator, and I doubt it ever convinced anyone to go out and buy a Ford. You'd achieve far more by visiting your local showroom, reading the brochures and taking a test drive.

There's really not much to do here

If you really want to experience Ford Simulator for yourself, you can download it from various abandonware sites or run it in your browser here. I wouldn't bother though: it's a crap program even by 1987 standards and is best filed as an obscure curio that has a little bit of novelty value in a "what on earth were they thinking?" way that soon wears off. I played it purely for the nostalgic reasons of having had it as a child, and more than anything else this crude 'simulator' is a reminder of just how far computing technology has come in the last 30 years.