Papyrus Design Group

» see papy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sim racing was a category with an entry fee, and Papyrus set it. You needed a wheel bolted to something solid, you needed to accept that the car would spin the first forty times you asked it for anything, and you needed to treat the thing as a discipline rather than a game. Almost nobody signed up. The people who did are still there, twenty years after the studio that built it stopped existing.

David Kaemmer and Omar Khudari founded Papyrus Design Group in 1987 in Watertown, Massachusetts. Their first release, Indianapolis 500: The Simulation in 1989, let you change the car before you drove it, adjusting wings and suspension and tire compound, and then made you live with what you had chosen. That was new. Racing games until then had been about the track, and Papyrus made them about the vehicle instead.

IndyCar Racing followed in 1993 and NASCAR Racing in 1994, and the NASCAR series became the studio's whole commercial existence for a decade. Sierra On-Line bought Papyrus in late 1995, after IndyCar Racing II, and Khudari left not long afterward. Kaemmer stayed, and in 1998 the studio shipped the thing it is actually remembered for.

The Turkish internet cafe of 2002 to 2005 was a room of identical machines rented by the hour, and what got played there was Counter-Strike. That economy could not hold a Papyrus game. Grand Prix Legends asked for equipment nobody was going to bolt to a rented desk and for a hundred hours before it started being fun, and an hour of cafe time was a currency you spent on something that paid out inside that hour. This was a genre that needed a room of your own, and the room of your own was not how most people here got online.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Grand Prix Legends shipped in 1998 and modeled the 1967 Formula One season, which is the year the cars had roughly four hundred horsepower, no downforce worth mentioning and tires that were essentially a rumor. Papyrus modeled all of that honestly, and the result was a game with a reputation for being close to undrivable. Reviewers said so admiringly. Sales were poor. The community that formed around it started building its own tracks and cars and physics within months and did not stop.

The NASCAR line kept the lights on: NASCAR Racing 3 in 1999, NASCAR Racing 4 in 2001, then annual editions. The last one, NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, arrived in February 2003 with Kaemmer already gone, having left the studio a few months before it shipped. It is generally treated as the best thing the studio made, and the modding community around it is still active now, which for a licensed sports title from 2003 is close to unheard of.

~ the day it died ~

Sierra passed to Havas and then to Vivendi, and inside Vivendi a small racing studio in Massachusetts was not a priority. The NASCAR license expired at the end of the first quarter of 2004 and NASCAR Racing 2003 Season came off the shelves. On 5 April 2004 the papy.com website went dark. In May, Vivendi Universal Games closed the studio.

The interesting part is what happened next rather than the closure itself, which was routine. On 28 May 2004, Vivendi and Papyrus signed the copyrights to NASCAR Racing 2003 Season over to FIRST.net, LLC, a company Kaemmer had set up weeks earlier. He had bought his own last game back from the people who had just fired everyone who made it.

~ the next chapter ~

FIRST.net became iRacing, which launched in 2008 and is now the thing that professional drivers practice on and that broadcasters cut to during rain delays. Its networking and its replay system started as NR2003 code. The tire model has been rewritten several times since, but the lineage is not in dispute and Kaemmer has never pretended otherwise.

So Papyrus is a studio that died and then kept operating under a different name with the same founder and the same source tree. What actually ended in 2004 was the retail sim, the boxed product with a license on the front that a publisher renews or does not renew. The thing that replaced it charges a subscription and owns its own physics, which is exactly the structure that would have kept the original studio alive.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »