Perspective from a 51 year old Gamer

[ETandK]

“Grazie Infinte” dear Kunos Simulazioni Team, I mean this sincerely.

This brings me to the point and motivation for this post, PERSPECTIVE.

You have taken gazillions of zeros and ones, mixed it with your technical ability, added passion, talent, and precious time, and cooked this fantastic dish called Assetto Corsa,

It is not only a racing game or simulation, it is much more.

Assetto Corsa is a platform for us to live our passion, to create memories, and have fun.

To explain this is not that easy but I will try,

I have been a PC gamer since the early 90s and always enjoyed 3 genres, Flight & Racing Simulators and First person shooters. Played Doom no cheats, flew in EF 2000, Fleet Defender, MS Flightsim, raced in the epic GP2 by Geoff Crammond and later GTR.

Autoexec.bat, Config.sys had to be fine tuned to squeeze every byte of RAM to optimize the early games. No Gigabytes of this and GHz of that, basic hardware only, the days before Pentium processors and high speed graphics cards.

And as simple as these games were it created memories, even today I recall some of those from my virtual life.

And this is what I experienced most recently and made me think, driving the beautiful F2006 and now the epic the F2002 F1 Ferrari of Michael Schumacher, and watching my replays brought a lump to my throat, understand why since I am a very old fan since 1993 who followed his entire career.

To experience such strong emotions from a game, how is this possible?

Only because of the passion which was used to create this beautiful game and the fantastic mods by our talented community can explain this sensation.

Thank you for letting us live this fantasy, creating memories and having fun, this is after all what it’s about.

To the rest, don’t loose perspective, have respect for the talent and enjoy this era you live in with all the choices, software and hardware power options before you demand more, criticize, troll, whatever you call it.

Wake up and smell the coffee sunshine, life is too short and precious to waste.

Only burn rubber!......................

Cheers

ET

 

[Anthemius]

Well, We, the people over 40 y.o. (b.t.w., I am too young, just 41 ), we can consider ourselves lucky from this point of view: We grew up in parallel with the evolution of Personal Computers (PCs) from the very beginning.

Most of us bought many of the next generation computers, i.e. ATARI 2600, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, commodore 64, Amiga, TI, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, e.t.c.),

we lived the gaming experience on every screen that you can imagine (BW and Color TVs, then on Monochrome Monitors (green), on colored CRT monitors with VGA and sVGA (wow!) resolution, later we bought the slim ones with LCD, TFT and LED technology,we played games on consoles with 8-bit graphics, in gaming machines (mame32 roms), on PCs without sound card (they have not been invented yet(!)), we loved games like enduro racer, outrun, spyhunter, chuckie egg, double dragon, e.t.c., in an era where the term "gaming controller" was unknown, since there was only one word to cover anything apart from the keyboard: joystick!

I suppose that most of us have seen the movie "Electric Dreams" on 1984, (and remembers the movie song ), we were impressed with the future crew PC demos and the music by the purple motion team (and how is it possible to fit too much info in a few bytes!), we bought at least two of the 2400bps, 14.4Kbps, 56K MODEMs, in order to play the multiplayer mode of Need for Speed with our friends at the other side of the city, some of us we were chatting even before IRC (mirc and pirch) through ytalk unix command, we used to print the PC game walkthroughs and university thesis on 9pin dot matrix printers, e.t.c....

After all, I think it sounds quite logical that now I am playing games using a high-end graphics card with a triple screen setup and a full wheel/pedals/shifter hardware... I suppose that I should also say "thanks to KUNOS" for making it happen!

 

[Yapci]

This is why I appreciate every single feature sims have now and still get astonished when new ones are released (this tire models...man!!!).

I'm young but started with a cheap pc with gp4 and the born of rFactor and a Logitech wingman gp (after some years of keyboard and mouse...) so having a g27, a csl seat and a medium pc nowadays is enough to enjoy more than were I was a teen learning to drive in a F1 car!!!

We all must learn to appreciate we're have we come in just a few years of intensive development in software and hardware.

 

[smasha]

49 here.
I was an Amiga boy in my youth.
Indy 500 and Geoff Crammond's F1 gp.
Our family did have an Atari St in the late 70s though.
My fav driving game for that console was Night Driver.

I remember that racing controller on the first page fondly.

 

[smasha]

Just found this intriguing racing game on this Amiga tube which made full use of the machines capabilities.

56 min mark.
Very interesting.

 

[Andy_J]

49 here.
I was an Amiga boy in my youth.
Indy 500 and Geoff Crammond's F1 gp.
Our family did have an Atari St in the late 70s though.
My fav driving game for that console was Night Driver.

I too started on Spectrums and Commodore 64'S Before moving up to Atari ST's and Amiga's prior to my move to 386 pc's.
ps Atari ST's were released in 1985.

 

[smasha]

Getting old lol.
Sorry,I meant to say Atari 2800.
Never had an Atari St ,only the Amiga.
Here in Australia ,the Amigas were 799 if I remember and I bought a Phillips 14 inch monitor to go with it which cost 499.
The store was Maxwell's in Collingwood,Victoria and as a young bloke,it was my haven.
It was one of the first big stores with games in Victoria and was always full.
Aaah,great times.

 

[Fernando Zart]

autoexec.bat and config.sys - good ol'days, where a few commands and device drivers loaded on "high memory" would do the trick. 47 here, messing with IT since the Tk era. Heck, even on OS/2! Geez.

 

[hodge like]

41 year old here & been chasing the driving thrill since ZX Spectrum days. Relatively new to PC racing (18 months) & have a decent rig setup. I initially bought the PC for AC & will be honest I was like "its ok I suppose" but back then I new very little about installing mods & as such, it sat in my Steam account doing nothing. Discovered all the other driving titles & then recently put a lot of time back to AC, taking advantage to the wealth & quality of mods available. Nothing quite like doing both a practice or race then sitting back & watching replay thinking crikey, this is superb. Not typing more, I want to drive (make the most of my day off work haha)

 

[ALB123]

The first gaming system in my house was Intellivision. My brother got this game "Auto Racing" for Christmas. I got a baseball game. Notice the smooth bend of the road and also check out the driver who didn't quite make it and ended up in the thick grass!

The Commodore 64 followed. By time I turned 12 years old I had already turned into quite the software pirate. I was using dialups & hacked codes to call the "elite" BBS's all over the country. After all, I couldn't give my parents a $1,000 phone bill each month. I had two C64's by time I turned 14 multiplexed to a single 10MB hard disk drive. It's amazing just how incredible 10MB of storage was back then. I saved up my newspaper delivering money for months and months to buy that. I paid $500 for a used Lt. Kernal HDD. Ran my own BBS on one C64 and played games on the other. To look back and think of the games we used to play and then glance at our screens to see what's running currently... Man... We live in great times!

 

[minidriver]

at 39, this thread makes me feel young

I started off on a TR(a)S(h)-80 with some kind of ascii based racing game loaded from cassette. then indy 500 / Microprose GP1 and 2, and test drives. then put it all on hold until Dirt Rally, tinkered a little with RBR and GT over the years but was too busy wasting my life away outside of the PC!

 

[Oops]

Hi all this must be the thread for all the oldies lol, 54 here, I started with the atari then moved on to the amstrad, but I must say that I have just got an Oculus rift and omg with the tweaks to get assetto corsa playable with the rift, it is just amazing that's the only way to describe it, it really feels like you're sitting in the car, it just brings a smile to my face and I havn't even done much racing I just sit in the car and look around, I even got the wife to try it and she (who hates gaming btw) was just blown away now I'm sure that the other racing games that are compatible with the rift e.g. Pcars, live for speed etc are just as good but to be honest I haven't gotten around to them yet lol.

 

[AndrewBo]

Youngsters , all off you...lol. 55 here. My father ( born 1920 ) once told me , that when he was young, there were nearly no cars on the streets. He lived in Bremen.
Well, when he died, mankind was on the moon.....
I have the same feeling nowadays: When I was young ( And DAMN, i am still young ) we had no cellphones, PC, colourTV etc.
And now? VR, PCs all over my house, a handhold PC ( smartphone) , Microwave, and i am sure, when I die, mankind has landed on Mars.
I LOVE IT.
Cheers
Andrew

 

[AndrewBo]

Well, We, the people over 40 y.o. (b.t.w., I am too young, just 41 ), we can consider ourselves lucky from this point of view: We grew up in parallel with the evolution of Personal Computers (PCs) from the very beginning.

You are so right mate. 100 %

 

[LilSki]

 

[AndrewBo]

@LilSki
This one is for you

As i have said before: Getting old doesn't mean being old....

 

[LilSki]

@LilSki
This one is for you

As i have said before: Getting old doesn't mean beeing old....

You're going to need a LOT of Evian . Maybe through some Ensure in there just to be safe!

 

[fortyfivekev]

A young 53 year old here. Started with F1GP on Atari ST, then onto Indy500 and ICR2. Makes me laugh when people on here are moaning about AC physics or AMS graphics, etc. they really don't know how lucky they are

 

[ALB123]

50 isn't old anymore. I don't even think 60 is old anymore. 70+ is old. And even that isn't a steadfast rule. Look at how many rock stars from the 1970s are still touring and playing 3 hour shows, running around, etc... And due to advances in nutrition and medicine - people being aware of what it takes to take care of your body throughout your adult life, it's only going to get better and better.

For those of you pushing 55 or 60, go look at a photo of your parents at 55 or 60. You'll be shocked at how much older they look, generally speaking. Remember when cigarettes were advertised as a health benefit? Doctors smoking in hospitals while talking to patients, smoking allowed on airplanes, in movie theaters, etc...The amount of alcohol people consumed, on average, was pretty crazy too.

 

[Roderick Kennedy]

This almost 62 year old totally agrees.

A young 53 year old here. Started with F1GP on Atari ST, then onto Indy500 and ICR2. Makes me laugh when people on here are moaning about AC physics or AMS graphics, etc. they really don't know how lucky they are

 

[xnorb]

Hitting 38 next month, so i'm, the absolute youngster here
But PC-wise i have witnessed the whole evolution of home computers which is insane if you think about how little time has passed.