Ever wished you could race in the old days of NASCAR, going bumper to bumper with the King and the Silver Fox? In this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re taking a look at a game where you could do just that, NASCAR Legends.
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NASCAR Legends was released by Papyrus Design Group in 1999, for the PC. The title simulated the 1970 NASCAR Grand National Series (now known as the Sprint Cup), with 16 of the 49 events being recreated. Iconic circuits, such as the late Riverside Raceway and North Wilkesboro Speedway were included in the roster (Daytona was left out due to licensing constraints). The Ford Torino, Mercury Cyclone, Dodge Charger Daytona, and legendary Plymouth Superbird were at the mercy of your right foot.
The same engine used in NASCAR 3 was incorporated in Legends, giving you not only extreme realism, but also the ability to tweak whatever you wanted to your liking. You could adjust races from short sprints all the way to full-length races. Damage, weather, and number of cars were also some of the adjustments you can make to your race weekend. You could also tune your cars setup, to optimize the car for each track. You can also choose between just running a solo weekend, or a full NASCAR season.
Legends also included a paint editing tool, which allowed you to customize your own paint jobs for any car you wanted. This was a precursor to the modern painting tools we have now, and enthusiasts went wild with the tools, creating many new paint schemes, be it real or fictional, and shared them with the world.
Online racing was also supported, over TCP/IP or Wan.net. Racing was relatively scare though, so many people, including our very own Darin Gangi, would form weekly leagues and race together. I never raced NASCAR Legends, but I’ve heard the online experience was quite enjoyable if you had a good group together.
To this date, I think NASCAR Legends is the only racing title to attempt to recreate the classic stock cars, and it shows in its scarcity. A quick look on Amazon shows that the average price for the title hovers around the $30 mark. I have driven NASCAR 3, and I enjoyed it, so I can only imagine how Legends felt, wheeling those beasts around those classic circuits.
Did you turn laps in NASCAR Legends? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below.