One of the most serious racing simulators has taken an abrupt left-turn

Welcome to racing games business school. If you’ll all stop throwing paper planes and blowing cartoonish bubblegum bubbles for a moment, we’re about to learn about supply and demand: there haven’t been many great arcade racing titles lately, but people remain hungry for great arcade racing titles. That, students, is called an opportunity.

An opportunity which iRacing, of all franchises, has seized. They’ve signed up Original Fire Games, who made the fantastic Circuit Superstars and Karting Superstars games, to make an accessible and colourful spinoff bearing the name of the ultra-realistic, ultra-competitive racing sim. Thus: iRacing Arcade.

The best thing about all this, other than seeing one of our favourite studios in Original Fire Games getting a mass-market project, is that there’s a demo coming to Steam available now.

The game will also feature at Sim Racing Expo in Dortmund from 16-18 October, and we’ll be there to test drive it and report back.

iRacing Arcade isn’t just about dialling the primary colours up and the brake distances down, though. There’s a rather ambitious career mode in the works which promises to add management elements like building facilities, weekly challenges, global leaderboards, and official vehicle and track licenses as you’d expect from a game bearing the iRacing name.

Very exciting. We’ll be reporting back after getting some track time with it.