It may be all about Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton these days, but back in 1992, Nigel Mansell was the British F1 driver of choice.
After years of working for Lotus, Ferrari, and Williams, he secured his one and only F1 World Championship with the latter team in 1992, recording a (then) record nine wins in a single season in the dominant FW14B.
As you can imagine, this made Mansell a hot ticket when it came to licensed video games, and Gremlin duly snapped up the rights to produce a series of titles across all of the major gaming platforms of the era, including the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, NES, Mega Drive, SNES and even CD32.
However, one system that sadly didn't get a version of the game back in the early 1990s was the Commodore 64, even though one was actually in development at one point. Now, after 33 years of being missing, it has finally become playable.
As reported by Games That Weren't, the source code for the C64 version of Nigel Mansell's World Championship was discovered this year, and a talented team has assembled a working version of the (still unfinished) game that you can play.
It would seem that the plug was pulled quite close to the game being finished, as GTW's Frank Gasking explains:
You can race against other cars and also put in qualifying laps – there is also a tutorial feature where you can drive with Nigel Mansell and get tips on how to become a better driver. It’s glitchy at this stage in places (especially with the road routine), and there only seems to be one car on the screen at a time – we guess this would have been improved over the last few weeks, as graphical mock-ups we also recovered show more than one car present.
Pitstops are missing, and also road-side objects at this stage. As well as there only being one car, there are no variations in colours and the main car’s wheels are lacking animations to make them look like they are spinning. All areas which no doubt would have been improved and polished before the final release.
If you fancy trying this one out, head over here to download the ROM.