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MicroProse's Steam reissue of the racing title Geoff Crammond Racing 4 (originally published as Grand Prix 4 in 2001) has run into licensing issues with some of the brands included in the original game.
On account of this, MicroProse is asking fans to help come up with "period-appropriate" names to replace some of the licenses they failed to renegotiate, in a "Community Vote" open until Wednesday, October 14th, 2026.
The news was shared in the first of what looks like a series of devlogs published on Steam, where MicroProse revealed that the company's attempts to relicense some of the "original motorsport brands, team names, driver names, and sponsor logos" haven't gone exactly as planned.
Here, the developer/publisher claimed it has already had to make a ton of changes to the original game's art, reportedly replacing 1,987 textures to remove the licenses it no longer has the rights to use and slip in some of its own. With "just south of 300 brands" in the original game, though, it is appealing to the community to lend a hand.
"One of the first things we did was try to contact the rights holders," a MicroProse representative wrote in the devlog. "There is just one small problem: actually reaching the right person at a large company in 2026 is sometimes near impossible.
"Our PR team has sent thousands of emails and made hundreds of calls. The results were not quite as impressive as those numbers sound. When we do manage to reach the right people, the response has often been very positive. Only a few companies have directly said no. The bigger problem is that most requests either never reach the right department, get stuck somewhere inside the company, or disappear into the mysterious corporate void. That said, we do already have some very big names on board, and we are genuinely thankful to those companies."
Here are some ground rules for suggestions, if you want to take part:
- Period appropriate
- It should look like it belongs on a car in 2001
- Original, not a misspelling
- No real team, driver or sponsor names, and nothing that is obviously one of them with the letters shuffled
- Nothing offensive (we will quietly bin anything that is)
- You do not need a name for every team. One good one is plenty
Entries can be submitted on Steam or by survey. All entrants will get the chance to win a free copy of the MicroProse-published Throttle Trace, while the chosen winners will get their name in the credits. The winners will be decided as part of a public vote, as part of devlog 2, which will go live following October 14th.
In the devlog, MicroProse said it was fully aware of how frustrating this will be for motorsport fans of a certain age, saying its staff also has "a lot of nostalgia for the original teams, cars, drivers, and liveries."
However, it has tried to reassure fans that it is being "careful with these changes" and also claimed it will leave the game's files as open as possible, allowing players to "bring back the original look" in their own installs.