How A Bad Business Deal Kept Porsche Out Of Your Favorite Driving Games For Almost 20 Years

If, like me, you spent a lot of time in the late-90s/early-00s playing the new breed of more realistic racing games on your home console, the chances are that you noticed a glaring absence from the swelling car rosters: Porsche.

Depending on your platform of choice, you were able to race all manner of exotic sports and supercars through virtual streets and race tracks, except for Porsches. To drive Stuttgart’s finest, you were more or less locked into a single game series as the result of an unwise and record-setting exclusivity agreement signed at exactly the wrong time between Electronic Arts (EA) and the automaker.

It hadn’t always been the case, although Porsche was reputedly reluctant to get involved with video game licensing at all early on. That policy eased somewhat with the original Test Drive featuring a 930 Turbo back in 1987, before the 993 appeared in what was the first recognizably modern driving game: 1994’s Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed.

After Sony Computer Entertainment developed and published Porsche Challenge in 1997 as a standalone title for the new Boxster, it looked like Porsche was going to be everywhere soon. When Sony’s flagship simulation racer Gran Turismo arrived a few months later, however, Porsche was nowhere to be found.

Porsche wasn’t in the second Need for Speed title earlier that same year, but it transpired that publisher EA and Porsche had been working closely on something else.

That was Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, which began development in 1998 and eventually landed in 2000. The title featured Porsche models only, and from across the decades, beginning with the 356 and rolling right through to the 996-generation 911.

Porsche Unleashed also brought with it the start of an exclusivity agreement that gave EA the sole rights to use Porsche vehicles in driving games, which shaped the genre for almost two decades – with some unexpected consequences.

The first signs of this actually came a year earlier with the arrival of Gran Turismo 2. Sony’s original had proven a smash hit, despite largely focusing on Japanese cars and only featuring around a dozen vehicles from the USA and the UK from the 150+ available.

GT2 expanded this original tight focus to a much more well-travelled car list, and in fact featured brands that have never been seen again in the series, such as Vector. European exotics were thinner on the ground, only really including Pagani, and Porsche was once again absent. In its place, though, was a brand called RUF, featuring obviously Porsche-shaped models, which bamboozled many gamers back in 1999.

Those of us who were on racing game-related forums and bulletin boards at the time saw a lot of misinformation posted: RUF was Porsche with a fake name; RUF made bodykits for Porsches so they were different enough; and similar. In fact, RUF was and is a manufacturer of sports and supercars in its own right and helped developers skirt the Porsche blockade.

RUF itself had become particularly notable about a decade earlier, through a number of head-to-head comparisons and a now well-known video of its CTR “Yellowbird” lapping the Nurburgring Nordschleife. This was before everybody and their aunt had access to the Internet, so although known to those who knew it hadn’t quite percolated to the wider world yet.

At the time, though it would also supply aftermarket parts, too, RUF’s vehicle output solely comprised body-in-white (BIW) Porsche chassis, delivered from Stuttgart, to which it applied its own brand of German engineering. The result was cars that looked quite like the Porsche upon which they’re based but with higher performance and — crucially — RUF VINs. That made the cars discrete models; the distinction is quite subtle, but the outcome significant.

Being a legally distinct entity, RUF models were not covered by the exclusivity agreement between EA and Porsche, and neither could do anything about them replacing the more famous brand. It was nonetheless a brave move from RUF, which depended on bodies from Porsche for its own road cars, but it enhanced its visibility markedly.

Although it wasn’t the first game to feature Ruf in place of Porsche — Test Drive 2 featured the Ruf CTR Yellowbird in an expansion pack — nine million sales for GT2 did spark a number of other developers into similar action.

RUF models would appear in other series like Forza Motorsport and Horizon, Test Drive Unlimited, GRID, Enthusia, Project Gotham, and of course every Gran Turismo game since. Gemballa, on a similar basis, would appear in other titles. Forza was a rare series that featured Porsche too, with Microsoft reportedly paying EA a hefty sum to sub-licence the brand (the cars were only made available as paid downloadable content (DLC) packs to recoup the cost).

With games increasingly becoming regarded as an effective way to get cars in front of the eyes of the next generation of car buyers, and Porsche losing ground to its rivals on that front, the mood at Stuttgart seemed to change. In 2016 — some 17 years after it began — Porsche and EA revealed that it was coming to an end by mutual agreement.

That sparked an immediate flurry of new deals, with Porsche announced for the Assetto Corsa sim, Forza Horizon 3, Project CARS 2, and Gran Turismo Sport over the weeks that followed.

In the ten years since, Porsche’s presence has expanded to dozens of titles, rather than just one series. It’s even making cars just for games, with its Vision GT prototype also appearing as a cover car for Gran Turismo 7.

On the other hand, after carrying the torch for the elder brand’s misstep for nearly 20 years, RUFs video game exposure has reduced from its peak and only now really appears in Gran Turismo and The Crew Motorfest.

Do you have a favorite RUF car from a specific game? Did you even notice the absence of Porsche?

Top graphic images: DepositPhotos.com; duPont Registry