Mod night club
Meet the modders crafting a love letter to Japanese car culture
Upon its release in 2014, few people thought Assetto Corsa would become a hotbed of cultural expression. Like most racing simulators, Assetto Corsa’s focus is on providing the most accurate driving experience possible, offering an obsessive level of detail that requires such elaborate efforts as meticulously laser-scanning the topography of real-world racing circuits.
While this devotion to recreating the experience of real-world performance driving results in a remarkably authentic simulation, its narrow focus comes at the expense of some of the bells and whistles we expect from more broadly accessible racing games. Many racing simulators don’t even have a singleplayer campaign in the traditional sense (though Assetto Corsa does offer a very barebones one) and devs certainly don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the culture and history of motorsports.
Sim-racing enthusiasts are happy enough – they come, and stay, for an accurate driving experience – but there will always be those who want something more. Into that niche-withina-niche steps the modding community, and in the five-plus years since Assetto Corsa’s release, some modders have even managed to provide an injection of exactly the sort of cultural trappings that are missing from the necessarily rather sterile vanilla game.
Shutoko Revival Project is a mod that marries the hardcore simulation of Assetto Corsa to a nostalgic encapsulation of a defining moment in the history of car culture, and the extent to which it pulls this off – even in the early beta form in which it currently exists – is a sight to behold. Focusing on the early days of Japanese street racing, SRP recreates huge sections of the freeway system that surrounds Tokyo, including the legendary C1 loop and Wangan-sen. The two developers who began the project about a year-anda-half ago, who go by the handles Soyo and Trawa, are car-culture fanatics deeply familiar with the source material.
“I’ve been a car guy for a long time, and specifically I’ve always been interested in Japanese cars and car culture,” says Ryan ‘Soyo’ Egan. “The Shutoko highway system, the Wangan and C1 – they’re all just these iconic Holy Grails of driving.”
To anyone familiar with the infamous Mid Night Club street-racing crew, or who has played such arcade-racing classics as the Tokyo Xtreme Racer and Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune series, these locales require no introduction. It is hard to overstate how important these freeways, and the street racers who battled upon them, were to the birth of ‘tuner’ culture and the rise to prominence of JDM-style cars around the world.
The Shutoko Revival Project team knew this freeway system had been recreated in videogames before, but never in one with Assetto Corsa’s calibre of simulation physics. “Don’t get me wrong, I love arcade racers, I love the Tokyo Xtreme games and stuff like that,” Egan says. “I played those growing up like everyone else pretty much on the dev team. But I’m interested in real cars, so I like simulation because it provides a very realistic background.”
The vehicles on offer in the mod are a grab-bag of iconic Japanese sports cars – the RX-7, Skyline GT-R and so on – and one of the advantages of building Shutoko Revival Project atop such a robust simulator is that it’s able to convey accurately just how scary some of these cars would have been to drive. “They were pushing the limits. They were outright dangerous and not easy to drive, and that’s the vibe we were going for,” Egan says. To that end, driving some of the spicier cars in the mod’s stable feels like trying to wrestle a bear on a skating rink.
The modelling of the freeways is as period-correct as possible, too. John Billios, a volunteer contributor to the mod, mentions that they try to keep everything looking how it would have between 2005 and 2007, and he frequently uses Google Earth Pro to pull up backdated satellite imagery of what the Shutoko highways looked like at that time.
All of this fealty to both history and the laws of physics comes together to form something far more than the sum of its parts. The feeling of being able to roam across 190km of Tokyo freeway, howling through tunnels and trying to keep these highly modified tuner cars under control at over 300km per hour, while your friends run alongside you and engage in impromptu battles, is manna from heaven to a certain type of car enthusiast.
In the future, the team plan to add proper competitive aspects to the world they’ve created. “We have ideas for a turf war system, where we would have zones of the map with timing objects, so that they would have their own separate leaderboards,” Egan says. “Like a portion of C1 or something like that, where whatever team owned the top three times on that portion would own that territory, and teams could fight each other to try to dominate a certain route.” For now, Shutoko Revival Project is simply a sandbox, offering you the chance to blaze across the Tokyo skyline at blinding speeds, reliving the Wangan dream.
“The Shutoko highway system, the Wangan and C1 – they’re all just these iconic Holy Grails of driving”