Australia, February 25, 2008 - Mark Cale is a man on a mission. A lifelong lover of Ferrari's cars, he's bringing the experience of driving Italy's finest to gamers around the world with Ferrari Challenge. The game, developed by Eutechnyx and Cale's company System 3, certainly should be a Ferrari fan's wet dream, with 50 cars from Ferrari past and present lovingly recreated in-game, complete with handling that's been tweaked by Bruno Senna, Ayrton Senna's nephew. It's designed to straddle the arcade-sim divide, so players can choose to test their mettle with all assists turned off, or go a more arcadey route and barrel around the courses with less to worry about. Accompanying this is an in-game economy that sees greater rewards given to players who choose to play without assists, thus allowing them to purchase unlocked cars faster, as well as giving arcade-inclined players more of an incentive to reduce the assists they use.

With the game almost done and gunning its engines on the starting grid, we got in touch with Mark for a chat about the game, and discovered he's not shy about singing the game's praises, nor of critiquing perceived failings in other racing games. Read on to find out what he had to say.


IGN: Give us a little background on your involvement with the real life Ferrari Challenge.

Mark Cale: Well, I used to race cars about seven years ago, but I've had a passion for Ferraris ever since I was about eight years old. In fact, the reason why System 3 was set up was with one goal, and that was to get enough money to get a Ferrari. So it's just been something that I've been passionate about since I was a child. So getting on to where we are now…

Ferrari Challenge seems to use slightly saturated colours to give it a hyper-realistic tone...

IGN: You've really come full circle.

Mark Cale: Exactly. I've been trying to create this product from a view of someone that's been a complete devotee for most of my life. It's a bit like a football team, you know, you don't change your football team, and I was supporting Ferrari when they weren't winning world championships. It took them 21 years to win a world championship from when Jackie Ickx last won it for them, which was just a few years after Niki Lauda. So really, the whole Schumacher years – everyone thinks of Ferrari's dominance and everything like that – it wasn't actually like that. There was a long time when Ferrari were way down the back of the grid… [but] you always support your team.

IGN: Ferrari's always had a very romantic, stylish image though right?

Mark Cale: Absolutely. They're the most successful road racing team ever in history, and it's an iconic brand… so when there was – because I know a lot of people very closely in the factory - an opportunity to actually do an official videogame of the race series, Ferrari Challenge, and follow on from what SEGA had done, of course for us it was a great opportunity. It was something I was deeply motivated to do myself as a personal milestone in my life, and we've tried to put a lot more into this product than what people would have normally done. I think you can see the big differences between what we've done with Ferrari Challenge and what SEGA had initially done. I mean, SEGA's 355 Challenge game was a real milestone race game when it came out in the arcades, but the first thing that we learnt was that people either loved it or hated it, and it was too sim-based.

...although it's not always azure skies.

IGN: So are you hoping that Ferrari Challenge will scale all the way from the hardcore sim nuts through to arcade fans?

Mark Cale: Yeah exactly. That's why we've got different levels of traction control, stability control, ABS – even on some of the old cars we artificially put in traction control to help people, but of course, it's not an arcade game because it would be unfair to say it is. I wanted to try and balance it in the middle between arcade and sim. We feel we've created the definitive arcade-sim. So if you want the ultimate sim you have Gran Turismo. If you want something that's very arcadey, and that's thrashing cars around and not really caring, you've got things like Burnout Paradise... we wanted to position ourselves somewhere between the two.