Nigel Mansell World Championship for the C64 has been recovered, and it's well worth checking out!

This is incredible news especially if you have a C64, as the classic racing game of 'Nigel Mansell World Championship', which was released on many different systems such as the Amiga,  Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, DOS, Genesis and ZX Spectrum, has not only been recovered, but as of today you can download the game and try it out on your Commodore 64 right now. A holy grail game, which,  according to project manager Darren Melbourne, "featured some of the most impressive road routines he’d ever seen on a C64". To coincide with this news, make sure to check out the previewed footage posted below, it does look good!

According to the website in brief. Nigel Mansell World Championship was not far off completion, however when too much development time was spent on trying to perfect the road routine, and with still an estimated 6 weeks away from completion for the C64. It was decided by Gremlin to cancel the game. They would have missed the chance to make any profit from the title, even if profit was being made from the other versions. Thankfully for those of you who have always wanted to try the game are in luck. As looking through the Enigma Variations archives, to find a series of NES titles that never saw the light of day, they were stunned to find the entire PDS source code back up to Nigel Mansell on the C64!

Further notes :

• Thanks to the amazing work of CSixx, Martin Pugh, Bieno, Arcane, Dave Simmons and Ax!s (who has created a conversion of the CPC loading screen), we can now see just how far the C64 version had come – and its much much further than we ever thought, even though still a bit away from completion to mark up as a full game.
• Pretty much all of the tracks are present within the game, and it seems straight away that the NES release of the game was a major inspiration – with the look/feel replicated of the console edition, rather than looking anything like the other 8-bit editions.
• Project managed by Darren, with code by Andrew Bowen and graphics by Paul McKee.
• 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.
• Sadly, although there was also music and sfx in binary form in the archive – none of it ever got to be integrated. A music demo is included which showcases the title music, and several sub tunes by Gerard Gourley (who certainly got around at the tail end of the C64’s life!)

Links :1) Source (The Full Story) 2) CsDB