04.04.2022   Category: Site news

Episode 13: Virtual RC v1-v3 in retrospect

With the release of v3.5 in 2006 came an end of an incredible adventure. Without any idea or knowledge of computer games or sims we had created a very respectable rc racing sim and exceeded everyone’s expectations, except for those who saw Virtual Racing Industries (VRI) as a serious and dedicated game developing studio of which there were so many in these early days of computer gaming. On the contrary, it was by sheer coincidence that I got involved in this adventure. In the years 1995 till 2005 I was fully engaged with running Serpent, VRC was just something on the side for me, let’s see what it brings… But I must admit it was a fascinating journey which coincided with another exciting technological development: the Internet. In this period I also jumped on the promises the Internet had in store for us as a small company. Team Serpent Network (TSN) and myTSN were developed in this period and opened up complete new ways of communicating with our customers from around the world. Communication has always been one of my key interests and marketing strategies. VRC went hand in hand with the internet revolution!

After 2003 I got more and more involved in VRC, seeing the potential it had to engage a whole new market in r/c racing: computer gaming. I sincerely believed that VRC held a great promise to attract new hobbyists to r/c racing, after all this was the whole idea behind the development of the VRC-1 game port adapter back in 1995. And with partners like Kyosho and Horizon Hobbies I saw great potential to break into new markets, even non-rc related markets. Computer gaming was the biggest threat to r/c racing so better try to connect!

The Curacao adventure
I had high expectations of the release of VRC through our partners and through a network of VRC dealers. In my endless optimism I had developed a plan to open a Curacao branch, thinking that it would save us some money on taxes, and was already dreaming of spending quality time with Renee on this sunny Caribbean Island (Curacao is a Dutch governed overseas area). But then we would have to host and operate the VRC servers also in Curacao. So I had the servers shipped over to Curacao and in May 2004 my Slovak internet team and I took an airplane to Curacao to install the servers in a local hosting center. I also set up an VRI Curacao office which would be manned by my son Tim as a first step in the VRI business after he had graduated from university later that year. To cut a long story short, it did not work out as expected and the adventure was ended in 2006. I think Tim had a great time there! And so did the Slovaks…

Big decision
In 2005 I took a life-changing decision: retire from Serpent and hand it over to Michael Salven and Ronald Baar so I could fully focus on VRC. Serpent had been my life since 1979, I had spent all my time and money to build up a successful r/c racing car manufacturing company. And then suddenly give up? I truly believed that there was another exciting and challenging future ahead of me with VRC. At the same time, I also saw the market change, especially manufacturing. More and more engineering and manufacturing was shifted to Taiwan and later China, it was an unstoppable development that I could see coming from the late 90-ties. I spent a great deal of my last years in Serpent exploring new sources for manufacturing, you had to in order to stay competitive. It was do or die.
You can probably also imagine what sort of family life I have lived since 1972 when I started with r/c model cars. Every weekend and all my holidays were spent on r/c racing, I was also heavily involved in EFRA and IFMAR trying to get this hobby organized to the next level. Fortunately, I had a very supportive wife, and she has certainly also enjoyed many great moments together with me, winning Euro and World titles with Serpent, but it was not always easy, not to say stressful, not hard to imagine. Retiring from Serpent in July 2005 came as a relief to me in this respect although I really missed the racing. Once an r/c racer always an r/c racer…

The Serpent business involvement came to an end but was replaced with a new fulltime involvement: Virtual Racing Industries and VRC. That was going to be my new life, very challenging but at least I had the weekends off. I was 56 at that time, could spend more time with my family, on my golf game, biking and holidays with my wife Renee, right?

VRC platform potential
As I was now fully committed to the success of VRC the very first question I had to answer was: what future do we have with what we had developed thus far: VRC v3.5? I had long discussions with my son Tim, Tony, Todd, Marek and Lothar to get an idea of where we stood technology wise. Computer, internet, gaming technology, everything was developing at an ever-accelerating pace it seemed. Was the VRC v3.5 the platform to build our future on? The simple and honest answer was: NO. V3.5 could probably be sustained for a few more years but eventually the platform would become out of date, gaming development had advanced already far beyond the v3.5 platform. And to build a new platform you better start immediately as it would at least take 2 years, I thought… Well, VRC Pro (v4) development started in 2006, and VRC Pro was finally released end of 2011. Not 2 but 6 years! Auch…

In retrospect
Before going to the next phase, the development of a whole new VRC platform, I like to reflect on what we had achieved thus far and what sort of business (Virtual Racing Industries) we had become. If you have read all the episodes of this Inside Story you now know that VRC was kind of a ‘fortunate accident’ that happened more or less unintentionally. We started out with developing the VRC-1 Game Port Adapter back in 1995, with the idea to connect r/c with the fast developing gaming scene. Through the patenting process of this device, I met Lothar Pantel who had developed his own game port adapter and also a very simple 2.5D r/c game. We joint forces and sold his RC Car Trainer game with our VRC-1 game port adaptor. We then started to think to take this game to a next level. Lothar developed VRC v1 and later v2 which we also sold. I was more and more intrigued by the potential of a good r/c racing sim as a means of promoting the r/c hobby and how it could benefit my Serpent business.

Building the team
We then started talking about more realistic car behavior, and through Lothar’s father I came in contact with Todd Wasson from the US who was looking to get involved in developing vehicle dynamic physics for racing games. Through Todd I met Tony West from the UK who was developing, together with his brother Chris, an independent racing car sim title called Racing Legends. Tony was like a dream coming true regarding 3D modeling and texturing and graphics design, just what we needed and more for the next step. And finally, I had a team of internet developers who worked on Serpent’s first attempts to build something like a customer community type of website, the Team Serpent Network and later myTSN. So, within a year or so I had a complete ‘game development’ team which was formed by sheer coincidence.

Was Virtual Racing Industries now suddenly a professional game development studio? Not really. It was just a group of talented and skillful individuals, each specialist in their own field, who realized my dreams. And I still knew nothing of game development although I was learning fast. By trade I was still a mechanical engineer who manufactured Serpent model racing cars since 1979, and mainly working on developing my company and the r/c racing market. Did I have a solid marketing and distribution plan for VRC? Did I have third party funding for continued development and a massive marketing campaign? The answer was no, we were more like a little start up.

Looking at the present VRC Pro forums I often get the impression that many of our members have a completely different view of Virtual Racing Industries and think that VRI is a professional game studio, probably misled by looking at what we have achieved with VRC Pro which after all is quite impressive! We were not and have never been, and never will be a real game development studio, however much I would have liked that to happen.

I’ll close off the first chapter of the VRC Inside Story. Starting with nothing until VRC v3.5. You now know where we came from, how it all happened, all the coincidences that made this exceptional project happen. It’s now time to let you in on the next chapter, VRC Pro. That’s next.

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