Inside F1 Race Stars: When Formula 1 rivalled Mario Kart

Since acquiring the license, Codemasters has released an annual Formula 1 game every year since 2009. But in 2012, the studio released not one, but two official Formula 1 games.

Whereas F1 2012 aimed to recreate the sport as authentically as possible, F1 Race Stars, a kart racing spin-off released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U the same year, offered a more light-hearted, family-friendly take on the sport.

While its casual nature was a perfect fit for the Wii U, Race Stars was ultimately the last official Formula 1 game to release on a Nintendo system. That may change in the future, with Codemasters considering if Formula 1 is a “good fit” for the Switch 2.

“It’s a project I look back on fondly”

Combining cartoony visuals with F1-inspired power-ups and fantasy takes on real-world tracks, Race Stars is a unique anomaly as the first and only Formula 1 game that dared to take on the kart racing titan: Mario Kart.

“It’s a project I look back on fondly that I’m very proud of,” Chief Game Designer Gavin Cooper, who went on to be F1 25’s Creative Director, reflects. “We built it to be as multiplayer as possible. There aren’t many games that let you not only play multiplayer online or in split screen, but combine the two. You can have two people on one console and three on another, all connecting over the internet. The goal was to bring as many people as possible.”

“Once you got good at it and understood it, it was fun in multiplayer. I think there is something fundamentally fun about a kart racer,” adds Game Designer Tom Goodchild, who is now an indie developer at Ice Beam, which launched the chaotic party racer Make Way in 2023.

In contrast to the mainline games, F1 Race Stars adopted a colourful art style. All drivers from the 2012 championship were exaggerated caricatures, with you racing big-headed versions of Lewis Hamilton, Sebastien Vettel and Mark Webber among others.

“It was a triumph of art style. I still go back occasionally and look at it. All the bobblehead drivers still look great. I love what they came up with,” Cooper reminisces. 

“A few people figured out something online where they could take a low-poly model and turn it into origami art. So we had little bobbleheads of all the F1 drivers sitting around on people’s desks.”

Alongside the official drivers were three fictional female characters: Ruby Power, Jessica Chekker and Satsu-Aceler. “It was a family game. You can imagine kids playing it. We wanted to attack the idea of ‘it’s just going to be a bunch of boys on the track,’” says Cooper.

“There’s no reason why my daughter shouldn’t be able to play and see a character she can identify with. But if we just put a girl in, it would feel a bit tokenistic. So we tried to put a mix of extra characters in.”

Codemasters had to overcome a few hurdles when pitching the idea to Formula 1. Damaging the cars was strictly forbidden. “They were open to the concept. There was always a lot of back on forth about the specifics. I think it was sometimes difficult for them to see it purely as a game, especially when we were talking about power-ups,” says Cooper.  

Powering up

One idea that had to be reworked was a power-up where players could throw tyres at each other. “They were like: ‘we can see why you want to do that. It looks like Mario Kart. But tyres flying around the track in a real sport? That’s terrifying,’” Cooper recalls.

“There was always a bit of a disconnect there. But they worked really hard to get their heads around it. They were open to listening to us and why we wanted to do certain things. It was a process of education on both sides to arrive at something that worked for everyone.

“We wanted oil slicks, but we couldn’t have that, so we had to have something else. There was a lot of discussion to arrive at the final set of powerups.”  

Tyres were replaced with bubbles. Dropping balloons filled the screen with confetti, while rain clouds slowed players down. Other powerups befitted the world of Formula 1, from activating a safety car to slow rivals down to increasing your top speed by deploying DRS.

Despite the Formula 1 theme, Race Star’s power-ups owe a debt to Mario Kart, according to Goodchild, who compares the safety car power-up to a Blue Shell. “You would fire it from last, and it would slow first place down, and everyone can overtake them. I was particularly happy with that,” he says, adding that F1 Race Stars’ pit stop mechanic “sat fairly well with the narrative.”   

“You aren’t ripping them [Mario Kart] off because you can’t think of anything. You’re ripping them off because they solve a lot of problems,” Goodchild explains. “What happens if a car gets too far ahead, or if someone is around the corner and you want to shoot them?

“There are a lot of questions you ask in a combat racing game that were already answered by Mario Kart a long time ago. We were trying to hit similar beats. You’d have ones that distract all of the pack, or disrupt the people in front or behind you.”

“We wanted to make something that was ultimately better suited for a casual racing game”

As for the tracks, F1 Race Stars featured circuits from the 2012 Formula 1 calendar – but not as you knew them. While each track had recognisable landmarks, they were exaggerated with loops, jumps and shortcuts.

“We didn’t want to recreate the exact layouts of the tracks. We wanted to make something that was ultimately better suited for a casual racing game,” explains Cooper.

“We worked through a process of trying to identify the famous bits of not just the track, but also the country where it takes place. How can we not necessarily stick tightly to the layout but still ensure you’re going through Eau Rouge, for example, while also backing it up with the character of the location? I was happy with what we ended up with.”

Powersliding around corners is a staple of kart racing games but was deliberately removed from F1 Race Stars as Cooper feels it “was not a realistic representation of the sport.”

“We wanted to come up with something that felt like there was a skill game to perfect through the corners, but was sympathetic to F1,” says Cooper. “Ultimately, I think the audience probably would have preferred it to be like Mario Kart with F1. We moved in that direction when the iOS version came out later.”

“Powersliding ultimately didn’t work,” Goodchild adds. “We burnt a lot of time trying to make this mechanic work, but it never really landed properly, which was probably its biggest undoing. It was trying to pump the brakes and use the accelerator like an arcade-style throttle control. It sounds great on paper. But then you try it and it doesn’t land. I think we probably should have prototyped that earlier, but I arrived when it was already a year into production.”

Will F1 Race Stars ever get a sequel?

Sadly, the chances of F1 Race Stars getting a sequel are slim. According to Goodchild, the original “just didn’t sell well enough.”

“I think there was originally talk [of a sequel], but once we saw how it was going and the final release, we knew the writing was on the wall. It’s an unfortunate thing where it just didn’t quite land.”

Unfortunate timing meant that F1 Race Stars launched at a crowded time for the kart racing genre. Mario Kart 7 launched one year earlier on the Nintendo DS, while the acclaimed Sonic & All Stars Racing: Transformed released just a few days after F1 Race Stars.

“You’re fighting against Mario Kart, which was at its seventh version at this point, and Sonic & Sega All-Stars: Transformed came out at the same time. That was on their second version, so these games are a lot more mature than ours and they learned from their mistakes,” says Goodchild.

“We were a new team hired to make this game. None of us had really done kart racing games before. We had some arcade racing experience, but these are all lessons you need to learn.

“I just think it didn’t do enough to distinguish itself or be better at any of the key points of a kart racer to stand apart. Whereas Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed had transforming vehicles and Mario Kart 8 now has upside down anti-gravity tracks. They had all these big-ticket items and got all the core stuff right.

“I think a license gets you so far, but not over the line.”

“I think kart racers are a really difficult market,” Cooper adds. “You’ve got the heavy hitters, and then a bit of a steep cliff. I think it would be a lot easier now – Liberty Media has been so supportive of us doing things with the license that we previously weren’t able to. I think that could only bode well if we were to go back and do anything like that again.  

“Would I like to see another one? Yes, of course I would,” he continues. With Formula 1 more popular than ever, an F1 Race Stars sequel could, in theory, broaden the appeal of the  F1 game series to younger players.

“I’ve got a few young kids who watch me play the big game and want to have a go. It’s easier than ever these days. Since F1 22, my kid at the time, that was the first time he could sit down and even he could get around the track.

“He didn’t have to worry about braking because he had the braking assist on. The steering assist was helping him out. The auto reset was putting him on when he went off. Even though he could get around the track, it was still a bit too grown-up for him. I would love to see a Race Stars 2.”

Do you have fond memories of F1 Race Stars? Would you like to see a a sequel? Let us know in the comments below.