We definitely need to thank somebody at Mercedes for coming up with this Tron/Arcade 90s F1 game hybrid spot, celebrating their most successful motorsport year ever.
This is what Mercedes playfully calls their “Won Year”, a message that Lewis and Nico both sported on the back of their racing uniforms in Abu Dhabi, and one that stands not only for their success in Formula 1, but also in DTM, Formula 3 and the ADAC GT Masters.
The video starts off with Lewis and Nico bobbing their heads to the beat, which is really funny considering how you never actually get to see an F1 driver’s helmet do that in real life.
Then it’s on to some quick ‘Tron-like’ action before arriving in the wonderfully special world of home computers, back when people first started to play F1 racing games on them. Remember MicroProse’s original F1 Grand Prix game? How about Grand Prix 2? They came out in 1992 and 1994 respectively and in many ways paved the way for what Codemasters is doing right now.
In terms of graphics, what Mercedes did in this video closely resembles Accolade’s Grand Prix Circuit PC game, which was one of the original arcade-style games. The steering wheel used to move (which was pretty cool back then) and your notion of speed was much better than in MircoProse’s version, which even came at a later date.
All in all, it turns out that Mercedes are really good at celebrating things such as both the F1 Constructors and Drivers titles, the DTM Drivers & Team title (C 63 DTM), Formula 3 championship and ADAC GT title with the SLS GT3.
Wonder what they’ll do for an encore? 2016 is right around the corner.