Ever since Codemasters were handed the keys to produce the officially-licenced Formula 1 game in the late 2000s, Lee Mather has been heavily involved in bringing each of the 14 annual titles to life.
Now as senior creative director of the series, Mather is the one who holds the greatest influence over the direction of one of the most popular and successful annual sports game franchises on the planet.
It’s been two years since RaceFans last caught up with Mather to discuss an upcoming of an F1 game, but with F1 2024 set to be released at the very end of the month, what better time is there to catch up with the game’s director?
In the first of this two-part interview, Mather shares his views on why the changes to this year’s game will make it a must-play, even for long time veterans of the series.
Under the hood
With every new grand prix season comes a new F1 game. A game that will naturally feature all of the cars, drivers and circuits of the current championship. But 2024 is an unusual year where all the same drivers are racing with the same teams as last year, with the only new circuit – Shanghai – already being featured in F1 2023. So does having a season like 2024 with such little variance from the previous year make life easier or harder for Mather and his team?
“It’s a mixture,” he says. “We’ve had seasons before where there’s been very limited change. We gain extra boost when there’s significant changes in a season. But ultimately we still try to make sure that the game differentiates itself year-on-year significantly, no matter what the season is doing.
“If the season does something really crazy, like we’re going to see in ’25 with Lewis Hamiltongoing to Ferrari, then that’s like just a significant boost and sort of the cherry on the top of the cake, really. We’ve already set out to make sure that the game that players get this year will be significantly moved on from what we did last year. The sport giving us something fresh and different – new tracks, new drivers, different teams, obviously Audi coming in in the future – is another big key point for us in the future. So we set out to try and ensure that we will always hit that goal of giving players something fresh and new every year. And the sport can sometimes give us a leg up on that.”
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Without any major changes to the teams, cars, circuits or regulations for 2024, the main focus for the upcoming release has…
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