Back when I was about 7 years old I ended up with a copy of Ford Simulator
for MS-DOS, specifically the second release from 1990. I made a video talking
about it almost a decade ago here on LGR but my fascination with the series
remains intermittently steadfast, I guess you could say. There's just something odd
about these pieces of software which were distributed freely for about a
decade beginning in 1987, with six of them being released by Ford Motor
Company and the SoftAd Group by the time the series ended. Or so I thought.
Then I happen to see this show up on eBay a while back and I had to grab it!
This is Ford Simulator 7.0 from 1996 which as far as I can tell has never
appeared online before this video. Well it's never been seen in any real depth, at
least. Heck it's even hard to find a reference to this thing anywhere on the internet
at all, other than one lone forum post from 2003 inquiring in vain about its
existence. As well as this scan of a Brazilian shareware catalog which is
actually just an optical character reader's flawed interpretation of "Ford
Simulator 2." So say hello to the Internet, Ford Simulator 7.0! You have a lot of cat
videos to catch up on. And yes that is a Jaguar plopped in there between the Ford,
Lincoln, and Mercury products, being from the era when Ford owned Jaguar Cars.
What makes this notable is that all previous versions of Ford Simulator did
not acknowledge that fact and from what I've seen this is the only release to
have done so. And as with all these Ford Sim releases they originally came
directly from Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, provided free of
charge if you requested it from a dealership, by mail, over the phone,
whatever worked. And this one has never been opened since it was first shipped
out decades ago, so this is quite the exceptional moment! I mean, I guess it is.
I don't know my opinions on these things are skewed. Once unsealed it folds open
to reveal the program itself on a CD-ROM. A pleasant surprise to me since all
previous versions I've owned have only come on floppy disks. The only other
thing you get inside is a card with a few technical details, which includes
some details of the technical variety. Like the fact that it not only requires
Windows, but also SVGA graphics, 8 megabytes of
RAM, and a 50 megahertz 486 CPU. Pretty hefty specs compared to previous
releases that were only made for DOS and could run on most any PC with a VGA card.
We'll be running this on Windows 95 since well, it came out in 1996 so it
felt appropriate. And without further ado behold" the long lost Ford Simulator 7.0!
Narrator: "Welcome to Ford Simulator 7 and the exciting world of Ford, Lincoln, Mercury,
and Jaguar vehicles. Please select a specific vehicle now!" LGR: eh it's fine.
It's just a virtual product catalog like all the other Ford Sims. But I mean, there's
got to be more to it so let's keep going because I'm sure there's some 90s CD-ROM
goodness in here. Like the pointless and long-winded narration that happens on
every menu when a simple line of text would suffice. Narrator: "To see a list of available
accessories and elec--this screen provides a view of the many features available to
each of Ford's--accessories and electronics options--paint your car by selecting one
of the colors at the bottom of the screen..." LGR: or the bodacious full motion
videos that play for every single vehicle complete with saxophone music
and more of that sultry narrator. Narrator: "the Mercury Grand Marquis offers convenience,
comfort, a powerful 4.6 liter overhead-cam v8 with a 100,000 mile
tune-up, and a body-on-frame construction that helps produce its legendary ride.
With a roomy 6 passenger interior, luxurious upholstery, and convenient
appointments, you'll feel right at home away from home!"
LGR: Ahh, the mid-90s. When CD-ROM was still the new hotness and every program went out
of their way to use all 650+ megabytes whether they needed to or not.
And Ford Simulator 7.0 is a delightful example, functioning more like an
interactive audio-visual encyclopedia than any of the previous releases. You
could slap a Compton's logo in there somewhere and it'd have no problem
fitting in with the rest of the presentation. But yeah beyond the state
of the art 1996 multimedia facade, Ford Sim 7 really is the exact same core
experience as the Ford Simulators that preceded it. That is, it's a computerized
advertisement meant to sell you on a new car.
Look at photos, videos, lists of specifications, accessories, trim levels,
lease options, and even customize the paint! So instead of flipping through a
physical Ford catalog or visiting a Ford showroom,
you can browse an interactive selection of their automotive offerings from the
comfort of your own computer chair. So it not only made sense for someone in the
market for a new car but for those looking for something, anything, to run on
their computer for free. I was definitely one of those people
back then, and at ten years old I still would have been somewhat amused by Ford
Simulator 7. Not just because it was a computer thing, but I just liked
anything with cars at all. But really the biggest thing that drew me to Ford
Simulators was the so-called "simulator" aspect. Choosing the 'Game' mode from the
main menu left behind the confines of manufacturer warranty information and
annual finance rate calculations and provided a welcome reprieve in the form
of a cheap ripoff of the game Test Drive with a little bit of Outrun tossed in.
And the version of Ford Simulator that comes with Ford Simulator 7.0 is
practically identical to the one in 6. And five. And probably 4 and even
3 to a degree... yeah they got lazy with these releases later on it seems.
Oh well, it does differ a bit in that there are fewer features than previous
releases so that's nice... like, right away you can't choose the car to drive like
you could in 6.0. Not that it made a huge difference to the gameplay since the
driving is so basic, but still, why take that away? All you can do here is choose
between automatic and manual transmission and you're given the
objective of reaching Lake Wakatonka as fast as possible, with multiple forks in
the road presenting multiple routes to take. Sounds like a fun race right?
It isn't.
It's not really a race at all since you're not racing anyone or
limited by time. All you need to do is make it to the end of the road in one
piece, which is accomplished by driving slowly, cautiously, and more or less
within the speed limit. Wheeeeeeeee.
Along the way you'll be running into plenty of traffic
though. And I mean it you literally run into them,
complete with Bat-Fight words.
*1960s Batman TV show sound effects play*
And if you drive too fast within view of a police car you'll be pulled over.
Four miles over the speed limit?! Ooh you're such a rebel! But the biggest obstacle
are the roads themselves which are bizarrely tough to stay on. Not sure if
it's a mixture of the controls, the physics, or the fact that
this sucks but the driving in this is atrocious. Even at low speeds you're frequently
but inconsistently being pulled from one side to the other, like a giant but
faulty electromagnet keeps switching off and on to each side of your car, while
the road itself is covered in a mixture of molasses and snot. This is a
confusingly-built advertisement for Ford vehicles seeing how badly the car
handles here, it's infuriating! Then every so often you'll be presented with a gas
station you can stop inside and oh!
Who are y--what the heck is wrong with your face...?
So this guy says after you've paid for gas you only have enough money to buy
one thing, even though you don't actually have money that runs out. Oh well. You've
got three options: buying a map is the most useful item to grab since it
provides you the ability to press F2 to open the map and refer to a map of the map.
Not necessary of course and each route looks 99% identical to all the
others, but still nice to have since it lets you know which fork in the road
leads where. The other two purchase options, soda pop and candy bars, do
absolutely nothing. I thought maybe they might act as a kind of health, removing
one of the hits you took when you collided with something, but nope. All
they do is nothing. Which really about sums up this mode to be honest... a whole
lot of nothing. It's a driving simulator that simulates the most mundane aspects
of driving while providing little more than a test of your patience and
obnoxious PC speaker noise.
*obnoxious PC speaker noise plays, pulsating painfully as the engine revs*
Once you make it to the end 15 or 20 minutes later,
hooray I guess. You get a perplexing animation showing who I presume is the
developer and a logo that is not SoftAd, but Code To Go. Well that's strange. Code To Go
I've talked about in the past since under programmer Dan Duncalf they
developed the Disney game Coaster, as well as the DOS port to Turbo Outrun
among others. This is the first time I've seen a reference to them having
developed the driving portion of Ford Simulator games and considering the
Outrun connection that kind of makes sense. So hey that's something we've
learned together. Fun times. Fnd that's it for Ford Simulator 7.0! This particular
release may have been forgotten by most until now but I can't say I blame anyone.
It's the final release of a debatably memorable series of free computer
software and the most notable thing about it is that it eluded being
properly cataloged on the internet for all these years. There are some
wonderfully cheesy FMV sequences for each vehicle, and that's fun enough I
guess. Especially since the older releases just had static or animated
imagery. But then the quote-unquote "simulator" mode that it comes with is
just as much of a letdown as the previous few Ford Sims. To me though
Ford Simulator 7 is a bit more fascinating for the context in which it
was released rather than the software itself. In the days before widespread
worldwide web access and multimedia-laden websites these kinds of software
packages made a lot more sense for a car company. And Ford Simulator 7 was the
last of its kind for Ford. This was 1996, where you could realistically expect
home users to have a 33.6 kilobits per second dial-up modem connection, if they
had one at all. So embedding full motion video and sound into a website didn't
make much sense. And the game mode, well, even being a freebie it was hardly
very appealing when you had fantastic racing games hitting the PC left and
right by then. Finally, the explosion of internet usage in North America around
1997 meant that it really didn't make much sense to continue releasing Ford
Simulators. All one had to do was log on to www.ford.com and get 95% of the exact same
content and functionality that you would from Ford Simulator.
Yeah maybe you didn't get the hundreds of megabytes of narration, video clips,
and ethereal candy bar-chomping roadtrip gameplay... but the website did the job for
most computer-savvy folks, and it didn't require writing CDs or floppy disks for
physical distribution. Ford Sim Seven existed as it did, when it did, for a list
of reasons that only existed for a small moment in tech history: where the world
of offline and online multimedia were evolving, shifting, and merging in
intriguing and unpredictable ways month-to-month. And I can't help but
smile thinking back to that specific moment in time that
flew by without most of us even noticing.
I just realized that I've been messing with Ford Simulators
for like 27 years and I've never ended up owning a Ford. Heh, yeah not a very
effective piece of adware I guess. But anyway if this video was effective in
providing some enjoyment then perhaps you'd like to see some of these others!
And as always thank you for watching LGR.