Play Formula One - F1 Online

Game Overview

F1 on MS-DOS is one of those early '90s racing games that somehow nails the speed feel despite the tech limits. You start by picking your difficulty—Novice is forgiving, but Expert? Good luck keeping your car in one piece after a few bumps. The tracks are all real 1993 circuits, though they threw in some weird obstacles (random signs, platforms hanging over the track) to keep you from just flooring it the whole time.

What’s cool is the little details: you’ve got to manage tire wear and wing angles, and if you ignore pit stops, your car just gives up mid-race. The engine overheats with a horrible screech if you’re reckless with automatic gears. And yeah, the roster’s stacked—Schumacher, Prost, Häkkinen—though no Senna since he was tied up with Sega at the time. Weirdly, you race as "James Tripp," which is just the dev sneaking himself into the game.

Two-player split-screen is chaotic fun, and there’s this "turbo" mode that strips down the graphics to make everything feel even faster. It’s janky by today’s standards, but back then, few games made you white-knuckle the keyboard like this one did.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".