Ford Simulator 5

There are games born from a love of playing. And then there are games born from a love of selling cars. Ford Simulator 5 unmistakably falls into the second category.

In 1994, SoftAd Group released a product for MS-DOS that masquerades as a racing game, but is actually an interactive catalog. Ford Motor Company commissioned software advertising meant to reach a younger audience and subtly convince them that Ford was the right choice when buying their first car. Racing is therefore more of a pretext than a purpose.

The game mechanics are precisely as ambitious as you'd expect from advertising software from the mid-nineties. You sit behind the wheel, drive through a few tracks, and throughout the game bombards you—both subtly and not so subtly—with information about Ford models. The controls work, the graphics for 1994 surprise no one either way, and the Sound Blaster audio will convince you that you've heard a car engine at most on a cassette in your dad's car. The racing itself offers no depth, no challenge, no reason to play again. You complete a lap, get a result, and wonder if that's really all there is.

Yep, it is. That's really all there is. Ford Simulator 5 aged the way things age that were never truly alive—it simply sits there, a quiet witness to what happens when marketing gets a game development budget. As a historical artifact, though, it's fascinating. It shows how corporations in the nineties tried to reach young people's computers through software that pretended to be fun. Today we'd call it advergaming; back then, they just called it Ford Simulator.

Play it today if you're interested in the history of game marketing or want to show a friend what corporate PR looked like in the DOS era. As a racing game, it won't satisfy you. As a time capsule, it's exactly the kind of curiosity websites like this one exist for.