Codemasters Birmingham revs new kart racer

Codemasters award-winning racing studio is working on a new over-the-top kart racer based on the F1 licence.

F1 Racing Stars is being developed at Codemasters Racing Studios in Birmingham, which also responsible for the BAFTA award-winning F1 series.

The arcade racing game, which has more in common with Mario Kart than its realistic F1 simulator series, arrives this November.

“We’ve really let our art and design teams off the leash to bring F1 stars’ personalities alive in a new way,” said Chris Gray, senior producer of F1 Racing Stars.

“It’s the game we’ve wanted to create for a long time and, building on our strong relationship with Formula One Management, we’re now able to bring Codemasters’ long-standing expertise in track design and AI to create a Formula One racing experience quite unlike any other.”

The game presents iconic F1 stars – including Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton – as cartoon characters, and features transforming corkscrew tracks and powerups, which aims to attract a younger audience than its core series. The tracks, racers and cars are all based on their real-life counterparts.

F1 2012, which is being developed by the same studio, is due on September 21st.

Codemasters recently decided that it would be switching its focus solely to racing titles.