In pictures: Evolution of racing

Atari's Night Driver in 1976 was one of the first racing games. Black and white pixels represented the road and the car was a plastic overlay on the screen

Namco's Pole Position in 1982 pushed the genre on with versions on arcade machines and - in this picture - home machines

Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix series of games brought realism to titles - with a handling engine for car physics in the game

Arcade title Outrun in 1986 helped revolutionise racing games - with its high-quality graphics and famous soundtrack

Gran Turismo, on PlayStation, spawned a series which obsesses about detail and realism. GT5 is due out next year

Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 4 on Xbox 360 has re-created some of the world's most famous cities in great detail.

The team took thousands of digital photos of Macau, China, before drawing it. More than 6GB of data for the city was crunched down to 600MB.

Each car in PGR4 takes four to six weeks to create and place in the game. Every car must be signed off by the manufacturer before it can be used.

For Ferrari Challenge developers Eutechnyx took up to 7,000 digital photos to recreate a car

Ferrari supplied digital blueprints data to build the cars accurately and the handling of each virtual car matches the real thing

All finished cars had to be approved by the Italian racing legend before they could be used in game

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