Circuit Superstars’ winning design has a long family history behind it

polygon.com:

The Mastrettas always knew they were going to make a racing video game. Take a glance at their family photos, and it’s easy to see why.

There’s their granddad, beaming alongside the “Faccia Feroce,” a single-seater race car he built in the 1950s. (It’s Italian for “fierce face.”) And here’s their uncle Daniel, with father, Carlos, introducing the Mastretta MXT, Mexico’s first showpiece sports car. And here’s Alberto, creator of Circuit Superstars, scooting around a tire barrier on his 125cc Formula A kart, with sister and studio co-founder Carolina standing by in the pits.

“We say the game is ‘by racing fans for racing fans,’” Carolina told Polygon, “but I think people would love to know what we mean by that.”

It would explain the “sim-meets-arcade” approach that Carolina, Alberto, and their brother Carlos Mastretta have taken with Circuit Superstars, a top-down racer that launched last fall on Steam and Xbox One, and two weeks ago made its debut on PlayStation 4.

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The “arcade” portion is simply what the Mastrettas’ studio, Original Fire Games, can handle, visually, with a full-time staff of just six. The “sim” component — realistic physics and handling; tire wear and fueling — comes from the Mastretta family’s combined experience designing and racing high-performance vehicles themselves.

“You can preserve a lot of the traits and qualities of the entertainment that motorsport brings, without having to go to a full simulation,” Alberto Mastretta said, in an interview shortly after Circuit Superstars’ PS4 launch. “So that’s what we did. We respect a lot of motorsports’ rules and aspects that make it exciting, such as pit stops and qualifying. Getting pole position, you know, making a good first lap.”

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