Colin McRae Rally will launch next year and comes with an unbeatable heritage: the Colin McRae series has shipped over 4m units on PlayStation and PC and is recognised as one of the games market's most valuable and acclaimed motor sport franchises.

Promising an unbelievably personal experience, rallying will never have seemed so real. A team of over 40 people is already working on the game's creation with more positions to be filled as the development programme continues. Rick Nath is Associate Producer for the game, with McRae team front man Guy Wilday as overall Producer and Head of Studio.

"We're aiming for a very personal experience," says Rick Nath, "The previous games were all about the cars and the tracks. We want the player to really connect with the feeling of being McRae, not the car, and work with co-driver Nicky Grist, and the Ford team as a whole."

Visually Colin McRae Rally will be a feast of cars, stages and countryside with the Ford Focus RS World Rally Car returning as the lead car. The in-game Focus is being designed to feature fully moving working parts, such as suspension, and the enhanced damage engine will result in a totally destructible car - panels can be ripped off and punctured as well as dented.

Codemasters has cemented a deep working relationship with Ford Racing for this project and will be making use of their vast expertise to add realism and a passion to the game's atmospherics

Martin Whitaker, Director of Ford Racing, describes the close working relationship with Codemasters: "The high degree of realism in Colin McRae Rally reflects the unprecedented access that Codemasters has to the Ford World Rally Team. The experience for players will be closer in every respect to that of Colin McRae when he's competing for Ford in a World Championship event."

Describing the development team's ambitions for the game, Head of Studio, Guy Wilday enthuses: "There's two key elements to our vision for Colin McRae Rally - to continue our heritage of delivering the very best exhilarating racing gameplay and to create a more immersive rally experience that players can feel a part of. With these aims we are confident of bringing something new to the game's genre and moving the benchmark of 'best rally game' even higher." With the game due in 2002, artwork and a teaser movie file for Colin McRae Rally can be downloaded for media use from: http://www.codemasters.com/cmr-press