Demo-Version with Mouse and massive lags cause of poor CPU, upgrade to S2 and High-end PC with black Momo, testing lots of setup and finally first WR on hotlap in SouthCity (what a trip) ... more Hotlap-WR`s and joining Team DSR-Racing (sweet memories) .. doing my best all day and nights to stay competitive with growing crowd of youngsters ... lots of fun with whole package --- lost connection cause of circumstances ... miss that great times ... greetz out to all Veterans who still remember .. all the best from (DSR)Ehn!cO !!!

My first memories:

Collecting some kart parts from a mate who was attending the LFS meet up at GP karting in Northampton (2005 or 2006). My main thought was

"who are these weirdos?"

and now I'm one of em.

I went in to work with my dad for a few days once during a school holiday and him and his work mates would play LFS during their lunch hour. I played it the whole time I was there and by Friday, I was winning everything. After that I set up LFS on the home computer and the rest is history.

Jump to 16 years later and some of my best friends are people I met in this community. We've run a kart team together in the UK since 2016.

Mostly playing by myself in singleplayer mode, driving the XFG and admiring how smooth the game ran (on a Pentium E2220 at the time, version 0.5Z25/Z28).

First online memories? Probably "Police Practice Server" and all the cops and robbers stuff that went on there. Absolutely loved it.

in 2006 my moher bought a CD like "PC expert" from Digerati with 404 games, and this CD comes with treasure games like

V-rally 3
Test Drive 6
Nascar Heat
Test Drive Offroad 3
Live For Speed

All the games are Demo version xD and the magazine says it's COMPLETE

Quote from TFalke55 :

My first memories:
[...]

Wow, that didn't age well!

I saw that show too back then! This, as well as the Fujitsu-Siemens racing series got me into LfS and sim racing in general...

2005, I used my father office pc to download LFS demo, because well, home internet wasn't a thing back then in my country.

And how I found about the game ? I was searching for an startup error/crash I had with NFS hot porsuit ( it was finally an incompatibility with the useless SIS integrated graphics chipset ).

while searching I stumbled by chance on a download link for LFS via google search ( I thought it was a click bait name ), and when I tried it I was so happy about a car game finally running on my computer even tho I didn't manage to finish one clean lap for some times...

My first memory should be somewhere in december 2003, where I got stuck in BL1 chicane, when the inner side still had a barrier wrapped around a piece of grass and even a tree if I recall well. That was so funny.

My memories 2002 or 3 maybe played one day or week and then nothing.
Then remembered the game in 2005 I believe and DSR (dark side racing) and Apexi where my favo servers. Had some more but still remember Camino complaning about me and back then 33's where rare but I did 33's.

I felt fast as **** back then

Getting kicked out of a server

2008-ish downloading a cracked version, but I already knew it was special.

I remember playing the beta demo countless hours online with the XFG on BL, 0.3b maybe? I can't remember.

When you found people of your same skill, it was amazing, otherwise it was caos in the first curve. I don't think that has changed much.

I've never ever played the same track, with the same car so many times in any other game. And I played with mouse and keyboard lol.

The game was great already. There were not many games with a good online mode back then, but LFS worked great. This game was done properly from the ground up. It was the first game I bought online.

Quote from H0ld3n :

The game was great already. There were not many games with a good online mode back then, but LFS worked great. This game was done properly from the ground up. It was the first game I bought online.

I hope big improvement next update on those words

I remember playing the demo a lot and didn't really hop online for the longest time, and I remember the anticipation waiting for S1 to drop; couldn't wait to get home from work to try it. The fact that you could really feel the weight transfer in the LX6 when you floored it was really cool, the front end would felt lights because of the direct force feedback. There really wasn't much like it at the time.

Also remembering being in a race one Saturday (CTRA?) and Purolator came to deliver my shiny new G25 and I hesitated because I didn't want to lose place or wreck anyone, but by the time I pulled safely over and ran to the door he'd already left with my wheel >.>

Arguing with Tristan and others about horsepower vs torque was fun too lol

I found LFS on some pc game magazine disc (propably "Komputer Świat Gry") i dont remember exact date. I wanted to play with my freinds on LAN, but they say "nah, it not have keyboard control only mouse" so we droped it.
Few years(?) later freind (from car games oriented forum/website "SpeedZone") introduced me to game that he played and it was exacly this same game that i wanted to paly with my LAN freinds.

Quote from TFalke55 :

My first memories:

Holy smokes, that burn in the end! :0 Can't believe they aired that...

I don't really remember that.

But what I remember is that sometime in 2003-2005 I was looking for racing simulations that had both a ForceFeedback function and Lan ....

And in ~2005 there were no options other than LFS ....
In addition, there was already a free demo at that time. Perfect for the Lan parties at that time.

Quote from 5tag :

Holy smokes, that burn in the end! :0 Can't believe they aired that...

Lmao

Quote from Xenix74 :

And in ~2005 there were no options other than LFS ....

Well you didn't look properly then. GPL had been around for a while then, and the community 2004 release didn't look too bad either. Also GTR and GTL came out in 2005, those were great in terms of sound at the time!

I met Live For Speed ​​when I was looking for Need For Speed, I played a little on demo stunt and derby servers at the carpark track,after playing for a while, i met a brazilian drift server that we played on the reverse Blackwood when the XRT was still part of the demo version.

Quote from 5tag :

Well you didn't look properly then. GPL had been around for a while then, and the community 2004 release didn't look too bad either. Also GTR and GTL came out in 2005, those were great in terms of sound at the time!

However, there were no demo versions of these games (with Lan). And back then at LanParty times you always had the problem that not every player had bought every game.

(Es gab aber keine Demoversionen dieser Spiele (mit Lan). Und damals zu LanParty Zeiten hat man eben immer das Problem gehabt das nicht jeder Spieler jedes Spiel auch gekauft hatte.)

A friend told me about it, so we raced demo in 2006. I had a Saitek gsmepad and really bad pc (pentium 3 667 mhz with gf2 mx), so LFS didnt run the best.

In 2008 i got a new PC (core 2 duo with radeon 3850), so decided to check up on all games that i couldn't run before. After few days of demo driving, i got s1 and entered a CTRA race...i think i got kicked for crashing out in way of leaders. LFS wasnt easy for begginers. Then i got S2, joined fox junkies server, had a good race with guy named Nicotine and decided to stsy there. From there on just gained more and more connections inside the game.

Quote from Xenix74 :

However, there were no demo versions of these games (with Lan). And back then at LanParty times you always had the problem that not every player had bought every game.

Don't act so innocent. This was the golden age for cracks, keygens, disk imaging, torrents etc. and sharing ripped games along with movies or music was a big part of the LAN parties we had.

In fact, to get back on topic, this is how I was introduced to LFS: A cracked version of 0.5P. I got into online (demo) racing since updates were more common back then, the sound update of ~0.5V played a big role in that (still one of the most underappreciated aspects of LFS, although it definitely needs some attention). Credit cards are rather unusual where I live, but I eventually paid for S3 when PayPal became a thing.

Quote from 5tag :

Don't act so innocent. This was the golden age for cracks, keygens, disk imaging, torrents etc. and sharing ripped games along with movies or music was a big part of the LAN parties we had.

In fact, to get back on topic, this is how I was introduced to LFS: A cracked version of 0.5P. I got into online (demo) racing since updates were more common back then, the sound update of ~0.5V played a big role in that (still one of the most underappreciated aspects of LFS, although it definitely needs some attention). Credit cards are rather unusual where I live, but I eventually paid for S3 when PayPal became a thing.

That's true....

But it was also the time of demos.

But I was pretty much the only Sim Racer in my Lan circle. So far, I had a hard time starting some races in the group. And LFS was the most accessible to my team. GTR & GTL were very difficult to master than the demo vehicles from LFS.