It’s no secret that no entertainment device or system is capable of replicating the sound and feel of live professional drag racing. But the closest thing to doing so will be on the market Friday (Aug. 26), thanks to GameMill Entertainment.

That’s when the “NHRA Speed for All” video game will be released, bringing the most up-to-date version of drag racing gaming to fans on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, and PC. The suggested retail price is $49.99, and the game can be purchased at Amazon and Walmart.

GameMill’s latest offering provides the player with realistic video and audio straight from trackside. The game includes tracks that currently host NHRA national events, and also some – such as Tucson (AZ) Dragway – that don’t, which allows players to experience facilities in every corner of the country.

The game covers five classes starting with Super Street, climbing the ladder to Pro Mod and Pro Stock, then rolling into the nitro-burning Funny Car and Top Fuel ranks. Thirty-eight NHRA racers are integrated into the game.

On the cusp of the release, Alex Knight, senior producer at GameMill, spoke about the game this week on the Competition Plus Power Hour. He worked on the project from conception to release, or as he put it, “through every step of the game at this point.”

Knight’s 15-year involvement in the games industry has included a heavy concentration on motorsports, from Hot Wheels to NASCAR. For this project, he was on-site at NHRA national events early on in the process.

“It was absolutely exhilarating,” he said. “I started talking to all the pros. We had such tremendous help with NHRA, as well, early on to onboard us into all the intricacies that would make the game.”

Those “intricacies” include the experience of being in a pro pit area between rounds. The player will get the sense of scale of the team’s transporters, and of the between-rounds maintenance and prep that occurs. There’s a team management side to the game in which the player handles his operation’s finances; in essence, an owner/driver.

“You’re there, you're up close, and if you're one of the lucky fans to get there when they decide to turn over (the engine in) a nitro car, well, you're going to enjoy your lungs for a little bit,” said Knight, whose crew had microphones in the Kalitta Motorsports and Justin Ashley pits to capture the sounds inherent in preparing cars for competition. That dedication to realism in the game produced nearly one terabyte of audio files.

While in the pits, players get to play crew chief as well as driver, making the tune-up calls for each round of action.

“You can hear tools and stuff, all the power tools and pneumatic tools going off,” Knight said. “There's just the general vibe of people talking and chattering, so you hear that in the background. … It's real background ambient sounds, which I think is stellar. … It’s the real deal. It’s absolutely the real deal.

Knight added, “If you go back to last year's Las Vegas event, you'll actually see our audio guy in a lot of the NHRA.tv footage and the FOX footage. … He's got all of his rigs set up. We captured the starting of the Top Fuel nitro cars, (and) Funny Car as well.

“And I think that's something we added to this game that wasn't done in the previous games. The folks at NHRA were saying, ‘This is such a visceral moment, when you turn over that starter, and it's the roar of those nitro cars coming to life. We want that in the game.’ That is something we definitely wanted to recreate, and so that's a feature in the game now.”

A player of “NHRA Speed for All” gets to start out at a grass-roots level in Super Street and working out of a less-tricked-out trailer/tow rig. Winning rounds is the way to move to a more-advanced class, one step at a time, until reaching the pinnacle in Top Fuel.

Knight described it as “a dirt to Daytona” or “rags to riches” approach to the sport that is designed to span an imaginary 20-year racing career.

“Our career management aspect is really robust,” he said. “You're going to be spending a lot of time dealing with investments with your R&D, (and) buying and buying and replacing parts. We got a lot of nice data in terms of mimicking what the budgets and financial side of NHRA can be within a certain range. We are completely off-the-wall fictional, so I think that's really cool.”

So, how much gaming muscle does a player need to get the full effect of the game? Knight tackled that question on the Power Hour, too.

“Really, what we're recommending is that you've got probably a 2060 Nvidia or greater. You can probably run it on a 1060,” he said. “Again, Nvidia GPU as the minimum spec; Intel i5 equivalent. I'm an Intel/AMD guy, so that's why I'm spitting out those specs. So I think if you've got a PC built within the last five years or so, you're probably pretty solid to play it on solid 30 (frames per second). If you want to go up to 60 FPS, I definitely recommend a bit better PC.”

The game doesn’t offer multi-player capability beyond what Knight termed a “local two-player” option. Online multi-player is “asynchronous,” which means each player will post his/her own reaction and elapsed times as a means of competing against another player’s numbers.

“But that means you can do it whenever you want,” Knight said, “so I think that's the benefit there is we keep this tracked. And so every one of the events that you can go to, you'll be able to post your scores, compete, go up the leaderboards, and if you're the fastest and the quickest, you're going to shine there.”

The local multi-player aspect, he said, is that the split-screen set-up “allows you to play as any of the drivers that we've got in the game. So if you want to dive in and mix and match Top Fuel cars, you can take your career car and go against Brittany Force if you want, or you can have a couple of the real-world Funny Car drivers, head to head, if you want to do that, too.”

GameMill also integrated a view from a driver’s helmet cam in the Top Fuel and Funny Car ranks, with Knight saying the game “replicated the same sort of focal distances that were used on those cameras.”

Knight said that immersing himself in the sport to gauge its race-day feel helped GameMill offer the most realistic version of a drag racing game in well over a decade.

“It's such a cool, tight-knit network, and you don't often see that in a lot of motorsports,” he said. “Oftentimes you get a little more competitive, but NHRA was next level. And I think that's what surprised me the most is they're all looking out after each other.

“They're all excited for the game. It's been, I think now, 15 years since the last PS2 game. I had a great time chatting with some of the crew from Team Kalitta. It's interesting, they're in this multimillion-dollar hauler, and they're still rocking a PS2 playing the old-school games. So I'm excited for them to be able to upgrade to a PS5, hopefully, and be playing our game and enjoying that for years to come, too.”

A pair of digital editions of the game are available, deluxe and ultimate. The latter includes “cool stuff with paint schemes, extra content for haulers and race suits and cars,” Knight said.

Fans attending the Dodge Powerbrokers NHRA U.S. Nationals (Aug. 31-Sept. 5) will be able to see and play “Speed for All” at GameMill’s booth. The game will be available for purchase on-site.