Codemasters had acquired the exclusive license to the World Rally Championship series in June 2020, which will begin as a five-year deal in 2023.

Started in 1998, the franchise has been a critical and commercial success and is generally acknowledged as a pioneer of realistic rally sports racing games.

The series is named after the World Rally Championship driver Colin McRae, who provided extensive technical advice during development.

The game featured real cars and drivers from the 1998 World Rally Championship season.

New features include Arcade mode, with direct head-to-head competition against AI drivers or another player, and a cleaner and more minimalistic menu system, which would be retained for the rest of the series until the release of Dirt 2 in 2009.

[50] This fourth incarnation of the Colin McRae Rally series, unlike in the previous three games, has no official WRC team license.

There is also a revised graphics and damage engine that enables paint scratches on the car, and a new 'career' mode where the player starts out in the lower club leagues and works their way up to compete with Colin McRae in his 2004 Dakar Rally Nissan Pick-Up.

An OS X version of this game, renamed as Colin McRae Rally Mac, has been published by Feral Interactive and developed by Robosoft Technologies and represents the first Macintosh release of a CMR series game.

Apple's switch to Intel Macs, some behind-the-scenes changes at Feral and other issues conspired to keep Colin McRae Rally Mac from being released until fairly late into 2007, despite it being based on PC-game underpinnings that Windows gamers had been enjoying since late 2004.

Feral chose to make this release as independent of the PC franchise as possible to avoid any issues that might date it, calling it Colin McRae Rally Mac rather than attaching a year to it.

In November 2008, Codemasters unveiled a sequel to the successful Colin McRae: Dirt; it was released in September 2009.

The game was a dedication to Colin McRae featuring videos and a special tournament in his honor.

Dirt: Showdown, an "arcade-style spin-off", was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in May 2012.