Development of the game began in 1996 and continued for the next eighteen months during which Codemasters worked closely with the British Touring Car Championship's organiser TOCA to faithfully recreate the series in the virtual world.

[2] The vehicles in the game are super touring cars for which the player can select the gearbox setting to either automatic or manual.

Cups are awarded to the player based on his or her performances and allow for the unlocking of extra circuits, hidden cars and cheat codes.

Once a reference time has been established, a phantom car is materialised, prompting the player to further improve on the previous best lap.

The team, led by Gavin Raeburn, consisted of twenty-six programmers who worked six-day weeks at the rate of fourteen hours per day during the final stages of game development.

The designers also represented the race cars accurately, showing the sponsors of the teams and the advertising hoardings present on each circuit.

In order to realistically model the real life cars, each one was laser scanned with a precision of a quarter of a millimetre.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2000 in Los Angeles, developers Spellbound Software and Codemasters officially presented the TOCA Touring Car Championship port for the Nintendo handheld console.

[17] In the month before the game's release, Codemasters invited around forty journalists from across Europe to the Brands Hatch racing circuit in the English county of Kent.

Then they executed slaloms in a race car while attempting not to drop a ball placed on a container that was attached to the bonnet.

The journalists eventually tested TOCA Touring Car Championship under optimal simulation conditions by sitting in a bucket seat, which was near a giant television screen and a steering wheel.

They wrote that "the graphics are fast, detailed and liberally peppered with neat effects, and the sound is among the best to grace a racing sim".

[30] Finally, the magazine Consoles + had the same opinion, noting in particular that the effectiveness of the two-player mode was poor because of the game's fast-paced action.

[16] As for the French publication Génération 4, it estimated that "TOCA marks especially by the originality of its subject" and considered it more realistic in terms of control than Screamer Rally, released on PC the same year.

The French website welcomed the longevity of the championship and eight-player modes and believed that it showed that its realism was better represented on the Game Boy Color.

[15] In the first half of 1998, the PlayStation version sold 600,000 copies in Europe,[15] and it ranked third in the United Kingdom official video game charts.

[36] At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes, the PlayStation version took home a "Gold" prize for revenues above €21 million in the European Union during the previous year.