The project originated as a tech demo exhibited at E3 in May 1995, created to showcase the capabilities of the M2 hardware — a PowerPC-based platform co-designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical that had begun life as an add-on chip for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer before evolving into a standalone console. Studio 3DO developed the demo into a full racing game, initially working under the title IMSA Racing before the project became IMSA World Championship Racing.
Had it shipped, the game would have been the first officially licensed title by the International Motor Sports Association, and one of the first release titles for the M2. Development lasted approximately two years, with the game appearing in playable form in magazine previews during 1997.
The lead designer was Ed Rotberg, a veteran of Atari who had previously worked on the arcade titles Battlezone and Star Wars. Chuck Sommerville, known for Snake Byte and Chip's Challenge, served as lead programmer, and producer Greg Richardson later went on to serve as CEO of BioWare and Pandemic Studios. The game ran at 30 frames per second at a 640x480 resolution. Its driving and physics engines were derived from the earlier arcade game Hard Drivin', while the graphics engine — called "Mercury" — was licensed from an external developer.
An easter egg embedded in the finished build contains a two-dimensional vertically scrolling shooter minigame, written by artist Alex Werner as an earlier standalone demo of the M2's 2D capabilities.
Panasonic cancelled the M2 project in mid-1997, citing competition from the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 and concluding that the system would not offer a sufficiently differentiated experience against other fifth-generation consoles. IMSA World Championship Racing was left unpublished as a result.
Following the M2's cancellation, Studio 3DO began adapting the game for PC, but this version was also never released.
In July 2010, a near-complete build of the game was made available online by community member NikeX at the 3DO Zone forums, shared with the explicit permission of original developer Alex Werner. This made IMSA World Championship Racing the only M2 home-console title to be made publicly accessible, though playing it requires M2-compatible hardware such as the FZ-21S or FZ-35S interactive kiosks and multimedia players. The Konami M2 arcade board — used in Battle Tryst and Evil Night — is incompatible with the home-use software.
Previews of the game before the M2's cancellation were positive. David Hodgson of GameFan praised the graphics, audio, and overall presentation. Ultra Game Players highlighted its attention to detail, and French magazine Joypad also commended its visuals.
Despite never receiving a commercial release, IMSA World Championship Racing stands as an artifact of the mid-1990s racing-game boom, a period in which developers competed to create increasingly realistic licensed simulations of professional motorsport categories. Its development by the team behind Hard Drivin' physics, combined with the IMSA license for sports prototype racing, positioned it as a potentially significant sim-racing title for its era.