Atari announced today that the demo for its currently in development arcade racing game, Race Driver: Grid, has broached the 1,000,000 download limit from Xbox Live. This figure becomes all the more staggering considering that the Grid demo reached this landmark total in a period of roughly four weeks since the demo made its appearance on Xbox Live Marketplace. The game, which is currently being polished to what will no doubt be a shining finish, is under development by Codemasters. This firm, it may be recalled, released another racing title last year called DiRT, which sold 500,000 copies. With the success of GRID’s demo, it is not crawling out on a limb to say that GRID may exceed the performance of DiRT in US sales.

Codemasters does seem to be promising to pull out all the stops for GRID, as the Atari press release speaks of “dramatic and beautifully realized race locations over three continents” where players can compete in “an exhilarating variety of racing events.” The full version of the game will be made available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC and Nintendo DS on June 3rd. In the meantime, prospective players can acquire the demo over Xbox Live Marketplace and the PLAYSTATION Network; however PC users can get that version of the demo from the games official site. 

We will continue to report on this game as the release date approaches, culminating with our review it, but our impressions of the demo can be viewed here.