[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]

Blur screenshot

2009 is looking like one hell of a year for racing games. On the sim front we’ve got Forza 3 and Need for Speed: Shift to look forward to. And on the arcade side of things we’ve got Split/Second and Bizarre Creations’ Blur to whet our appetites. Of that list, perhaps most interesting of all is Blur, a game that’s divided opinion like a knife slicing through a buttery internet. Its PGR4 with power-ups approach has led some to accuse the Activision-owned studio of chasing the Mario Kart crowd. Others reckon it’ll prove a sweet antidote to serious sims. But pretty much everyone, however, wants to know why. We sat down with Bizarre’s communications guru Ben Ward and Blur executive producer Peter McCabe to get the answer.

VideoGamer.com: Is it simply a case of you’d worked on similar games for so long and wanted to try something else, or was it a combination of other factors? I’m curious as to how the decision to do something so different came about.

 Advertisement

Ben Ward: It was a combination of factors. The PGR series was coming to the end of its life. We were feeling a little bit restricted in what we could do and what our next game would be, not through anyone’s fault but just because after you’ve done four games you’re like, Jesus Christ, do we do hovercrafts or horse racing? It was a combination of that and joining Activision about that same time as well, loads of new opportunities opened up. Also being more honest about the racing genre. Why are people buying games? If we could address that with a brand new franchise, look and a brand new take on the racing genre, then we should totally do it.

VideoGamer.com: It was interesting that in the presentation you mentioned there hasn’t been a massive hit in the racing genre previously. I thought they were doing okay…

BW: I’m not going to mention numbers but not really, with the exception of Mario Kart, which has done very well because it’s a Mario Kart game. That is the exception rather than the rule. But generally titles, I won’t name any names, more recent titles that were really good, critically acclaimed and we all played them, they didn’t sell as well as can be expected. I know sales is one thing, but sales are reflective of people who are interested in the concept and interested in what they want to play. So if it’s not selling then the developers are doing something wrong and pushing it in the wrong area. We totally rebooted with Blur. All of these things we think are wrong; we’re trying to fix them.

VideoGamer.com: What’s the overarching premise of the story? Are the existence of various power-ups explained?

BW: You’re the third person that’s asked that this morning and nobody else has ever asked whether we need to explain the power-ups! It’s got to be a British thing. We were the same. We’ve got all these amazing power-up things and how do we explain it? Every idea we came up with sounded shit, basically, it sounded cheesy. So we’ve deliberately not explained it in any way. We’re sort of said, they’re power-ups, that’s what they do. Until today nobody had asked about it. What do you think? Do you think they should be explained?

VideoGamer.com: It just occurred to me that because there’s a story in the game it might tie into it, and if that’s the case I should ask about it. It wasn’t that I expected them to be explained.

Peter McCabe: In the story you meet a guy who knows how to use this perk, who teaches you how to use it, but we don’t explain what it is, why is it there in the world? If you went off down that then it would become a hardcore storyline…

VideoGamer.com: A Star Trek story…

PM: A Star Trek story!

BW: It’s not a storyline, it’s more of a premise. It’s more like a reason to race essentially. It’s not like War and Peace, there’s not going to be these big dramatic scenes or anything like that. Nobody dies in the game for instance. About as deep as it gets is, we’re in this area, some sort of thing happens that means we need to go to this area. For example, when you win at the LA Dogs, when you meet the main character there, he becomes disenfranchised with the scene that grows up around your racing, and he’ll go off and do his own thing. If you want you can go with him and join him in destruction style racing but it’s not going to be the case that you have to hunt him down or he has a secret identity. It’s not anything like that. It’s just a reason to race. That’s what people want from racing games I think.

The idea is loads of friends get together in LA, they start racing, more people hear about it, get interested, it snowballs and it moves all around the world. By the time it gets to New York and Barcelona, hundreds of people flash mob cities to see these impromptu races. That’s essentially the story.

[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]