A few of you have been asking us to reprint a series of emails we wrote many, many years ago about how Burnout came about. I've managed to find them finally so here is Part 1 which covers how Alex and I met and how I came to take over the running of Criterion, changing it to be Criterion Games and Alex joining.
Early on at Three Fields we realised how many of you have been following our work since the early Burnout days. So we thought we would go back to the very beginning and tell you about how an arcade racing game with a shiny red car in it came to life.
Part 1 - The roots ….
Fiona: In early 1997 I joined Criterion Software as a Producer in Guildford, Surrey. A subsidiary of Canon, Inc, it was predominantly a technology company. It had a strong interest in the development and application of 3D imaging. Back then, it was beginning to utilise their expertise in 3D graphics by making a few titles for accelerated PC’s. It was something of a sideways step for me coming from the world of book and multimedia publishing.
On the development side there were no women, just a couple in admin and marketing, and the whole atmosphere was pretty intimidating. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I would be staying there too long. However I remember that a few people left after failing their probation period. That was interesting to me. This company clearly set high standards and held people accountable to them. That was something that definitely appealed to me. I began reporting directly to one of three company Directors, Mike King. He immediately sent me on a trip to St.Petersburg in Russia to oversee a small team they were working with over there.
I’d been at the company less than three months when I went to my first E3. That was May 1997.
As is often the case when you are on a work trip, I started to build a good relationship with a few of the guys on one of the internal Criterion teams, predominantly Artists Ed Hayden and Omar Mohammed and Designer Craig Sullivan. Like me they were all relative newcomers at the company. Along with Lead Programmer Sean Turner they were trying to start a new game project. After I completed my work with the Russian team, I joined them as their Producer. Ed had an idea for a hoverboard racing game and was interested in what could be done on the next wave of console hardware that was being talked about.
As Criterion was a Japanese-owned company our CEO David Lau Kee had extensive contacts in Japan. It was David who built a relationship with SEGA in Japan and thus my team were granted early access to development kits the as yet unreleased Sega Dreamcast. By the time of the next E3 in 1998 we had a pretty good playable PC demo of the game and were ready to seek a publisher. The game was known as ‘Velocity’.
Before joining Criterion, I had worked in book and multimedia publishing at the UK division of the McGraw-Hill Book Company. The Managing Director at the time was a gentleman called Fred Perkins and Fred's son in law just happened to be Rod Cousens, veteran UK game publisher and President of Acclaim Entertainment in Europe. I’d met Rod at Acclaim demonstrating a CD-ROM title two years before and so I contacted him again to say I was now at Criterion and had a game I’d like to discuss. He said he’d set me up an appointment with the guy who ran his A&R, Alex Ward.
The meeting at E3 in Atlanta with Alex almost never happened as Alex had twice tried to cancel leaving us with the distinct impression he wasn’t interested! I think he believed we weren’t making very good games.
Looking back, he wasn’t far wrong. Criterion was much more of a tech company than a game development company. The company had published a couple of games, one through the then small French publisher Ubisoft. The titles were PC based and little more than extended 3D accelerated graphics showcases for the company’s in-house Renderware technology.
Alex : At that time, my job involved visiting almost every European development studio and looking for titles that we could publish. Acclaim had several studios and the idea was that if I could find one or two hits from outside the company, then this could potentially allow more development time to be spent making an internal title better. In the run-up to E3, I was receiving a lot of requests to meet with people at the show itself. Back then, you rarely got anything playable through the post. It was mostly a VHS cassette with some early footage and a covering letter. Criterion had sent copies of their PC titles along with a VHS. I was focused on finding console games at Acclaim so I wasn’t really looking at PC titles. The VHS featured “Redline Racer” a 3Dfx powered racer that Ubisoft had recently published. The visuals were good for the time. But to make a great racing game you’d really have to look to beat the sorts of games that Namco were releasing on PlayStation, and that Sega were releasing in the arcades. They were requesting a meeting with Acclaim at E3 but I turned them down.
In 1998 E3 took place at the end of May. I had put together my appointments quite early on and then flew out to the United States two weeks early. I had a meeting in Seattle, then took some holiday in Las Vegas with Darren Falcus from Iguana UK before flying on with him to Atlanta.
When I got to my hotel, I received a fax from Rod where he’d more than doubled the amount of appointments for me. I also noticed that there was a ‘must attend’ note next to the appointment with Criterion.
Atlanta had incredible humidity, and the games of that show - (which I never got to see as I was stuck on the stand) were “Half Life” on PC and “Perfect Dark” on the N64. I spent three tiring days sitting through some uninspiring pitches. The overall noise of that show was close to deafening. People had to shout into your ear all the time, like shouting over the music in a nightclub. For the first day I was pretty sure that the new game from Rare was titled “Perfect Dart” and I was wondering why they had chosen such an odd name.
Fiona: So the E3 meeting happened after all and it stood out for 2 reasons. Firstly I remember thinking this guy Alex clearly knew a LOT about videogames and secondly half way through the meet Alex suddenly out of the blue looked at me and said 'Got it! Winchester Rifles!' and then turned to my then boss and said 'Whatever you're paying this girl it isn't enough!'. Turned out Alex had suddenly made the connection between Rod and myself and a pitch I had done years earlier. Rod had apparently said after the meeting 'She is very impressive' (always nice to hear if a little embarrassing coming from someone I thought was a total stranger).
A follow up meet was arranged in Guildford where our offices were located.
Alex: I can clearly remember the first meeting I had down at Criterion.
The game looked impressive with a great futuristic style. The game was running on PC and Set One Dreamcast development hardware. It also featured some very arcade inspired characters - and that was something that I had seen a lot of European developers struggle to get right. We’d also heard through the grapevine that Criterion was one of the very first groups in the world to be secretly working on what was then referred to as “NGP” - or “Next Generation PlayStation.” We were always looking for development studios we could form a long term relationship with, so it seemed like a smart move to make a deal with Criterion that year.
Fiona: Alex became our unofficial liaison at Acclaim and his huge knowledge of games was really inspiring. Our actual Producer was based in the US but we only met him once or twice. A completion date had been agreed between the companies, so we were pretty much left to get on with it and deliver the game on time. Alex got to know the team at Criterion pretty well, often coming down to Guildford from London in the evenings and at weekends to playtest the game as we finalled. Jeremy Chubb, Acclaim’s UK PR was often with him.
Fiona at her desk 1999.
An early magazine cover for TrickStyle.
Alex: Although 1998 is a long time ago, I have good memories about it. I was travelling around a hell of a lot and I assisted in making four development deals that year. Project “Velocity” was the first. Guildford wasn’t too far away for me to drive to so I visited their offices quite a lot and was around for the closing stages of the development. I remember a lot of crashing PCs and a few mammoth 24hr sessions finishing the game. One of those sessions was the night before the big solar eclipse in August 1998. I know that because I got home just after 6am and ended up sleeping through and missing the whole thing!
I still hate the name “Trickstyle” to this day (as a side note: you can now buy the game on Steam as a company bought the rights to it when Acclaim went under). I thought that the key art that made it onto the final box was terrible. The original art that Ed Hayden had done for the pitch material was much stronger in my eyes. Acclaim had excellent PR in Europe - headed up by Simon Smith-Wright and Jeremy Chubb. They did an incredible job spreading the word about the game. But I don’t think the same enthusiasm was felt in the New York office. They were really lost as the industry changed around them - moving away from quick-gimmick licensed titles on cartridge based machines and the rapid adoption and explosion of first PlayStation. Then Neversoft released “Tony Hawk Skateboarding” on PlayStation which was a huge hit. In true game publisher style, the New York folks were suddenly quite cold on our futuristic arcade racing game and were much more excited in what was the then-current ‘flavour of the month.’ I’d been at Acclaim for five years at this point and working alongside the Criterion team, I was really started to see things more from the developer point of view. And could also see how they weren’t always treated with the respect that they rightfully deserved as developers from some of the people on the Acclaim side in New York.
Here is the box art for the game
Fiona: After the launch of “Trickstyle” in September 1999 I was asked if I would consider taking over the games side of Criterion. At the time Criterion had two and a half teams none of whom had yet seen any real success. There were not many design leaders and it wasn’t really clear to anyone what games we would make next. There was the TrickStyle team, with people like Ed, Craig, Omar, Neil Manners and Steve Lucas, who I knew would be supportive of my appointment and the remnants of the “Sub Culture” team - who I had no real relationship with - so that was daunting. Though Mike Williamson who would become a really close ally and friend for the next few years was from that team. There were also a small team that had worked on 3D graphics demos for Intel out of which emerged the motorbike games “Redline Racer” and its spin off “Suzuki Alstare Extreme Racing” (the latter of which was notably led by graphics programmer Alex Fry, another person who would be key to Criterion’s future.)
So becoming Head of the Studio felt like a huge risk for me to take, especially as I’d only shipped two games myself.
After a lot of thought, I accepted the job on the proviso that we find and hire a Creative Director and start the studio afresh. We needed someone who knew games inside and out and who could provide a clear direction of the types of games we could make that would also be commercially viable. In a meeting with Criterion Software boss Mike King I remember using the words ‘someone like Alex’. It was Mike who said ‘well why not Alex?’ This led to him joining shortly afterwards as Criterion Director.
The beginning of Burnout
Fiona: When Alex joined the new studio in January 2000 we had two and half development teams on the go.
The “TrickStyle” team were in the early stages of making a sequel using the newly arrived development kits for PlayStation2 (that game would later become Airblade published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe). These kits were big, heavy, and for security reasons were locked into place in metal cages that were physically bolted into the concrete under the office floor.
The “Sub Culture” team were finishing up a sequel for Ubisoft on the Dreamcast (which would be published under the name Deep Fighter). We also had a third very small group trying to come up with a new game idea. We thought it should be a mission based driving game and had put together a brief written pitch. The Renderware group had just signed a big deal with Midway in Chicago for them to use the Criterion middleware across all of their titles. They suggested if we had anything internally, we should meet first with their San Diego office.
In February 2000, Designer Chris Roberts and Art Director Mike Williamson joined Alex and I on the trip to San Diego. The night before the meeting Chris talked Alex through the game design ideas we had - which was a mission based driving game. The only thing I can remember about it now nearly 18 years later is that you delivered donuts to the cops. (It was clearly a killer concept!) Silence fell as Chris finished talking and Alex eventually said ‘so what do you think of it?’. Chris smiled and said ‘it’s rubbish…. I’ll work on it but I wouldn’t buy it!’ So there we were in the hotel bar and nothing concrete to pitch the next day. My strategy switched to become “survive this meeting and then come up with a new game, fast. “
The next morning before the meet Alex took us to a mall and we walked around talking about games and what we liked and didn’t like. He was very passionate about driving games and agreed strongly that was what we should be making.
The time came for the meeting and luckily surviving it was pretty easy as a) the guy we were met was more interested in talking about board games than arcade games and b) anyone who went to Midway’s offices back then will know that it was situated under the flight path of the US Navy’s Miramar Air Force Base meaning that you’re regularly treated to the deafening sound of fighter jets passing overhead. Not that conducive to a productive meeting really - but in this case we were desperate to get out and continue talking about what we were going to do next. I think that every great game should begin with a lot of talk about what we all love. And that these things should be our inspiration.
Inspirations
Alex: I was always very into arcade games, from quite an early age. If you wanted to see the latest and greatest hardware and also be inspired by what was to come - then you had to be studying arcade games in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Since I first met the Criterion guys I knew that the pressure would be on to get a project up and running as quickly as possible.
I had a spreadsheet on my computer which listed pretty much every single developer in Europe, and what titles they currently had in development. Not only did I know what most of the releases that year were going to be. I also knew most of what was coming the next year and the year after that.
I’d learned the mantra “know your product, know your market and know your competition’ from Joe Bonar and Tony Beckwith from Probe Entertainment in Croydon. To have a chance of breaking through with a new team, with a new game, on hardware that wasn’t yet out I knew we’d have to stack the deck in our favour as much as possible.
My plan was to make a true arcade-style racing game for the PlayStation2. I saw the Criterion guys as massively ambitious, and incredibly technically competent. They just needed a hit game to really make their name. A lot of the games I’d been shown during my time as an A&R were often too ambitious and quite weak technically - often taking ideas from PC titles and then struggling to make those ideas work on consoles like the PlayStation.
My favourite genre in gaming has always been racing, especially the coin-op titles. “OutRun” had really had a massive influence on me and I closely followed the arcade scene. I’d worked with Leon Deith in Acclaim’s short-lived coin-op division for a time and got to attend all of the London amusement trade shows - the ATEI in Earl’s Court and the smaller AL Preview show which was held in a hotel in Hammersmith. A room full of brand new arcade games? All on free play? For someone like me, there was nothing better in the world!
ATEI arcade show at Earls Court, 2000Photo credit: Unknown
As much as I loved the early simulation attempts in the driving genre, I knew we’d have no chance starting off and trying to beat Polyphony Digital and Gran Turismo with our first game. Likewise, there were a lot of teams trying to make mission based driving titles in the vein of Driver by Reflections. But the thought of some sub-par storytelling and wonky polygonal characters shaking around in cutscenes put me off that idea.So, I was a big fan of Namco’s Ridge Racer, OutRun by Sega’s AM2 division, and the very first version of Need for Speed by Electronic Arts on the Panasonic 3DO console.
I remember the excitement and amazement in the room when my friends first saw the car crashes in the game. Like Sega’s Outrun, the first NFS had that rare mix of high speed driving , traffic, and crashes.
I thought if we could create a game that had a lot of speed and really cool car crashes (which nobody else was doing for licensing reasons), then we would be on to something.
In the month before I joined Criterion I spent a long afternoon in the arcades near Leicester Square studying all of the driving games. Apart from “OutRun” the only one I found that featured traffic and crashing was an obscure PC powered game from Konami called “Thrill Drive.” I spent a long time playing the game, not only trying to complete all of the stages but also imagining making a game that was better than that and bringing it to the home consoles.
Fiona: It was clear from the start that Alex had a really clear idea of what he wanted us to make - Make a game that was really fast, really fun, that anyone could play and which had the best car crashes seen in a game. So that became our mantra.
But before we could do that we had to put a car on screen and make a car drive. That led us to our first prototype on the PlayStation2 development kit…..
We hope you've enjoyed hearing about these early years. We'll pick up again on the story very soon.