If you missed Part One you can find it HERE ....
Alex : When we returned from the San Diego trip in February 2000, we started to really think about all the content we’d have to create to make a great arcade racing game.
We studied every Hollywood car chase sequence we could lay our hands on. There were three main sequences we look at particularly closely.
The first were the sequences in the 1998 De Niro thriller “Ronin.” Set in France, the John Frankenheimer movie showcased everyday saloon cars being pushed hard on everyday roads, weaving in and out of traffic.
The second was the San Francisco cliff top sequence from the 1992 thriller “Basic Instinct.” The sequence shows cop Michael Douglas risking his life in a nail biting overtaking sequence on some twisty mountain roads.
The third was an obscure 1976 French short film called “C’etait un rendez-vous.” This film shows an eight minute drive through Paris during the early hours. It’s shot using a bumper cam and has incredible audio. It’s quite well known amongst petrolheads today but wasn’t widely available back then. We paid a lot of money to get an NTSC VHS made from a 35mm print of it. It was Criterion Software Director Mike King who happened to read about it in an in-flight magazine on United Airlines. He tore the page out figuring we’d be interested in taking a look.
Being part of a company that was owned by Canon had several advantages. One of which was access to industrial grade copying machines. One part of the office floor was actually a photocopier showroom. We grabbed all of the chase sequences frame by frame, printed them out, and covered an entire wall of the office with them.
The two French movies were used as reference for what became the first completed Paris track, which we named “River City.”
The sequences from “Basic Instinct” and “Against All Odds” were used as inspiration for what became a European based track, which was called “Harbour Town.”
The first 'Shiny Red Car' Prototype.
Fiona: If you’re a really big Burnout fan you may already know that the original code name for the game was SRC. Which stood for Shiny Red Car. That was our first prototype - a shiny red car on a big flat grey skidpan.
As anyone who has made a driving game will tell you, getting the car to drive right is the biggest, most important piece of work you’ll do. Yes the AI can be tricky to get right (more on that in a moment) but if the car doesn’t drive well then the rest is pointless. Certainly the handling took every 1 of the 18 months we made the game for - every time the rest of us thought it was good enough Alex said it wasn’t and in the end he was right.
Starting out we had three big goals:
Get a car that drove, and most importantly, drifted well
Ensure the game ran at 60 fps on a PlayStation 2
Work out how to make AI drive through traffic.
That 3rd point might sound easy but in 2000 no-one was doing it.
Alex’s desk. Finalling Burnout (PS2) Summer 2001. Photo credit: Alex Ward
Alex: Lead Artist Mike Williamson led the track team and split the locations between either a City or Rural location. Inspired by the arcade titles we looked at, he also proposed to link both of the tracks together to create a Point-to-Point Track. This was pretty unique at the time, and required some clever streaming technology to stream the geometry off the PS2 disc.
Fiona: Talking of clever technology and the PlayStation 2 this is as good a time as any to squeeze in a photo of the wonderful Rabin Ezra who was so much a part of our development back then. Rabin was an exceptional Software Engineer who was a key member of the Renderware team. Whilst he never worked directly on the game team he worked very closely with us, especially Alex Fry (often turning up late at night to offer moral support) and he was pivotal in helping us achieve 60fps on the PlayStation2. Sadly he passed away in June 2005 (we dedicated Burnout Revenge to him and the incredible contribution he made to the Burnout series over the years).
Rabin Ezra watching Fiona play the game (Alex’s foot just in view). Photo credit; Alex Ward
Alex: All this work commenced in February 2000. At the same time, my old employers at Acclaim sent a FedEx legal letter which cancelled the other project at the Studio which was going to be a sequel to “Trickstyle”on PlayStation2. The team had already got the DC version of the game up and running on the Sony hardware very very quickly. This all happened in the quite cold and sudden way things often do in the industry. A team of people had worked incredibly hard to bring a game to life and despite all of that effort, you just get a formal legal letter telling you it’s all over.
It was a great shame as I still believe that the team would have produced something very impressive in the launch timeframe of the hardware.
Ed Hayden and Craig Sullivan set to work on a new project which was called “Stunt Squad.” It was still based around using a hoverboard, but was a more interesting take. The Renderware group had some new technology called “Render Vision” - which enabled Ed to create an sequence from his work in 3D Studio Max and spit it directly out onto the PlayStation2 where it was playable, with the controller, albeit in a limited way.
A grab from the RenderVision sequence of “Stunt Squad” . Photo credit: Alex Ward
We got our hands on the final launch hardware courtesy of a Japanese machine hand carried to GDC in San Jose by Yasushi-san from Criterion Japan. This was a few days after the Japanese launch. I was really keen to look at “Ridge Racer V” from Namco and had to get an engineer sent to my room to crack open the back on my TV so I could connect the machine up. I remember him staying around to watch the intro sequences to both “Ridge Racer” and “Tekken.” All these things laid the groundwork for our later success. We had to closely follow everything that was happening with the PS2. This would help us to calibrate ourselves against our competitors in the genre. Those two Namco titles were significant because they were the only other titles we saw on the PS2 hardware than ran at 60hz.
Back in the UK we attended the second Sony development conference for PlayStation2 which was held at the secret Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire. The Renderware guys had a stand at the conference. We had a chance meeting with the technical people from SCEE in London who were astounded to see the visual quality “Stunt Squad” project actually up and running on the target hardware. We arranged to meet with them shortly afterwards back in Guildford.
This meeting led to the hoverboard team signing a development deal with Sony in Europe. That project became known as “Airblade.” As they were the first team to sign their project, internally they became known as “The A-Team.”
The Airblade team area. Photo credit: Alex Ward
Back on the driving game, work began on planning the courses and getting a car to drive around and handle well. As anyone who has ever worked on the development team of a car based game will tell you, this is no easy feat to achieve. And always takes a long, long time to get right.
Fiona: There was a really tight knit core team on the game. People who would be key for the next 5 years and who are the first names in my mind when I think about who helped to forged Criterion into Criterion Games. They are the people we worked with most closely and who really made the game what it was. On the code side it was the incredibly talented Alex Fry, Richard Parr, Olly Read and Hamish Young. On the art side Mike Williamson, and designer Chris Roberts joined a little later by Paul Cross. And on audio Steve Root and Ben Minto.
The core members of the code team - from left to right: Hamish Young, Richard Parr, Alex Fry (hidden behind his monitor) and Olly Read. Photo credit: Alex Ward
A few others joined the team as we went along (Stu McKenna and Mark Wesley on the code side, Omar Mohammed, Trevor Moore, Mark Rendle and James Hans on Art plus Peter Bishop on Audio) but that core were there from the start and remained so all the way through the next few years up to the point where we were acquired by Electronic Arts.
We didn’t have Producers in those days, I was the Head of the Studio, we had two games teams (the “Airblade” team which had about 12 people and the “SRC” team which had about 7 at the start, peaking at about 14) and I ran them both, working with the individuals on the schedules.
Fiona in front of our Finalling board showing days left, build issues. Photo credit: Alex Ward
The board shows we were due to go 'Gold' on 28th September 2001 and that we were working towards the Review Build on 31st August. The Burnout team in all its iterations were always a team that could make big changes fast at the end of the development and this first game was no exception.
However, we are getting ahead of ourselves .... we need to talk about how we signed the game with Acclaim (after pretty much every publisher had turned us down). That's for Part 3 .... coming soon.