These weekly development updates are going to be paused for the next 3 weeks, as all the work we are doing during this time will be focussed on the Early Access programme.
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We will do sporadic updates as and when we have something to share of course.
In the meantime, here's another trip down memory lane.
Burnout 1 - Tracks, Cars and Crashes ...
Fiona: Mike Williamson was the Art Director on the project but he was also very much leading the effort on tracks. In those days each person did multiple jobs (very much like we do now at Three Fields). The first 3 Burnouts were made with relatively small teams. Once we joined EA that all changed - they were very focussed on having people dedicated to very small areas with a Director for each. Incredibly hierarchical and all those layers meant you also needed lots of ‘development managers’ whose sole job it was to manage. But we’ll get to that part of the story another time. Back to 2001.
On many games the game designer or level designer will map out the courses and then the artists will make them look pretty. Not so on the Burnout games. Mike is a self confessed control freak and he wanted to design the courses himself. He would sculpt up a basic ribbon in Lightwave and spend a lot of time massaging the ribbon.
We wanted them to flow, like the best Japanese driving games did - where the flow of the track from corner to corner felt good, you could drive at a really high speed and that the handling felt right for both Beginner players and more Advanced players.
Once we had the ribbon right the artists would ‘mass’ up the basic scenery of each track and from then on it didn’t really change too much.
Alex: Looking back, I think we probably spent far too long making the tracks for the first game. But everything was new, the tools and workflow, the team and the project. Again, doing a game that targets 60fps affects pretty much all of the visuals in the game. Everything had to be efficiently used and implemented, and then re-used as much as possible.
Lead Artist, Mike Williamson playing the River City track which he had built. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Chris and Paul were doing the traffic placement. They had a Lightwave plug-in that let them place all of the traffic on a track and run it and see how it worked. It was pretty cool - I remember we always used to show that tool to visitors as it never failed to impress. In particular were the triggers which were set so that once the player passed a certain point traffic would trigger, for example to come out of a side road and give them a scare. We did that a lot in the first game. And it was different on each lap.
Designers Chris Roberts and Paul Cross. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Fiona: Burnout is known as the unlicensed car game and there were 2 big reasons for that.
Firstly we wanted to smash them up and at that time car licensors were not keen on seeing their pride and joy smashed to smithereens. Bad PR apparently! To be honest we didn’t know any car licensors anyway and we didn’t have the money to pay them even if we did. So we set about making our own. We hired an ex-car industry guy called Nigel Gordon Stewart who made sure we didn’t mistakenly infringe any copyrights. He inspected every car model we created and ensured it was ok. We learnt a lot about this over the coming years. It’s all about the little details like the shape of the lights, the grilles and so on.
The thing we wanted in the first game was to have everyday cars. This was inspired by what we had seen in Thrill Drive and in Ronin. And of course we wanted to put in larger vehicles. It was all motivated by pure fun.
Once we had made progress on our big 3 challenges we set about making the car crashes look really good. We really wanted to include replays so players could relive the moment of their crash but they were without doubt the biggest development headache as they constantly diverged. I think the majority of bugs we fixed on the game were to do with replay divergence and the last one we ever fixed definitely was. It’s the reason we dropped them in later games. It was just too painful.
Burnout 1 is the purest racing game of all the Burnouts and that’s reflected in the game modes we chose to do. True to our inspirations we wanted to make an amazing, fun, fast racing game - with the best crashes. In later games we became more interested in the interaction between racers as seen in Takedown and Revenge. One regret was that the Survival Mode was too hard and that we didn’t put a Leaderboard in. We knew it had been a mistake because the night we finished the game we had to write our scores on a whiteboard to see who was doing the best.
Finishing the game for PlayStation2.
Once E3 2001 had come and gone we knew we just had to get the game finished. At this stage we were focussed solely on the PlayStation2 version which we planned to release Autumn 2001. (The Gamecube and Xbox versions were to be done after we had finished and were eventually released in Spring 2002.)
We worked a lot of very late nights and ate far too much takeaway food. But we were young, none of us were married. Olly had a young daughter, Leah, who used to come in at weekends. She was about 5 at the time and just brilliantly behaved.
Alex : For all of the Summer of 2001, I was working all day and almost every night at the office. We all were. The Acclaim guys did a very good job with the specialist Press both across Europe and within the UK.
As we weren’t that far from London, it was pretty easy to arrange for the writers from the specialist Press to come and visit us in the office. That way they could meet us, meet the members of the team and be sure to see the very latest up to date version of the game. That meant there was also something new for them to write about so month to month the coverage was fresh, and also it helped us give them tailored information that could be exclusive to their particular magazine.
Around this time, Acclaim were working with a London agency called Branded. They were run by a guy called Phil Ley - and he was famous for creating the SEGA “Pirate TV” ad campaign for the Megadrive. They were a sharp creative agency. No job was too big and, (as I saw some of the late invoices they submitted) no fee was too big either. They did a lot of TV work for Sky Television in England so if they needed any video content making, they would always hire the same crews that worked for Sky.
For Burnout, Branded’s ‘big idea’ was to use the visual image of a car crushed into a cube as the ‘key art’ for the game. They would find a friendly scrap yard, buy a load of crushed cars, and use these as point of sale material for UK retailers. It cost money to promote games in store windows back then, and the retailers liked unique eye catching props to bring people into their stores, or ‘drive footfall’ as they called it.
Every magazine back then had some sort of disc on its cover. If it was the Official Magazine, you got ten or so playable PS2 games. If not, you got a DVD filled to the brim with footage of forthcoming games. We did a lot of back and forth to different places ensuring that if anyone, anywhere saw our game running - it would always look really good as it was one of us playing it. I could always count on Paul Cross or Chris Roberts to drop whatever they were doing and record some top quality footage in a last minute situation.
As Fiona mentioned already, in those days we worked a lot of late nights and ate a lot of takeaway food. We had a regular order with one of the local curry houses in Guildford at around 7pm each night. I had a wind-up going for a long time that the Owners of it were all driving Bentleys as a result of our loyalty. If you liked Indian takeaways, it was all good. If you didn’t then you got to quickly learn to appreciate them. There wasn’t much choice around in 2001. And when you’re hungry, getting some Pizza in always sounds much better than it actually is in the end.
After a month of Indian food we’d all just about had enough. One night we all ordered off the English part of their menu. They did pies, chips and peas on the off chance someone wasn’t up for a curry. That was a big mistake. It was back to curry the next night. After trying everything on the Menu, pretty much everyone ordered a Vindaloo, usually the hottest dish on the Menu. The guys who came to deliver it all thought we were nuts. But then we found out that there were something hotter. Hotter than a Vindaloo? Yes, that’s a dish called a Phal. But when we floated the idea with our regular delivery guy,he said he wouldn’t let us order one. His reason was ‘that we must be crazy, or like hurting ourselves, because eating a Phal is like messing with drugs.’ And I swear, those are his exact words.
In September we were trying to finish the game. And we had just under a month to go. We’d bitten off every so slightly more than we could chew. If you look at some of the photos here, you can see what a mess our Office was. There was no air conditioning in the building, which is why every single desk has a fan or two sitting on it. And all the windows were open all the time. So, thirty game developers, hot weather, Indian takeaways - you can imagine what the place smelt like. And you can also see many make Coke cans littering the place. Criterion had a free Coke machine on the ground floor. And everyone drank many cans during the day. If I can remember clearly, we got through something like six hundred and seventy four days each month! Each month! We had a deal with the Doctors Surgery next door to the office and when I told him that he could not believe it and reckoned we were all high on the sugar all day long. I’ve got some of the early Criterion recruitment adverts at home from some of the trade press and they actually included ‘free Coke machine’ as one of the perks of working there in the advert. Never mind working for massive Japanese multinational Canon, no, free Coke ladies and gentlemen! That will bring them in, no problem!
Even though it was the final month of development, the game was still not complete. The track artwork was ongoing, and only a few tracks were complete enough to be Final. Mike Williamson and Trevor Moore finished their tracks first, and then assisted the rest of the Artists individually until the end.
We’d also taken on the working of making the game compatible with steering wheels. The folks at Logitech had sent us a pallet load of them. So almost everyone’s desk had a steering wheel clamped to it, with another one in a box to be taken home. I’m not sure how many people actually played it with a wheel, but we all had to help with the wheel testing. You could choose to play with Manual Gears if you had a wheel. Looking back that was making an already had game even harder.
Two features that I recall being a real pain in the final months were Crash Replays and then Race Replays.
Crash Replays came first. We liked the idea of being able to save all your best crashes to a PlayStation2 Memory Card and be able to show them off to your friends at some later date. A pretty good idea and one we’d come to revisit six years later when we were doing “Burnout Revenge.” However, like many good ideas in game development, it became a boat load of work. There were a few problems with it. Just as we found taking screenshots, the crashes didn’t always look so good in freeze frame or very close up. Secondly, we had to work on the user interface to let the player move the camera around and replay each crash. For the time we spent bringing this to life, we could have done a lot of other things. We did it, but we all felt in the end it wasn’t quite worth the effort it took.
Race Replays came into the game right at the very end. They were a great way to show off the game, and a good ‘attract mode’ (as they are known in the coin-op world) was a way to draw people in. They also helped us with marketing as they we got great screenshots from them, showing off the cars, the action, the speed, and the tracks from different camera angles. The replay cameras were hand placed by Chris and Mike who worked right through the night to author them for every single track. If you find any of the original trailers for the game, or have the original demo disc, then you’ll see their work showing off some of our pre-recorded laps.
Now, most people on the planet can remember where they were on the fateful day of September 11th 2001. I know I can, because I can instantly recall what I was doing at any time over the past 20 years by recalling what game I was developing at the time!
On that day we had Richard Leadbetter from PSW Magazine visiting the office to capture some footage for his monthly on-cover DVD. He’s now known for his work at Digital Foundry, but back then Richard was just as dedicated as he is today making sure that he captured game footage in the absolute highest quality he could. If the game ran at 60fps, he wanted to make sure the capture was done at 60fps. And he wanted to use the very best equipment that was around at the time.
We spent the morning of that day capturing footage from “Airblade” and then just before lunch we began to capture a few bits from “Burnout.” Then we went out to lunch at a Thai place up the High Street. We were just getting going again we word flashed around the office that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York. Someone put an aerial onto one of the office TV’s and tried to tune in a picture. As we tried to get more information from the web, it was clear that something out of the ordinary had happened. Especially when we heard it was a big passenger plane rather than the sort of small Cessna type aircraft we all assumed would be involved in an ‘accident’ like that.
My house wasn’t too far away from the office. It was about a ten minute drive. Shortly after hearing the news, and sensing something major was happening, I drove home in my car to record Sky News. I knew I’d be working until midnight that day and wanted to be able to catch up with the News when I got back. I’d just got a TiVo device a few months before, so I set it to record Sky News in long play mode and headed back to work.
As I arrived, we saw on the office TV news that a second plane had hit the Tower. Everyone was in a state of disbelief really as we knew that something bad had happened. We’d been sheltered away from the outside world all Summer. We were in the office making the game. We were all out of touch with a lot of what was going on in the real world, the world that was happening outside our little bubble of development.
I clearly remember taking a phone call from a guy called Pat Garratt who wrote for an industry ‘breaking news’ type website called “Fastest Game News Online” - we were talking about screenshots before he said the words ‘they have just hit the Pentagon’ in a spaced out voice and then the phone line went dead. As I said, I’ll never forget that day. And when I finally got home I saw that I’d recorded those awful events. Sky was broadcasting the New York Fox News feed for most of the day. I dumped it all down to a VHS copy and then deleted it from the TiVO. I never watched that tape, and I’m not sure if I still have it. I might be in a packing box somewhere, along with other things I held onto from that time.
A detour to talk about the night Airblade was finished:
I can also remember the night that the “Airblade” team finished their development. The unofficial rule was a disc would be burned that would be the ‘Final Master’ disc of the development. No-one would leave until that was done, and that we knew that the game could be played all the way through from start to finish.
The office fridge got filled with good quality champagne early in the day. Criterion always did things just that little bit better than a lot of other companies. Some firms did zero when it came to the end of a game. Maybe you got a few days off but that would be about it. Criterion knew the sacrifices people made to get the games finished, so cheap champagne was never going to be an option.
The Master disc was burned just after midnight, but due to the usual screw-ups it wasn’t properly completed on the disc burner until just before 1AM.
Paul Glancey and Pete Lake set up the projector in the Criterion Software boardroom and Craig Sullivan had the task of playing the game all the way through from the start to the end.
At the time we all felt that Airblade was a massive, next gen game. It had slick presentation and a unique play style. Around 1am, the whole team crowded down one side of the room, the lights were dimmed and the game booted up.
If any of you are lucky enough to be part of a game team, then this feeling at the very end is one of the best feelings you can have. The feeling of pride and sense of accomplishment is immense.
At the start of the game, Craig entered the name of the Save Files into the game. He typed the word “DONE” and the room erupted into cheering.
Then there was a nerve wracking 45 minutes of watching him play the final stages of the game. Everyone was watching with crossed fingers, hoping that it is finally done and hoping that the game wouldn’t crash. And if it was going to crash or hang, then you hoped it wouldn’t be your work or your code that had screwed it up.
But it all worked out. And I’m glad it did. Because it would have been hard to not open the mountain of champagne that was sitting on the boardroom table. And there wasn’t just booze, there were also several boxes of cigars. And because we were all much younger, they were lit and were attempted to be smoked with the sort of carefree reckless abandon that you just don’t see in the industry anymore…
Those are almost triumphant moments that stay with you forever.
That game had been quite challenging to develop and the team had been through the wringer a little but the Airblade team were certainly proud of their work and that the game was being published (in Europe at least) by the format holder themselves, Sony Computer Entertainment. And within the company, they were ‘The A Team’ and my team was “The B-Team.”
This fact was helpfully pointed out to me by one of the animators on the “Airblade” team as we wound down the celebrations in the boardroom.
“I bet you wish your game was as good as ours Alex..” he said.
“Erm, I think it’s better actually.” I replied.
“Yes, but it’s not like ours is it? It’s not triple A is it? Published by Sony you see? Now that’s what a triple A game looks like” he pointed out, whilst nursing a bottle of beer.
They had finished, and we still had another month to go. It would be better without their lot crowding out the office. I did think about tipping that bottle beer over his head. But decided not to…
Instead I walked away muttering “B Team are we? We’ll show you!” under my breath.
As war began in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 we played the hell out of our game, day in and day out.
Until one night, it was done. Time was up, and we enjoyed a similar celebration to our hoverboarding friends on the opposite side of the office.
The game was sent away into the ether for more testing and to enter certification at Sony. We will finished. Or at least we thought we were.
The office emptied sometime between three and four in the morning. We went home and attempted to resume normal hours of waking and sleeping.
It was all good. For about fourteen hours.
Fiona got a call at about 5pm from Acclaim’s HQ in New York. They had found a bug in the NTSC version of our game. They said the game was impossible to finish. Could we go back to work and find out why?
Now, as I said before, in the games business any feelings of triumph and success are always short lived for a development team. There can be some massive highs quickly followed by devastating lows. It was finished wasn’t it? It was done. Why do we have to go back?
By seven o’clock Fiona had reached most of the team at home and we all massed in the office, staring at each other in disbelief. We burned several discs of the NTSC version and all set to work playing the damn game through again, right from the start.
It was about 90mins before Richard Parr and Alex Fry, our technical leads found the problem. We were losing time. Not us, the game itself. There was a difference between the timings of the European PAL versions and the overseas NTSC version of the game. That meant that the further you got through the game, the harder it got. Well, that’s not such a big problem, most games work that way.
But for us, it wasn’t just that the game got harder - as the timings between Checkpoints decreased - it meant that the game truly was impossible.
That was an easy error to find and fix, and the guys had an updated version in under 90 minutes. But we’d also been asked to supply a VHS video showing that the game was in fact finishable.
And that was the real kicker. It was bad enough that we already thought we’d finished the game. We’d already drunk the champagne, and stayed awake most of the night. Now we were back on the job, the very next night. Back to the old routine, and back playing the game.
If you look at some of the photos that I took that night, a couple of them show small groups crowding around the PS2 that was connected to the video recorder. And the part of the game that was the hardest to complete was the Survival Mode event on the USA Marathon. It was driving the longest distance in the game and if you crashed it was game over. It’s all good fun and a good challenge if you’re playing for fun, but doing it under pressure is no mean feat. Everyone tried, and everyone soon gave up. In the end, it was Designer Paul Cross who stepped up to see it through and after a couple of hours of failed attempts, he finally nailed it in a truly nail biting display of gaming prowess. And we’d got it on tape to prove it. As the game credits rolled, we were done. A fixed NTSC version was uploaded and that was that. Nice one Paul!
A typical build review. Richard Parr, lead Programmer and Fiona are leading the meet. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Paul Cross attempting to play Survival mode on a steering wheel as Olly Read, Hamish Young, Richard Parr and Mike Williamson watch. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Fiona at her desk on one of the many long nights of finalling. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Mike Williamson and Alex Fry. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Paul Cross and Jeremy Chubb testing 2P splitscreen. Photo credit; Alex Ward
Fiona: The last night of development we all gathered in the Criterion Software Boardroom to drink champagne and play the entire game through one final time before we biked off the gold disk (to be sure that it was possible!). This was a tradition that started at the end of development of “TrickStyle” - am sure we’d all have preferred a beer or even a nice cup of tea but we had bought bottles of champagne in readiness and they had been sat in full view of our desks for weeks by that point.
On this first Burnout it was incredibly tough to achieve the 100% playthrough as the Survival Mode was a killer one to test - especially the USA Marathon (one reason we never brought it back in subsequent games!). We were there until dawn and it was very emotional. I remember standing outside with Mike Williamson as dawn broke and we were both crying.
Note: Reading this back today, I feel quite emotional about it again and seeing the old photos. As I mentioned in my post the other week, Mike, Omar and I met up recently at Ed's funeral. The Burnout 1 team will always have a special place in my heart because this was where it all started. At the time, we had no idea that it would go on to sell over a million copies, which in those days was an unimaginable target.
Thanks for reading!