Hi, whammy here.A Patreon page such as this offers a good opportunity to post information. I want to use this opportunity to make informative posts about The Crew and it's history, as this is more presentable, more easily accessible and less cluttered than doing so on Discord. I want to upkeep a sort of continuity between each one of these posts, so this will be the first introductory one.Let's celebrate the first month anniversary of TCU by diving into how Ivory Tower and The Crew came to be - a topic that's not commonly discussed, and is quite difficult to find info about. You may have already read the very short and simplified recap on the TCU website, but we will go a lot more in-depth here on Ivory Tower and The Crew's development. I got a lot of interesting facts, pictures and videos for you! Let's get into it.IVORY TOWER
So, straight off the wiki: Ubisoft Ivory Tower was founded in Lyon, France, in September 2007 by Ahmed Boukhelifa, Stéphane Beley and Emmanuel Oualid. All three founders were previously employed by Eden Games.Nothing more is mentioned. Let's dive in a bit deeper, using the info I've been able to dig up from the internet, game files, and from old interviews:These guys were all TDU developers. If you know anything about Atari at the time (or just in general), it's no wonder they split off and formed their own independent studio after the release of TDU in 2006. They had a vision and a goal for a bigger and better spiritual successor to TDU right away - eventually given the working title of "Road 66" - An open world driving game, set in the North US, with heavy MMO elements (seemingly an idea Stéphane in particular was really keen on). Given the working title, it's fair to assume the game was intended to have a very americana-historic-roadtrippy kind of vibe. Route 66 (now "Historic Route 66") is a very significant historical highway that goes from Chicago all the way to Santa Monica Pier in L.A, through a multitude of states, cities, towns, villages and other landmarks. It has embedded itself deep within the American history and culture.
PUBLISHER FOR ROAD 66They now need a publisher for their game concept, and no publisher was willing to take on such a risky video game concept. Back in 2007, the Black Box NFS games were on top of the racing game food chain and were the industry standard. They were open world, but certainly nowhere near as large scale as Ivory Tower were going for - and on top of that, an MMO? The publishers probably thought this little french independent studio were off their rockers! Test Drive Unlimited was and still is a very impressive game, but as far as I'm aware it didn't seem to affect the gaming industry much at the time (thanks to Atari being a dead-end publisher). Road 66 was a ridiculous and infeasible concept at the time... or so the publishers thought.However, one publisher didn't think so - that was Ubisoft. Ivory Tower have signed the deal, and Ubisoft was now the publisher for Road 66. Ivory Tower now have the funding and proprietary tech (courtesy of Ubisoft) to make Road 66 a reality. Ubisoft even got their studio Ubisoft Reflections (known for making the Driver games) to co-develop with Ivory Tower.Along the way, Ivory Tower hired veteran staff from all sorts of different studios, including (but not limited to) the likes of EA Black Box, and their fellows over at Eden Games who stayed at Atari and were developing TDU2, and wanted to jump ship before/after TDU2's release.BABELNow this isn't mentioned anywhere, but from my countless datamining sessions, the evidence strongly suggests that the actual production of the game has started back in 2008. That was also the year Ubisoft released Far Cry 2, which was made on the proprietary "Dunia" engine. Ivory Tower started production of Road 66 on this engine, but eventually they transformed it into a custom updated version of it with all the new tools and tech they need, called "Babel". Interesting naming they have... Ivory Tower... Babel...Anyway, Babel was an absolutely state of the art engine that can load and stream in a HUGE open world effectively, while also simulating all sorts of various life logic and physics systems around the player - roads, breakable props, traffic, pedestrians, animals, various aircrafts, boats, trains, "life events" (that's a rabbit hole of it's own full of unrealized/beta/cut ideas), etc. Nothing like this has been seen back then, and still hasn't been seen to this day. Not even future The Crew sequels can hold a candle to TC1's engine, which paradoxically were all built off of the same engine and game (but not by the same staff). But let's not get into that here.VISITING THE USABy around 2011 the game was really starting to take shape - lots of the map has been established and created, the narrative/storymode was already being realized and missions were being created.In 2011, some of the Ivory Tower staff went on a proper trip to the USA: Here's a road trip video posted by Yoann Bazoge. Here's an L.A. Scouting trip album and a North America album by environment artist Sylvain Pellan (there are some more albums on his profile that you can find). Some of the shots will be wholly familiar to you if you've played The Crew! (the original version of the game, that is)Important cities, regions and landmarks were being placed, the environmental work shared by different developers across both studios was incredible. Datamining suggests that missions started being made in 2012 in particular, however the vast majority of them were made in 2013.
You can find a multitude of concept art and early beta images of The Crew on artstation.com!THE STORYAs far as I understand, The Crew's story was written by James Worrall, Ian Mayor and Sam Strachman - James Worrall being an OG Rockstar writer, having been credited as a writer for GTA 3, GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas and GTA Liberty City Stories. He was also a "Lead Narrative Designer" for Driver San Francisco, along with Ian Mayor who was the Game Designer for it. The Crew's final story was decent, but it could be criticized for being not in-depth enough, despite having a hidden deep lore, which comes off as rather strangely obscured. That's because the final story is not the full script, it's very cut down and changed in places. To which extent we do not know yet, but it's definitely been simplified. We do have some clues and hints, some of the earlier missions have old leftover names and descriptions that suggest greatly different chapters and plots, and there are several unused mission names in the localization files. Some character models/textures/strings were found that also imply completely different subplots compared to the ones in the final game. We'll get into the details some other time.(Don't get me wrong though, it's already astonishing that we have such a lengthy and fully written story campaign to play in this online-only MMO game, it still beats the vast majority of racing game stories. The missions themselves are really well designed and are very fun to play.)What I want to show you now are some behind the scenes videos of the CGI cinematics in The Crew, This One showing the general making of the CGI, but the following one... I'll be honest, it was kind of mind-blowing to see: HERE IT IS. It's a storyboard/previsualization of all the CGI movies in the game, including a completely different alternate Dayton death scene (which also implies a very different 2nd half of the prologue), and one unrealized or possibly removed HQ movie. Even the non-alternate Dayton death scene has a completely different ending that implies some sort of additional getaway mission... just give it a watch and see!
THE CREWLet's get back to The Crew now. By this point the game is definitely known as "The Crew" and not "Road 66" anymore. As for what's been changed in the game's design throughout the development we can only speculate, but the developers said that the core concepts and principles remained the same throughout. No surprise, because The Crew is an extremely well designed game with very strong design principles.The Crew was announced in 2013. I don't remember the original announced release date, but it was eventually delayed to December 2nd 2014. The final game may not have been quite as "historic" as it was intended to be, but it still stays true to it's roots, featuring various locations, landmarks (with a short readable history for each), and a whole driveable Route 66 from Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier in L.A., and a race in the game that takes you throughout it. The focus in particular on the different regions and locations of the North US and capturing their essence and variety was extremely prominent. The Crew undeniably has the largest & most detailed & most varied & most living and breathing video game world of any video game to date (the original version of game, that is).The Crew was released on December 2nd 2014, it sold millions of copies within the first year and everybody got rich and lived happily ever after, maybe Ivory Tower will even add mexico/canada/hawaii map expansions to the game soon! Maybe even Europe, that's what the devs said in an interview!Sadly things did not go so well... at least for Ivory Tower. Let's leave it here for now, and in the next post of this "series" we'll get into the tragedy that struck after The Crew's release.----Thank you for reading, this was a fun post to write. I'm glad to have finally posted the findings and media above to a proper place where they'll be seen by many people. In case I got some facts wrong, please let me know and I'll edit the post.P.S. Finally I can joke about it: Yes, The Crew is technically the real TDU2... Though, not to insult the 2011 TDU2 as that's still a great game I love a lot.