[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I’m happy to welcome Alexander Sigsworth who you can find blogging at alexsigsworth.wordpress.com.]
On 25th June 1999, Driver was published in Europe for the PlayStation. This was not the original plan. The game’s success on the platform, though, is a typical example of why daring to take risks can pay off well.
Driver’s developer, Reflections, was founded by Martin Edmondson in 1984. Their breakthrough success came in the mid-1990s with the Destruction Derby games. As popular as those games were, they only consisted – like every other racing game of the time – of racing around a fixed, closed circuit. Edmondson wanted to push the genre further and so conceived Driver. The plan was to allow players to drive around a 3D city environment freely, with no restrictions. This had never been attempted before – and the inspiration was the iconic car chase movies of the 20th century.
When development began, Reflections intended Driver to be a PC exclusive. After all, the concept was so ambitious that only the best hardware could possibly run the game. It was then decided after six months that the PlayStation was going to overtake the PC to become the dominant gaming platform and that Driver, to be a hit, should also be released for that console.
They were told it couldn’t be done, that there was no way a 3D open world driving game could possibly run on a PlayStation. After all, the PlayStation had no video card. If a PC gamer wants higher specs, they can replace their PC’s video card with a better one, so PC games can be developed with as high specs as the developer desires. The PlayStation wasn’t built to be modified like that: all of its games had to be developed to the same specs for everyone – and that meant lowering them.
Similarly, the PlayStation used less RAM, which slowed its processing speed. There was also no floating point unit support, so the processing was centralised rather than being performed by separate hardware to allow the CPU to work on the most important tasks – further slowing the processing speed even more as a result. The lack of perspective correction meant the environment wouldn’t change relative to the player in order to maintain a consistent appearance, creating distortions from time-to-time and making the camera difficult to control in certain situations. It was, technically, a downgrade. Yet the PlayStation version was more successful than the version as originally developed for PC.
During development, Reflections, along with their games’ global distribution licence, was acquired by GT Interactive Software. The acquisition was reported by Arnnet on 19th January 1999, who stated that Driver would be the first game published under the new deal “in the third quarter of 1999 and will be operable on both PlayStation and PC”.
Its PlayStation version was, essentially, ported from a PC game that was still in development, though the former came first – one advantage of being developed for a more primitive platform. On 25th June 1999, it was finally published. By the end of the month, it had shipped 1,000,000 units worldwide.
It’s true that the PlayStation’s lower specs negatively impacted the game’s performance. The draw distance is shorter. The framerate suffers at certain moments of high action. There are obvious flaws not present in the PC version. The faults Reflections were told the game would have if developed for the console are present. Porting it had required it to be reduced from the potential that could only be fulfilled on PC and, even then, still pushed the PlayStation’s hardware to its limits. It just managed to run smoothly most of the time.
In that aspect, Driver was ahead of its time as a console game – and that may have been the gratifying vindication Reflections needed, because the PlayStation version sold more copies. All the reasons for the PlayStation’s weaker components also meant it was cheaper to manufacture, allowing more to be made, which lowered the retail price. For the serious gamer, waiting for the superior PC release was the obvious choice but for the consumer, siding with Sony was the cheaper one.
The ones who favoured their wallet may not have experienced the best version of the game but they also didn’t care. For everything holding it back, Driver made far more advances forwards by providing the kind of gameplay that hadn’t been seen before. It was the first game that offered the over-the-top urban police chase action of The Blues Brothers and The Dukes of Hazzard with the music and style of Starsky & Hutch in four real cities realised more accurately than ever before. It has 30 miles of virtual road and 150,000 buildings in each of the four locations, modelled on photographic reference material.
Exactly how well they’d been recreated would be for the local players to decide when the game was released in North America five days later – but even for Europeans, it was the largest environment yet offered for a driving game and was unbound by objectives or time limits. It was the small details that impressed. There’s an internally consistent traffic system that can be followed, if you so decide, and the player car’s hubcaps will fly-off during a high speed pursuit. In the end, no one cared about the hardware limitations because of what had been accomplished within them.
25th June 1999 was less than a year from the release of the PlayStation 2. Driver was one of the later games released for the PlayStation and remains one of its best games. It’s a love letter to the Hollywood car chase movie, made by a developer who were determined to do the best they could and didn’t let the boundaries of their time discourage them. Its premise is a simple one. It hadn’t been fulfilled before, so was conceived to fill that gap. It was executed as well as it could’ve been. Even today, it’s a tough game to master. Losing the cops is disappointing but is preferable to not losing them. It still manages to put a smile on my face because its charm hasn’t worn-off. The desire it meets has never gone away and, while they’ve have tried to do the same thing, other games have always added something else that dilutes the experience somewhat.
After all this time, Driver remains pure.
Top of other charts for the seven(!) weeks Driver was #1 after the page break…