Q&A: MARTYN CHUDLEY
The man in charge of the Project Gotham Racing series remembers the start of the series
What did the Xbox offer over the competition in terms of performance? What was it like to code on?
The Xbox was a dream to develop for. The PS2 was crazy powerful for the time, but you had to work so hard to get access to that power – with the Xbox, it was all abstracted, allowing our coders to get far more of the raw power with much less effort. We also had a stable development environment through Microsoft’s pre-existing Windows development tools. We (Bizarre) also had direct access to the Microsoft guys and gals who were 100 per cent responsible for the hardware and software, so this support was amazing.
How did your exclusivity deal on Project Gotham Racing come about?
The deal for PGR came about as a result of Sarah (my other half) and Brian (Woodhouse – our Development Director) doing a pitch to Microsoft for an ‘F1-style game in cities’, as way of a follow up to Metropolis
Street Racer. We ‘knew’ at that point that Dreamcast was effectively dead and that Sega would be going to become a multiplatform publisher, but they refused to acknowledge this to us. Ideally, we would have taken MSR to both PS2 and Xbox with Sega, but they just couldn’t admit their situation to us in time for us to recoup some of our losses. Upon doing the ‘F1-ish’ pitch, the chaps at Microsoft saw a near-complete demo version of MSR and simply said, ‘Why not give us that?’
Upon examining our contract with Sega it transpired that we (Bizarre) owned all the code and data, whereas Sega just owned the IP – essentially just the name Metropolis Street Racer. This meant that we could do a ‘homage’ game, using all of the cities and any new cars that Microsoft would license, just as long as we didn’t call it Metropolis Street Racer!
Was there much stress getting the game ready for launch?
Oh yeah – it was mega stressful for the entire production. We basically had well under 12 months from start to finish. Our original plans for development started at the tail end of 2000, targeting console release of November 2001. This was a stupidly tight schedule given that we were doing a complete code rewrite, remodel of all the cars, had to hire new staff, working with a brand-new set of production people and to cap it all had multiple revisions of (usually underpowered) preproduction hardware and libraries to aim at.
How did you end up choosing the four city locations you went with?
The original locations (San Francisco, London and Tokyo) were chosen in conjunction with Sega as they were absolutely iconic, fit the key console territories and were all visually (and layout-wise) unique.
New York was, again, chosen for its worldwide recognisability and also it was relatively easy for us to perform the research trips. In fact the cover art of the game was to feature the Ferrari F50 in front of the Twin Towers, but due to the catastrophic events of 9/11 we had long discussions with Microsoft about whether to keep (as a tribute) or remove the towers from the game (which we eventually did).
What improvements did Project Gotham Racing make over Metropolis Street Racer?
As far as I can remember, the biggest improvements over MSR included the addition of New York, and higher ‘perceived value’ cars – Ferrarri, TVR etc. Ultimately, the game was a complete rewrite from the Dreamcast code – everything, not just the engine. Physics, gameplay, UI, you name it. From a technical perspective Xbox gave us an order of magnitude more polygons (in the cars at least, the cities were just upscaled where it made most sense given our time pressures), shader effects (mainly reflections in both car rendering and circuit, and improved weather) and a doubling of the framerate to 60fps. I think we also made a conscious effort to make the game more ‘mainstream’ than what we perceived as a pretty hardcore MSR experience.
Why do you think Microsoft have never created a fifth game?
I’m guessing that basically Microsoft felt they could cover all bases with both the Forza and Forza Horizon brands – they didn’t need a PGR hanging around in between, not quite a simulator, not quite an arcade experience. I think that if we had stayed with Microsoft (and not been acquired by Activision) then a PGR5 could have happened, but alas it was not to be…
Finally, on a personal note I’d like to add that PGR couldn’t have happened without our coder Edmund Clay, who sadly passed away in 2013. Edmund joined us to work on PGR, and I don’t think there was an area of the game that he didn’t touch – physics, rendering, AI, shaders - you name it, he was a massive influence.