DANGEROUS DRIVING
The Burnout series may have screeched to a halt, but its legacy lives on in this shiny new racer from some of the visionaries behind the classic franchise. Alex Ward explains why it’s better to Burnout than to fade away
Considering the immense popularity and resounding critical acclaim the Burnout series had in its heyday, its sudden disappearance from the arcade racing scene after 2008’s Burnout Paradise was all the more surprising. Criterion was producing back-to-back hits, following the arcade purity of Burnout 2 with
Burnout 3: Takedown’s new-found focus on aggressive driving, Burnout Revenge took the vehicular carnage even further, then Burnout Paradise shifted the series to a sandbox setting with great results in early 2008. But since then, fans of riotous road rebellion have been left starved of rivals to take down and boost bars to drain with reckless abandon. The team shifted gear and picked up the Need For Speed franchise for several years, and while there were elements of classic Burnout
gameplay present in Criterion’s two entries in the series, its just wasn’t the same.
Fast-forward almost a decade and we can finally hear the familiar sounds of supercar engines roaring, metal scraping on metal and millions of pounds’ worth of vehicles being written off in a deafening cacophony once more. But Dangerous Driving isn’t just a pretender to Burnout’s throne – it’s the long-awaited return to the genre from some of the key creatives behind the
Burnout series, and you’d almost have to be blind to miss the similarities. Founded by ex-criterion bigwigs Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry, Three Fields Entertainment has spent the last few years building up to this release, honing its craft and getting the stage ready to deliver a true spiritual successor to the Burnout legacy.
“Our goal with the game is to bring back a style of game and a genre that has disappeared for a long time,” Alex explains. “The other games I directed in my career are all very personal to me. I was the person who started the whole thing off back in 1999. So capturing a sense of nostalgia is important, but more important to us is taking that whole feeling, revitalising it and take it to a new place.” Alex goes on to explain how Three Fields’ previous releases helped pave the road for Dangerous
Driving. “We learned physics in Dangerous Golf, speed of iteration in Lethal VR, then we made physically based cars crash in Danger Zone indoors, then took all of that outside and made Danger Zone 2. We say that each