This footage from a cancelled Bizarre Creations racing game will make you sad.
One of the more depressing studio casualties of the past couple of years was Geometry Wars and Project Gotham Racing developer, Bizarre Creations. While I have fond memories of Fur Fighters for the Dreamcast, most will remember Bizarre for its racing games, the last of which was 2010’s Blur. The footage to the right is from a prototype of an unannounced racing game very much in the vein of Blur that the studio was working on when Activision shuttered it in 2011.
The unnamed game is using tech and assets from Blur, but it’s running on a separate, and sadly never used, engine. So, why does a game in a supposedly pre-alpha state looks so polished? Bizarre’s former art director, Chris Davie, explains:
“We were using a whole new engine at this point that had been developed internally; it was really nice tech that we sadly never got to ship a game with. When we were told the project was being canned and that the studio was facing closer, I bloody mindedly decided to keep working on the art on this track, so much work had gone into the game already, it seemed a shame that nobody would get to play a finished track, even the dev team, so my goal was to get this Dubai track as close to final as I could before the lights went out for good.
A couple of guys chipped in here and there and got some nice new bits for their (soon to be required) portfolios, and I started grabbing old assets from previous projects to fill in bits of the scene that hadn’t been started.
By the end it had gotten to about an alpha level, there was some really nice things in there, though we still needed to add a load of destructible objects inside the shopping mall and tram station we drive through in the video, and inside the hotel lobby of the building we drive on the outside of here. More animated scenery like the trams too, but time just ran out.”
While I’m generally not a racing game fan, I do enjoy giving gravity the middle finger. The fact this game will never be finished drives me up the wall. Get it? No? See, the car drives on the- oh, forget it.
Source: Chris Davie’s Really Cool Tumblr
