Preview: Blur

PGR is a game that hates players,” says Martyn Chudley, flatly. “The fundamental premise that we had through the entire series was: ‘Well done, you got a gold medal. But you’re shit. You should have got a platinum one’. For every reward we threw another challenge at you. Leaderboards – ‘Wow! You’re 974,000th in the world. Brilliant.’”

Chudley, as managing director of Liverpool-based Bizarre Creations, sold his company’s soul to Activision last year, and also recently demoted himself to creative director. But such self-criticism and apparent surrender of his previously independent company to the largest publisher in the world isn’t a series of acts of self-flagellation. He wants to explain, PlayStation mug in hand, how his new crossplatform game will be a lot better than PGR. Shorn of his company’s responsibilities as a principal developer for Microsoft Game Studios, with a new market in mind and a new regard for the fun of driving itself, he wants to show us a new way of making a racing game. “One of the things we wanted for the new franchise was for the actual experience to be the reward, not the shiny bell at the end of it,” he says. “We wanted the on-track experience to make people say: ‘I don’t care how well I did; I enjoyed it. Let’s have another go’. That’s what games should be about, rather than: ‘Look how clever we are, look how clever Xbox is, look how polished our cars are, how accurate our cities are, how technical our sliding is’.”

The result is Blur. Though it’s set in real cities and uses a mock social network to structure the events, Chudley describes it as no longer hampered by reality. Its Wipeout-like power-ups, boisterous wheel-to-wheel action, glowing brake-light trails and cheerful take on illegal street racing would seem to confirm that. Though it’s set in real cities, they’re not the anally retentive (that’s Chudley’s term, by the way) recreations of Project Gotham. Blur’s are remixed cities: salient landmarks and pleasing details twisted and reconstituted into designed-for-purpose racetracks. “We won’t hold the game back; we won’t cause the player problems by putting in corners at 90 degrees that are hard to navigate,” Chudley continues. “That’s the fundamental backbone to the game. If we’ve ever had a design decision it’s always been: ‘Is that hardcore or casual?’ And we’ve always fallen on the casual side of things. What would happen in reality doesn’t matter. It’s what people would want to happen in a game.”