It’s difficult to decide where to start when describing what Blur actually is, because every feature carefully interlocks with and informs the others. It’s set, however, in the twilight and sunrise world of street racing, opening in LA, moving to San Francisco and Amboy, a Californian ghost town that lies just off Route 66. It then crosses to Europe and finally ends up in Tokyo. Each is distinctively rendered and encourages a different form of racing. The wide storm drains of LA are a general introduction to the muscular and aggressive nature of its racing, on-track obstructions and objects – and the powerups. Currently consisting of nitro, shunt, electro, shield, mine and repair (punchy, short names that also fit nicely into the sparely designed icons which hover above the track), each stimulates neon light to wash over the screen. Though players will begin with just one slot in which to store them, they will end up with five, flicking between them at the press of a button, with the idea for experienced players to activate them in combos. Races are intense, the 19 other cars on the track (in both singleplayer and online multiplayer; local multiplayer will see fourplayer splitscreen) jostling and firing off powerups around you. Tracks feature multiple routes and plenty that can be smashed aside as you power past.



“These power-ups augment the players’ skills,” explains Chudley. “It’s giving meaningful choices – the perfect lap is not apex to apex, it’s about decisions: I need this, I can go and collect it, then I can use that. We’re building up a story that the player is putting through in his mind, very similar to the process that a seasoned FPS player will do – they have a path they follow, picking up this weapon, using it, and then going to collect armour. We’re hoping people will start to generate that sort of racing line through our game, as opposed to car control per se. In PGR, if you couldn’t control the drift or hit the apex, you’d fall back.”

Though it’s easy to make comparisons with Wipeout’s pickups, Chudley says they’re actually inspired by the visual effects displayed in many recent car adverts, with cars leaving graceful light trails from their brake lights and Audis turning into spiders. “Why were they trying to sell their cars with stuff that was obviously not real?” Chudley says he asked himself at the time, and he realised that it represented an opportunity to blend Bizarre Creations’ brand of realism with the fantasy of arcade power-ups. Or, as an Activision exec let slip in December: “Mario Kart meets Forza”.

As such, their visual representation is vital. Art director Chris Davie explains that the current challenge is to amplify the splashes of bloom to emphasise their power. “We want to give enough volume that it looks like a shunt really can knock a car aside,” he says.

“You want the power-ups to be huge, so if you hit someone they fly for miles, but at the same time, the game has to be fair, so if someone hits you, we don’t want you to be taken out of the game,” continues co-lead designer Ged Talbot. “So that’s where the balancing comes in – how do we make power-ups look powerful without destroying the race whenever they hit you?” Electro will fizzle up environmental features, while the comet of green light that represents the nitro will threaten to consume the whole screen. The effects, created with lashings of feedback loops during post processing, will make photo mode irresistible.



The action then moves to San Francisco, where the racing is designed to showcase stunts on the steeply inclined streets. Along with combos, finishing position and other in-race achievements, stunts are a way of earning fans, Blur’s substitution for PGR’s kudos system. Instead of being awarded immediately as kudos was, however, fans are awarded afterwards, with each manoeuvre listed in a celebratory stream of typography flying by after each race. Fans, who join you in a trickle at first and later in a rush that sees you accruing 300,000 to 400,000 by the end of the game, then give you money which you can invest in new cars. “It’s a meaningful reason why you’re getting the cash and it’s really tapping into that idea on the web of people getting by with PayPal donations,” says co-lead designer Gareth Wilson. Indeed, they’re fitting to the fame-andflared wheel arches setting, but the presence of fans is as if Bizarre Creations can’t quite bring itself to leave the high score behind. After all, Bizarre brought scoring to driving performance in Metropolis Street Racer, to shooters in The Club, and delicately redefined the online leaderboard in Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

“We love the level of competition, that one-upmanship,” says Chudley. “But it’s a very hardcore thing, and it’s why we’ve deeply hidden the scoring in Blur and instead tell people that they’re great. If you’re better than great, you really are very great.”