After San Francisco it’s to the dirt trails of Amboy and then on to the fringes of Hackney and the City in London, where the action centres on the abundance of parked cars and trucks. Following a delightfully unpredictable trip to Brighton, the game visits Barcelona, where the tracks mix abandoned raceways and outer-city boulevards. The journey finally ends with team racing in the neon chasms, swooping flyovers and winding mountain roads of Tokyo and its surrounds. Hanging each location together is a story told, in part, through cutscenes. Fears over the collision of illegal street racing and awkward plotting and characterisation can be assuaged by the fact that Chudley shares them, too. “The underlying story arc is a zero to hero-type story, and I think they kind of have to be like that; a journey of the player,” he says. “And it’s the story of the scene evolving. You start with just a few people around you and go across the world, meeting new people, and that’s how the game unveils itself to you. But we’re not particularly good storytellers.”



There will be just nine scenes, created by the same agency that produced those in Gears Of War 2, and they will last between 45 seconds and a minute and a half. And though the script has yet to be locked down (we heard placeholder audio from the game’s US-based producer, whose performance perhaps overstressed the ‘cool, dude’ element of the game’s backdrop), one of its central roles is to show off the unusually keenly observed character designs, concepted by Davie. Inspired by street fashions from each of the locations, they balance credibility with idiosyncratic detail, each speaking directly about the place they’re from. London’s characters include Kahn, an intimidating Asian rudeboy, hooded and baggy-clothed. San Francisco has Weaving, a Jackass show-off with a shock of blond hair, jeans ripped at the knee and a jacket sporting lightning rods down the chest. Brighton has the slim figure of Morrissey, who channels Quadrophenia through his sharp, dark coat but bears a blue sticking-plaster on his head. “It’s more like fashion design than character design, making sure the outfits tell the story of the character but do it in a compelling way, so they just look ace,” says Davie. “So you believe that people would follow these people. We’re working really hard to avoid any cliché.” Certainly, the characters we’ve seen are iconographic enough that they can be recognised by silhouette alone.

“The decision behind the cutscenes was that if you don’t get to see the characters in the flesh, when you’re racing against them they can seem a bit cheap,” explains Wilson. “It would be just like going back to Road Rash or something. We want living, breathing, walking, talking people to back up the lower-tech ways of communicating such as voiceover, text messages and whatever.” When we suggest that it’s going to be difficult to get the tone right, he’s quick to respond: “It’s not really about the cutscenes. They’re about context more than trying to make a movie. We wanted a desert level because it would be great visually. So the story just reflects why they’ve gone to Amboy – because in the previous race at the docks they wrecked the whole place and a load of news helicopters showed up, so they’ve gone to race somewhere more secluded. It’s as deep and thrilling as that, really! So it’s context rather than: ‘You’ve completed five events; you’ve unlocked the next level’.”