In Blur, players can play with a broad set of rules to produce all manner of races. In-car view and power-ups off for racing purists? That’s fine. Team games and last man standing? Only nitro powerups? A version of Micro Machines in which drivers that drop behind lose a point? All possible. Each game type becomes a ‘group’ on the social network, for which the creator can design a badge, that other players can join – be it by invite only or left open to all. “We’re hoping that people will gravitate towards the best groups so they’ll filter to the top,” says Chudley. “It’s almost as if they can get the fame or notoriety of being a creator, and it all feeds back to this social side. What did we have yesterday? The David Hasselhoff group – there are no pick-ups, but every time you overtake you’ve got to shout ‘Hasselhoff!’ It’s just a stupid group, but it’s the sort of thing you could feasibly create.”

Bizarre originally named Blur’s power-ups ‘perks’ because they were all about empowering the player in a similar manner to COD4’s Perks. Early ideas included the ability to see through cars. “But that was sort of mad shit. It wasn’t quite working,” Chudley says. He didn’t want the game to stray so far from reality. Asked whether it was a wrench to leave the reality that Bizarre had put so much effort into realising in the past, Sarah Chudley, Bizarre’s commercial director and Martyn’s wife, says: “It was a sigh of relief, if anything. We were thinking that we could explain why these things were happening with the story, and then we realised: is anyone actually going to care?” “We were held back by our own reality,” adds Martyn, as Ben Ward, Bizarre’s community lead, explains that when making PGR, they weren’t allowed to have bystanders swinging from lampposts: “Because of health and safety – that was the sort of thing we used to work with.”



And yet Bizarre’s art team says that it actually took more research photographs and covered more of its source cities’ expanses in order to create Blur’s patchworks of reality and race-tuned fiction than it did the cities of PGR3 and PGR4. “We started off just doing Shoreditch and then we expanded and started going into the grimy back streets,” says Davie, taking up a 360 controller and flying the camera through the rendition of Hackney. “My favourite bits are just these housing estates,” he says pointing out a block of ’60s flats with boarded windows. “They just look beautiful.” Such incidental detailing, which many games would pass over in favour of taking on more glamorous areas of a city, makes Hackney look alive.

We ask whether Bizarre took on the dense and narrow back streets of the Tokyo suburbs. “We were originally trying an area based there and it looked cool,” he confirms. “We needed somewhere quite wide, though,” continues Talbot. “It naturally fitted the super-city neon places.”

“The raised highways are cool,” elaborates Davie. “But when you start getting above the level of the surrounding buildings you lose the impact. We had to scale it down so you never lose that excitement.”



The process of gathering the visual data was much the same as with PGR, with groups of researchers going on to the streets to photograph each building in a specified area, and risking, as they have before, arrest by over-zealous police and the attentions of local criminals. “The whole idea was to create the feel and look of Hackney without having to recreate it,” explains lead environment artist Chris Downey. For Hackney he and his team chose Shoreditch High Street and Great Eastern Street as the defining roads, keeping them pretty much unchanged because they’re good stretches to drive along and aid visual recognition – we notice the Tea Building, an office on the corner of Shoreditch High Street, flashing by, while the Gherkin stands proud in the distance when driving south. But the rest of the area is made up of bits that Bizarre liked that are dotted around the area. Downey shows us photos of a right-angled configuration of shops below flats, which he flipped in the game to improve the flow of the circuit. “The bonus of the more obscure areas is that we can make the roads wider without people saying that’s not how it really is,” he confesses. The Californian ghost town of Amboy, meanwhile, is a collage of a refinery, the iconic Roy’s Motel and a disused airfield that in reality lie 100 miles apart but are now naturalistically joined together. “It’s certainly a lot more creative on the art side,” says Downey. “We essentially used to just paint by numbers, and now a little more thought goes into everything.”

In fact, it’s clear that Bizarre has put a lot of thought into every element of Blur. Bizarre, after all, has always applied a designer’s sensibility to the racer, carving new play from the simple aim of driving fast. The result is a game that feels immediately familiar. It’s giddy, energetic arcade racing that fizzes with overblown visual effects. And the name? Well, that’s familiar, too. Four letters. A word that merely hints at car racing. You’ll be forgiven for rolling your eyes at an apparently naked imitation of Codemasters’ Dirt, Grid and Fuel franchises. But ‘Blur’ speaks more of Bizarre’s – and Activision’s – ambitions for its new game. Blur simply isn’t built to satisfy the kind of gamers that would notice any connection. “It’s going to be bigger than that,” says Chudley. Activision has dragged the king of score attack into the mainstream.