JALOPY
Format PC, Xbox One
Developer Minskworks
Publisher Excalibur Games
Origin UK
Release 2018
Greg Pryjmachuk still remembers telling colleagues at Codemasters that he was leaving the company to make a road trip game. One where the protagonist wasn’t a person, but a ramshackle East German car driven to Turkey after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “One dickhead started laughing in my face at the concept,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well, I haven’t tried it yet. You don’t know if it’ll work or not.’”
Back then, Pryjmachuk worked as a designer on the Formula 1 games, an annualised series with a developmental lap time of just nine months. It left scant opportunity for innovation, but with Xbox 360 and PS4 looming, Pryjmachuk’s team were given a one-off extension to almost two years. As the F1 team dreamed up new features, they returned to the original series slogan, ‘Live The Life’. For Pryjmachuk, that meant adjusting the lens to bring the periphery of the race into focus. “I’m not a particularly competitive person,” he says. “I never really found the thrill in racing, winning or working your way up through the teams. I always used to love watching when a pit team would get a record for how quickly they changed the tyres on a car. The unsung heroes.”
As development wore on, it became clear that
