THE EVOLUTION OF PGR PROJECT GOTHAM RACING

It’s said that everything is relative, and this was certainly the case with Metropolis Street Racer. The Bizarre Creations title reviewed well and was enjoyed by Dreamcast owners, but there just weren’t enough of them, and so Bizarre took steps to recoup the costs of its game’s development. This ultimately led to a meeting with Microsoft, as Bizarre founder Martyn Chudley explains. “Basically it was clear to us that we wouldn’t get a financial return on the Dreamcast with Metropolis Street Racer,” Martyn concedes. “We were well over budget and the platform was dying; it was being dominated by the PS2. We knew Sega itself was going to go multi-platform, and that could have been our preferred option, but it was still publicly in denial. So we approached Microsoft with a rough spec for a new racing game, with the hope of being given access to the upcoming Xbox.”

“THE KUDOS SYSTEM WAS OBVIOUSLY PROJECT GOTHAM RACING’S MAIN USP – IT WAS THE THING THAT TOOK US AWAY FROM OTHER RACING TITLES”
MARTYN CHUDLEY

In fact, Martyn didn’t even consider other systems. But given that the Xbox was just a year away from launch, Microsoft asked for a conversion of his Dreamcast racer rather than a new title, not knowing that Sega owned the name . “As for the other consoles, we felt that the PS2 was a sideways step performance-wise and that the GameCube would have been a down to London, at which point it said, ‘Can’t we have that on Xbox?’ We said, ‘Well yes… and no.’ Yes to the fundamentals of the game, but no to the name. And the rest, as they say, is history!”