THE EVOLUTION OF DRIVER
“I LIKED THAT ELEMENT OF CHOICE AND FREEDOM, AND THE IDEA OF DRIVER BEING SET IN A LIVING, BREATHING CITY”
MARTIN EDMONDSON
Drive responsibly; that’s what you’re taught as a learner driver. Of course, that’s not the case when you’re driving in a videogame, or if you’re a demolition-derby driver. Hollywood action movies are another exception. The latter was of great interest to a young Martin Edmondson, but as he explains, all three fed into a project that first came to him when his firm Reflections Interactive got into PlayStation development. “The inspiration for Driver came from a childhood obsession with car chases,” Martin enthuses. “The first film I ever went to see in the cinema was the Ryan O’Neal film The Driver, and that really stuck with me. My dad actually went to see it on his own first – just to make sure it wasn’t too violent for me, because I was only a little kid. But he thought it was right up my street, so we went as a family and watched it. So there was a bit of that from the point of view of general inspirations. Then during the design of Destruction Derby, one track had a crossover in the middle, and I remember driving up to it slowly, and thinking it would be fantastic if there were traffic lights and traffic, and if you could decide to go right or left or straight on. That was the earliest inspiration in terms of how Driver would play.”
The success of led to a sequel, however, then Reflections made a monster-truck racer. But. “I liked that element of choice and freedom, and the idea of being set in a living, breathing city,” Martin notes. “So we had pedestrians sat in cafes and walking around. There was a working traffic system, and police cars looking for people speeding. It was set in real cities because of the game’s movie inspirations, so we picked cities that were in films that people might have seen – San Francisco from was an obvious one. It was also to immerse you more in a real world, and it really helped with the immersion if you were Steve McQueen for the day when you were playing it. Another reason for putting it in real cities was that I was always quite fascinated by the idea of simulating real places, so if you wanted to you could just drive to Miami Beach.”
