Man In The Mirror

It wasn't, because I left years ago and was doing all sorts of things unrelated to vidoe games, and when Ubisoft bought Reflections, which used to be my company, and the Driver franchise, they said would I come and consult on the vehicle handling and also the early concepting meetings for the story and the premise for the game.

I was like, "Yeah, no problem at all," so I came to a few meetings about the design basis for the game and how Shift would work, that kind of thing, and then gradually it snowballed into more and more work and then eventually they said would I mind being the creative director of the project.

That was years ago... It's difficult to say no when it's your old company that you set up doing a new version of a game that you designed the original of, and it's something which is a subject matter that's very personal to you.

The reason I designed the original Driver game was because one of the first movies I remember going to see at the cinema when I was a kid with my parents was Walter Hill's The Driver. And then any other car chase film that came along, I was first in line to go and see it.

So it's a collision of all those things really, plus crucially being convinced that this was not going to be a game that had to be delivered to a deadline, that it was going to be delivered to an agreed quality level.

We've had definite problems in the past, where we've run out of time and you get to that point where the game has got to be delivered regardless, and that was not something I wanted to get into again – it's wearing. Especially with an entertainment project, something that's quite creative, just to have it go "bang" like that at the end is just painful.

So I got myself convinced that clearly Ubisoft don't do that. You can see the quality of all their stuff, how much they put into it, for their franchises and big games anyway. The potential for Driver to come back at that kind of scale again was quite exciting.

I don't want to get too stuck into the Atari situation, but when it comes to Ubisoft they are totally quality-orientated, so we have meetings and discussions about, "What's the best for the game?" and not, "What's the cheapest thing we can do?" It sounds like a cliche, but that's genuinely what happened.

The other difference is that staff within the company pretty much all play games, and the people that are in charge of game content are incredibly good game-players. I've not experienced that before within a publisher – people that know games well. So you actually listen to what they say, whereas I've had experiences in the past where somebody says, "No, this isn't very good and that isn't very good," and I'm thinking, "What on Earth are you talking about?"

You then become slightly [throws hands in the air]. It's the polar opposite now; it becomes much more collaborative and the game's better for it.

Yeah. I certainly hope so - it's all in the hands of the consumer, obviously, as the game has to sell and be received well, but everything is being lined up in the way it should.

It's had the investment, it's a strong IP still, it's a unique proposition in terms of Shift, it feels like Driver 1 – so that's got a lot of people quite excited because never mind the story, never mind the mechanics, just driving is good fun. So it's got all that stuff, and all the effort that's gone into it – I think it's got the best possible chance.

If the game is good enough, that will be a situation that exists but only for a short period of time. If the game is not good, then that will continue to haunt, and that's one of the reasons why when we got together to do this we decided that there's no half-arsing this.

This is absolutely 100 per cent "we nail it" or we just don't even bother doing it, and just release some phone games and stuff. That works for some people, but if you want to bring it back as a big IP on the big consoles, this is the only way to do it.

You never know until it happens, but with what we have being so different in the driving universe, and the definite story there of bringing back something to what it once was and really bringing it back up again. It's interesting - it's not just another sequel, but it easily could have been. It could have been Tanner out of the car again, running around with guns, and done very nicely, but this is really something that quite different, so I have hope.

It's a mixture of things. The main reason we delayed it, actually, was just to add more content. We had lots of ideas. As you develop a game you say, "Wouldn't it be great if we could do this and this and this?" but we went into one of those meetings and just said, "We've just had some good ideas but we can't deliver them on time," so you go into a long process thinking about how much these ideas are going to cost, how long will they take and we just collectedly agreed to spend the time on it and add the extra stuff.

It was extra modes, multiplayer, more multiplayer modes, split-screen two-player co-op and competitive, and a whole host of other challenges and activities to do in the city that were not originally part of the plan.

Plus obviously another year is another year of polish too, plus targeting 60 frames per second - every extra month of time that we get gets us closer to that.