"Point of Impact" spotted running in Amsterdam

So this second Burnout game was released in Autumn 2002. That means it began development around the time of December 2001.Less than 12 month development time from beginning to end.

(On a side note I can clearly remember the events of September 11th 2001. We had Richard Leadbetter (now Digital Foundry, then Editor of PSW magazine) visiting to capture excellent quality footage of the game for the magazine DVD. We were in the midst of recording when someone mentioned a plane crash into the World Trade Center. I remember being on the phone to Patrick Garratt (now VG247.com) then at CVG when he told me,"they've hit the Pentagon!" and then the phone going dead. I used to live close by to the Criterion offices. I drove home immediately and set my TiVO recording Sky News in long play mode. I still have the news footage of the new few hours on VHS)

Back in 2001, PlayStation online was very much in its infancy. And so was Xbox LIVE.

It was not practical to attempt online multiplayer on PS2 at that particular time, and the development was PlayStation 2 only. We only went to the other platforms after the main version was successful.

A lot of people enjoyed the 'music going louder' when you Boosted. It was actually cleverer than that. There were three or do separate tracks that could play and you switched between them Boosting or Crashing. So it was just a basic rhythm track and then bass and drums came into the mix with Boost. It was all written, performed and recorded live in the Criterion sound studio. The audio team was Stephen Root, Ben Minto and Peter Bishop - Steve Emney came in to play Drums, and Lee Pomeroy played Bass. All if I remember correctly. And this was all done mainly because we could not afford to put real licensed music in the game. This was only our second game, and was quite an unknown quantity.

Some fans thought we'd somehow sold out when we signed the game to Electronic Arts and we had access to real music for the first time and could put real ads into the game. To us, it was saving a lot of time. It's often harder and more time consuming  to think up fake ads and write original music than it to put in real existing stuff. FIFA was, and still is, one of the biggest games on the planet, so we were more than happy to have a big game featured on our Billboards.

With regard to online Leaderboards, this is something we did specifically to learn and support then then very new Xbox LIVE service. We didn't have the money to rewrite significant parts of the code to support online racing - but LIVE scoreboards was something we did think was worth making the effort for.

Our view was to always make the extra effort and go the extra mile to support as many features of each piece of hardware as we could. We saw each version as a bespoke experience and try to fulfil what the core fans of that system would want.

That effort went into the NTSC versions of the PS2 and Gamecube games, where we supported 480p Progressive Scan for those versions. I think we included extra music tracks into the XBox version IIRC.

I hope this answers your question.

1. How do you mess around with the car set ups?

The car handling model was a huge chunk of work undertaken by various people for each of the different games over the years. It was designed to give a good feeling while sliding the car around corners, and also to support being able to drive between oncoming traffic whilst sliding.

Whilst the game was very much originally in the style of Sega AM2 stuff, it was properly physically based - in some areas more than others.

2. Making a car different is one thing physically like it's shape; so was it reaction times per joy stick move, 'tire' slip rates, just changing some 'values', so type A car is tight around corners or slides, or type B car break's differently but has more 'mass' in the rear. 

We would usually get one car finished the way we liked it - that would be the base vehicle. And then the other vehicles were modifications from that base. The main differentiators to how a car played was top speed, top speed at boost and some tweaks to the drift.

3. Was there rear and front wheel drive 'effects' as well as 4 wheel drive 'effects'?It felt like there was.

No - not in terms of pure simulation. Even up to something like Most Wanted, where we really played with and pushed the car handling as far as we could push it - particularly in terms of tyre modelling and suspension - the system could still not do all wheel drive nor simulate Turbo properly.

4. How was it balanced? or was it not as complicated as that? Or just given values per car?

It was spectacularly complicated. Few people in Criterion could make head nor tail out of the handling code. It was not something that was entirely reliable. I'd say the main gatekeeper of the handling over the 14 years was Hamish Young. He moved to New York to get married the other year. He works with Avalanche now.

5. Would the Revenge Racer for next Gen be on fire instead of just flames painted on it, sort like the Halo helmet?

No.

6. Did you ever have the thought/ideas with-in the team of getting more arcade, like a jelly car, or other out-worldish stuff that was in the NFS:MW intros for some of the race and events?

No. The different intro's for the cars in Most Wanted came from a challenge I gave to the guys who had to do them. They were led by Neil Manners. We'd tried before, and failed, to replicate the very clever work done by the Top Gear guys when they showcase supercars. We got quite close in attempting this for NFS Hot Pursuit, but they never went into the final game. After so many years of making racing games, I always felt it was such a letdown to revert to the old 'rotating car model' on vehicle select screens.

We played with this a tad in Burnout Paradise with the way cars appeared in each Junkyards. I think that back then, and to some extent, still now - that the genre was a bit stale. Every other racing game gave you a shiny new car. I figured that this was Burnout, so we should give you a smashed up and knackered car. They dropped from the sky each time in a distinct nod to the old VW commercials of the 1980's. I am sure that confused a hell of a lot of players.

When it came to doing NFS MW we were spectacularly behind. And there are only so many times you can be genuinely interested in sorting out edits of Race Starts - a load of cars revving on the line and 3-2-1 GO! - all that sort of stuff. I challenged those guys to really go to town and surprise me. I especially wanted to see some upside down work. So they did them like they did and I think some of them turned out really well. The Transformers inspired stuff with the police cars was pretty funny.

8. Where's 7.?

7. Oh there is it.

9. I thought  you would never leave till you sorted the 'Ripping a car in two crash effect'?

I think we were full of bravado during the development of Burnout Paradise, and that was a quote from a press interview I think. In those situations the job there is to sell the game as best you can - especially so when the journalist has come to the office expecting to see a finished game and all you have to show are some 'barely there' bits - which was the case with Paradise. Just authoring content back then on PlayStation3 took ages. And we were au fait with the hardware a lot more than most back then. Throwing away all our our tech and tools and starting again was not the most ideal solution - but it was the only one we had. And we launched headlong into it - with the best intentions in the world.

We shot for tearing cars apart - but had SO many problems with Renderware Physics throughout that development - it never became reality. Not that we didn't try though. The first time I ever saw decent car crashes running in that game was the morning of the first E3 we had to show the game at. We would always go right to the wire for E3 - head out onto the plane with the safety build - fully expecting to have a three days later better version which we'd collect from EA LA the morning of the show.

I thought I'd never leave Criterion. It was pretty much my entire life for fourteen years. But, like most of the people in the Studio, I was pretty bored of the same work in the same genre year in and year out. I was planning to leave at the end of NFS Hot Pursuit. 

Then I got a phone call telling me the next game could be either Underground 3 or Most Wanted. I wasn't really interested in "tuner culture" but really enjoyed the first MW so stayed on to have a crack at that.

Is E3 "too big" ?

No, definitely not. Just because we're a small company doesn't mean we can't compete on the world stage. Ultimately, it's all about great games, and great games always cut through the noise.

Given that we only just formed the company two months ago on our own money, we're not planning to go to that event this year.

We'll be releasing our games digitally - whereas E3 grew out of earlier events like CES - which primarily existed as a way for physical disc retailers to judge software quality early in the release year. When manufacturing lead times were very long for Nintendo mask ROM formats, buyers from Wal Mart and the rest had to make a call on which games were likely to be hits. So right now - we don't feel the need to spend several thousand pounds to fly to the USA and show people our early software. We need to spend that money on software licenses, rent, bills and equipment. Making our games always comes first to us.

The best E3 I can remember was the Takedown one. And that's mainly because we were in a very comfortable place software wise - and thus able to show the game off very well.

After that we were always behind - and E3 was definitely something that got in the way of the game developments. At Electronic Arts there were three big events that were impossible to avoid. In your 'ship year' you would start off with the GPMM - the Global Product Marketing Meeting. This is an event - held in Germany or Spain where all the games are shown in January and basically the marketing budgets get decided. A dog and pony show in the biggest way. And you can either be honest with what you have and where you are. Or bluff massively with pre-rendered movies. At Criterion, we had no choice but to just boot the code from that week.

Games could "win" at this event - yet still  turn out to be very very average in the final release. Two good example there would be "Medal of Honour Airborne" and "NFS The Chase" aka "The Run." Both teams showed "amazing"  footage from the game which won the marketing crowd over (Airborne showcased class leading facial animation and The Run showcased the 'innovative' "out of the car QTE sequences') but those games turned out to merely average in the end.

After GPMM you had to deal with the fallout from that - either change a big feature in the game or change the name of the game.. Then you run into the 'pre-E3' event where they show top tier press all the good stuff from the Show the month before. Often, the press have seen everything before the Show this way - so the winners and losers are already decided.

Then the final event is the E3 Press Conference. Again, god help you if you try to get out of that. Doing NFS we HAD to show the game. End of. Which I totally understand because it's a tentpole franchise for a massive company like EA.

Again, the hours spent sorting out code for these events was massive. And our games particularly always had other more important things to be fixed. In terms of something like NFS MW, the team spent Sept-Dec making a scripted demo car chase showcasing graphical and game features that never went into the final release. I think everyone who worked on that game would agree that we needed that time - and that would have actually given us some time to polish the bits that worked a bit more.

Looking back, if anything, we were much too honest at Criterion. And we did live online demo's live. Very few people do that. Very high risk strategy. Go back and watch Craig and Matt do the HP reveal. Watch for the bits when Matt's wireless PS3 controller disconnects several times during the demo. So many flawless rehearsals previously and then a ton of wireless interference when the room is full of phones and laptops.

I'm glad I was around for those times - but we never managed to manage E3 successfully. Scripted demo's were never our thing. How do you capture the exploration of Paradise City or the mayhem of Freeburn in a five minute demonstration?

What I do look forward to though, is being able to show software that has everything in and working, and that is stable, that people love.