This is still a game about racing cars, though - with the exception of a hands-on session with a classic Boss Mustang, we don't see a single production model. The result is an edgy new title and look, a smattering of glamorous city tracks, the complete removal of any setup, modification or tuning from the game, and a move to mostly fictional, unlicensed motorsport series. And we still use the AI and the physics which have made those games really successful." But I don't think the people who traditionally love touring cars and open-wheel racing will be disappointed, because you can still do those things in this game as well. If that sounds clinical, then I guess that's just the way the games industry is at the moment.
"We make no bones about it, corporately, that we want to make the American market as important as our European market. It certainly does not appeal broadly in the United States, hence unit sales in single digits for previous TOCA games over there," he confesses. "We reached a stage with the TOCA franchise where we'd hit a ceiling with the number of people to whom we could sell that type of content. Touring cars battle it out on Spa's Eau Rouge, most feared corner in motorsport. Sadly, Fulton reveals that Codemasters felt that TOCA was, conceptually, on a hiding to nothing. Codies' admiration for Gotham is easy to share: its effortless poise, rich variety and note-perfect pitch between stern sim challenge and arcade thrill make it close to the perfect racer, so why not emulate that? But we also had a deep fondness for TOCA's real motorsport setting and tight, aggressive, wheel-to-wheel touring car racing. Seeing Race Driver close in on PGR gives rise to genuinely mixed feelings. And we're comfortable with that, because that's where we set out to go in the first place." "In terms of the arcade-to-simulation spectrum, I guess we're inhabiting a fairly similar space at the moment.
"I think that's fair," says chief game designer Ralph Fulton of the certainly quite flattering comparison. Watching an Aston DBR9 tear around sunlit Milan esplanades and neon-lit Shibuya alleyways - and, later, feeling a certain credible but forgiving slide in the handling, when we go hands-on - it seems that the influence of Bizarre's brilliant series runs deep and wide in GRID. Codies developers are generous enough to praise PGR4's beauty, its structure, its weather effects, its difficulty balancing. That game is Project Gotham Racing 4, and it's not just the journos bringing it up. On our visit to Codemasters' HQ to see the reboot of the track racing series formally known as TOCA, one other game keeps coming up in conversation.
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