Driver: San Francisco's MOT

You'll see that that's something that only happens when he's in the coma. When he goes into a coma there's a different treatment, and that treatment is to slightly affect the lighting. Some of the more intense missions have that effect that is more obvious.

I did read somewhere that it was some way of hiding the scenery, which I thought was terribly unfair, because if you're at the top of Russian Hill or Twin Peaks, you can see the whole city in its entirety - there's no fogging. We draw the whole world, and that has been one of the things we're most proud of, that we have this enormous city running in 60 frames-per-second and we do not occlude - we don't hide stuff.

That was one of the mandates at the beginning that we put to ourselves: it's going to be San Francisco, it's going to be at the tops of hills looking right across the Bay to the other side of the City, right over to Marin, many, many miles away. And we're not going to fog it, we're going to draw the world to its absolute extremity. That's the kind of thing that fills technical guys with utter horror. That's what we said to them and that's what they delivered.

The other thing to say is that it was a stylistic choice. The game is heavily inspired by '70s movie car chases. You'll see an element of film grain, you'll see that sepia, slightly aged film look, and it's entirely intentional. It's about the look of movies at that time. If you go and watch a car chase from the original Gone in 60 Seconds or French Connection or The Driver or Vanishing Point, they have that genuinely old, aged, celluloid feel to them, and that's part of what we wanted to do.

Not many things. We were lucky enough to be granted an extra serious lump of time on the project, because originally it was supposed to come out in September last year, and we were coming up with some really cool ideas like split-screen, the Movie Challenges - ideas that came in late. We were so adamant that we wanted to include these that they were either going to be some kind of DLC, or we extend the length of the project and include that stuff. We got a lot of the stuff that would have dropped by the wayside into the final game.

In terms of things we still didn't manage to get in: obviously there are always going to be things. A few more functions in the Film Director would have been nice; there were a couple of movies we wanted to include in the Movie Challenges but we ran out of time; and we wanted to be able to do things like changing the car's colour in the garage when you take the car out. It sounds like a trivial thing but it's still going to take a week to do it.

That's a question for Ubisoft. It absolutely would have been, but because we got the extra year of development time, everything that was planned for DLC - the serious, meaty stuff - we put into the full game package. DLC was getting bad press at the time for stuff actually being on the disc and then being unlocked - that's the sort of thing that really irritates people. We went the whole hog and put all of this in the game.

For a sequel, for other games to come out, then a game upon which it's going to launch a sequel has to be successful. Yes of course the game has to sell well. But there are other ways of brands continuing. If you think about the end of Driver 3, Driver 4, a lot of people said that's the end of Driver, you'll never see another Driver again. And yet here we are with not just another quick version of Driver, but a huge project and, in terms of time and investment, the biggest Driver yet.

It's too early to say. It's a feature, a function, that has an enormous amount of development time, effort, energy, tech, behind it. It would be a shame not to use it again. What we found is when we play some previous Driver games you find yourself wanting Shift. That's always a good sign.

You can imagine how difficult this was as a proposition early on, and it's all credit to Ubisoft that they are willing to experiment with things like this. I can imagine showing that, as a concept, to some other publishers, that they would be like, "What the hell?! This is far too risky." One of the great things about Ubisoft is that they are happy to try this different stuff. [The coma] did allow us to have great creative freedom with the types of missions, with Tanner's schizophrenia, and to tie it all up at the end and make sense of it.

No, it definitely doesn't mean that. But it also doesn't mean that we're now planning on having Tanner getting out of the car. I had no objection to the concept of Tanner getting out of the car or firing guns or any of that on-foot stuff. It's not to say we couldn't do it, it's not a lack of talent within the team or anything. It's just time and energy and focus. And if you focus on two things, you're not going to be as focused on one of the two things.

Using the same engine, yeah. This is an engine that we built from the ground up - proprietary tech. We had to do that because we were doing some crazy stuff with the tech. An enormous amount of development is taken with building proprietary tech that you could have otherwise just taken off the shelf in no time. Now that tech is built and we own that tech, it is entirely possible to use it to make other games. But it was very much tailored to that game.