Bizarre Creations' Gareth Wilson Interview

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Eurogamer: What's enabled you to do licensed cars in a combat racing game?

Gareth Wilson: The choice of vehicles for the game has helped. Ferrari and Lamborghini aren't in this game. The type of manufacturers has helped and also the attitude that we've taken has helped. If someone doesn't want to do what we want to do then we just won't put it in the game. There have been a couple of big manufacturers, can't tell you who, that have gone you can't set the cars on fire, and we've gone, OK we won't use your cars then. Because the cars are not the star of the game, the gameplay is the star of the game. Whereas in Gotham, if we didn't have Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche, then everyone on Eurogamer would be going 'oh my God'.

So because we've been more flexible, that's the number one thing. And also because we've asked. I think we were a little bit averse and a bit scared of asking before, and we didn't need to as well. Also other games have kicked the door down for us as well, like GRID and DiRT. They were doing all sorts of stuff. We had one thing with a manufacturer where they didn't want smoke coming out of the car, and we just said yeah but you're in GRID, and GRID does smoke. And they went, oh yeah. So I think every year, collectively, between us and Forza and Codies, we're gradually chipping away. Cos we've got fire now. If the car is wrecked, it's run out of repair, the car sets on fire. I don't think that's ever happened in a licensed car game - actual flames. So maybe if we do that, maybe in the next one Codies will manage to get flames while the car's moving, which then allows us to go maybe we can blow the car up next time. Every year we're chipping away at what we can do.

Eurogamer: Your competition, or perceived competition is changing from GT and Forza to Burnout, Split Second. Is that intimidating?

Gareth Wilson: No not really. It's weird because we've always thought that we went up against Need For Speed, but we were always perceived much more as a simmy game. But I think that space is up for the taking. I think NFS has lost its way. NFS Shift looks like it's just jumping on where Gotham was, it's almost like you can see them saying oh, no Gotham this year, let's do Gotham. I don't think that's the right thing to do. I think we should be going back to the reason play racing games, just having fun overtaking and racing, get back to that sort of OutRun, Road Rash golden age of racing.

If you've got a simmy game you don't really need any others. If you've got GT on the PS3 you don't really need another sim game. Look at RACE Pro. SimBin are the business, right? Stunning handling. How many units has it sold? I went into GAME and said have you got RACE Pro, they said what's that? I don' think there's a market for sim games.

One thing me and Jed [Talbot, another Bizarre dev] often talk about is the way that the console market moves through how old the console is, so at the start of the cycle, a sim game makes a great launch title. But once you're five, six, seven years into console development I think a sim game runs out of steam, because sim games are relying on tech. So for the next gen of consoles, making another kickass sim would be great, but once you've done that, you can't really go much further with the sim, I don't think. I think it so heavily relies on technology. That's another reason we want to move away from the sim.