Driver (1999)

For the last week I've been binging the Driver series and completed the first two games, released for the original PlayStation. The first game, published in 1999, even now feels extremely refreshing. The whole concept is quite unique actually. Massive (especially for PS1) open-world maps where various driving activities take place: chases, escapes from pursuers, ramming front windows of stores with your vehicle, etc. You get the picture—it's a vehicular crime game. But unlike Twisted Metal or Carmageddon, Driver doesn't have cars outfitted with insane weaponry, and the game doesn't take place in some hellish dystopia. It's grounded and set somewhere in the late 70s, complete with a soundtrack featuring jazz-funk and period-appropriate rock music.

What sets this game apart is the feeling of actually being a getaway driver for a criminal crew: you never pull the trigger, just take the hitman to the target's house or drive getaway for bank robbers. Amazingly, being on the Playstation 1, the game features 4 cities, each with their distinct features and feel. The size of the locations is also quite impressive. I played the PC port, which looks even more impressive in 1600x1200 with no PS1 wobble and an increased level of detail.

While I think very few people complained about the game's presentation, it's the gameplay that was a point of contention. The infamous first level places you in an underground garage where you're supposed to demonstrate your driving skills to the gang. Right out of the bat, it gives you a timer and a list of things to perform, like a 360° maneuver or doing a slalom around pillars. On one hand, it's a litmus test, because the rest of the game is quite challenging; on the other, many people never even made it past the garage, which is not what you want your game to be remembered for.

And while that challenge can be overcome with enough skill, the rest of the game has you interacting with other cars driven by the police and other gang members. That's where it goes a little off the rails. Traversing the city is somewhat reminiscent of the original Metal Gear Solid: you have a mini-map that shows where enemy cars are located and their cone of vision to indicate where they are oriented. If it's a police car, you have to drive safely and under the speed limit in order to not get caught. Once you're detected, all hell breaks loose: their cars ram you so aggressively that you can even be sent flying into the air. Couple that with the randomized fashion of the spawning of enemy cars, and you get a very RNG-based racing game where you can just get lucky with the spawns and complete the level with relative ease, or you don't get lucky and are forced to restart it entirely because a random police car rammed you off the road just before the finish line. It is frustrating, very much so. The very last level is just ridiculous; you're driving a car with a VIP, and it seems like the entire police force is after you, and in that level you don't just occasionally get sent into outer space when being rammed; it seems to happen almost every time. Strangely, the luck-based mechanics do make the game somewhat addicting, as you're clamoring for that "Mission Complete" text on the screen. I completed the last level because I simply got lucky with the spawns, and that's not a good thing, but I was still happy.

The style, presentation, and soundtrack of this game just rule. The storyline is hard to follow, but you don't really need to. The driving has that heavy and floaty GTA4-like feel, and the difficulty is at times "choke your family member out of pure rage"-bad. It most certainly influenced open-world games with driving, above all the GTA series. And as mentioned, it's a technical achievement on the original PlayStation. Yes, the draw distance is bad, and the frame rate could be better, but you had racing games that looked about the same on the PS1, and yet they didn't have multiple massive open city maps with distinct features. Very influential.

“I’m losing my favourite game, I’m losing my mind again” -Peter Svensson and Nina Persson, My Favourite Game

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It is the 30th of June 1999. A fire at South Korea’s Sealand Youth Training Centre kills 23 people. Jennifer Lopez is at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with If You Had My Love. Also, GT Interactive Software unleash onto the world Driver (which was subtitled You Are the Wheelman in North America).

For some reason, it always comes back to this for me. The earliest days of my gaming life that I can remember are also the earliest days of my life at all. There were no seasons, just summer, and all the days bled into one long recess. Driver is the first time I ever became truly obsessed with something. If I were into the whole concept of “fandoms” (which I’m not, but the reasons for that are a whole other article), then the Driver fandom is probably the first one to claim me, before anything else.

So how did we get here?

What made Driver so unique is that it was the first to do what almost every game of its genre is expected to do as a standard, and which has subsequently become something which is now taken for granted. The players of Driver – its first wave of players, that is – most certainly did not. Martin Edmondson had been the creative lead on development of Destruction Derby (1995), a racing game that – like most others – was about driving around a circuit.

Driver was something of a spiritual successor to the Destruction Derby series, and placed the gamer in four real world cities – with landmarks – and presented the opportunity to drive around, unimpeded. It’s not quite “open world” in the way that we would understand open world to be today, but it was the beginning of that concept for driving games.

The amazing thing is that such a gimmick was enough in its time to work, and could’ve been the only thing Reflections felt necessary to do. Even a title as simple and minimalist as a noun tells you all you really need to know about it, because unique selling points were significantly less necessary for videogames in 1999. That there’s more to it than that – the thing which makes it notable – is no small feat; especially given the abundance of “important” works which are only considered such due to a technical method being applied for the first time or in a certain way, but which don’t hold up on their own beyond that. When looking at Driver, it’s important to remember that while it premiered the idea of free exploration in a 3D city for a driving game, there is an entire second layer of quality – and, frankly, masterful – videogame development and digital artistry at work here. This is something I only came to realise recently in revisiting Driver for the purpose of nostalgia; in its heyday, the surface is all I saw, and it was enough to satisfy me. Having gone back to it all these years later, there was still so much more left to discover.

It turns out that Driver is a game which pushed the limitations of what was possible for its time by including so many elements of design and gameplay that didn’t need to be there. These elements build upon each other to make Driver a gift for its players. The sad truth is that Driver was released too early, and had it been only a few years later when it finally came out, it would’ve likely been flawless.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2017/09/13/driver/