Bizarre Creations—who made Project Gotham Racing and The Club—met an unfortunate end more than a year ago, after putting out combat-enhanced racer Blur. The Liverpool dev collective were working on another racing game when Activision pulled the plug on the studio. On his personal Tumblr, former art director Chris Davie (now at developer Lucid) shows an early, pre-alpha build from that last, stillborn game. It looks pretty damn cool.
Built on a new engine, the Unannounced Project would have upped the ante on visual and environmental effects seen in Blur. And you'd be driving up the sides of buildings in Dubai. Two videos show the game at various stages. Here's Davie:
This video shows us trying out some new visual effects, partly just because we thought it would be cool, and partly to see how more intense effects would effect the player's experience (i.e. is driving through a storm shooting and dodging weapons fun and exciting or stupid and annoying).
So we built a load of big storm effects into the Brighton level from Blur and did some fancier animated turn markers.
The ‘Shunt' power up also got an overhaul from the big red ball in Blur, to a big refractive energy pulse here. This new one would throw tear up the road as it homed in on its target, leaving a trail of broken tarmac and scattered, twisted lampposts.
You can see both videos on Davie's Tumblr. Would you have been hyped for this game if it made it out of development?