In most racing games the other traffic is something to avoid. In Burnout it was the point. Criterion’s 2001 racer for the PlayStation 2 rewarded the player for driving on the wrong side of the road, slipping between oncoming cars and missing them by inches, and when it went wrong, as it often did, the game lingered on the wreck. Over seven years the series turned that idea round until wrecking things, rival cars included, was the way to win.
Fast facts
- Developer: Criterion Games, Guildford.
- Publishers: Acclaim (Burnout, Burnout 2); Electronic Arts from Burnout 3.
- First game: PlayStation 2, November 2001; also released on the GameCube.
- Engine: RenderWare, Criterion’s own 3D middleware.
- Main series: Burnout (2001), Burnout 2: Point of Impact (2002), Burnout 3: Takedown (2004), Burnout Revenge (2005), Burnout Paradise (2008).
Shiny Red Car
Burnout began as a prototype called “Shiny Red Car”: a stretch of city streets with lorries and cars driving along it and a small red coupé to weave between them. “I don’t even think we had any collision on the vehicles at that point,” Criterion’s Paul Glancey recalled. Publishers wanted something like Gran Turismo, and it was Acclaim, which had published Criterion’s hoverboard racer TrickStyle on the Dreamcast, that agreed to take it.
When Edge visited in 2001, the game’s AI programmer, Hamish Young, explained the scale of it: “On average we’re updating about 300 cars a frame but actually on the larger tracks you go past something like a thousand to 1,500 cars a lap.” In the version Edge saw, dangerous driving, such as speeding against the flow, raised the driver’s heart rate, and once it was high enough the player could use the boost, which made the near misses more likely still. None of the cars were licensed, Edge noted, and “as such Criterion hasn’t shied away from portraying collisions”.
Edge‘s review that December gave Burnout eight out of ten. Crashes were “convincingly portrayed with a real sense of weight”, and a favourite collision could be saved and replayed at different speeds. The magazine called the game “a valiant, much-needed adrenaline-filled syringe passionately thrust into the exhausted heart of the videogame racing community”. Alex Ward, who started the project and is credited as the series’ creator, remembered the launch less fondly: “Burnout was spectacularly misunderstood all through its development, promotion, and release… I remember being truly heartbroken taking the game to the annual E3 show and no one being interested in seeing it whatsoever.”
Crash mode and Takedowns
Burnout 2: Point of Impact (2002), again from Acclaim, added Crash mode: fifteen road junctions taken from the game’s courses, where the aim was to drive into the traffic and cause the most expensive pile-up possible. Edge gave it eight out of ten and called it “a true digital toy box”. Acclaim promoted it by offering to pay British drivers’ speeding fines on its release day, a stunt that, a reader complained to Edge, “drew gasps of horror from within the corridors of power”.
Electronic Arts published Burnout 3: Takedown in September 2004, weeks before it completed its purchase of Criterion. The rival cars now fought back. Shunting one into a wall or the traffic was a Takedown and filled the boost meter; being taken down emptied part of it. Holding a button during the player’s own crash started “Impact Time”, which slowed the action and let the player steer the tumbling wreck, the Aftertouch, into a rival for one last Takedown. Edge gave it nine out of ten and called it “Criterion Games’ finest hour”.
Burnout Revenge (2005) changed the rules about traffic. Cars going the same way could now be rammed out of the way, “checking” in the game’s terms, and a whole rush-hour jam could be pushed into “a breaking wave of wreckage”. Edge found it throwing “the complete RenderWare manual at the screen”. A PSP compilation, Burnout Legends (2005), drew on the first three games.
Paradise
Burnout Paradise (2008) put the series into an open city, where the player drove from one event to the next instead of choosing them from a menu. Ward said he took the idea from Mercenaries and Crackdown: “My mantra for the game became ‘not playing the game is the game’.” Criterion kept adding to it after release, and Matt Webster, later the studio’s general manager, said the first year of Paradise taught the studio “a huge amount about how players interact with an open world”.
It was the last main Burnout. Criterion moved on to Need for Speed, beginning with Hot Pursuit in 2010. When a remastered Burnout Paradise came out for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC in 2018, it went to the top of the British sales chart. Ward and Fiona Sperry, Criterion’s former general manager, left the studio around the start of 2014 and founded Three Fields Entertainment, which made the Crash-mode game Danger Zone and, in 2019, Dangerous Driving, a racer meant, in its own words, to “recapture the spirit of the past”. The Criterion entry follows the studio’s later work.
Sources
- Edge issue 101, September 2001, “Inside… Criterion Games”: Burnout (formerly SRC); Hamish Young on the traffic; the heart-rate boost; unlicensed cars.
- Edge issue 104, December 2001: Burnout review (PS2; Acclaim; release 23 November; the crashes and replays; eight out of ten).
- Edge issue 108, March 2002: Acclaim’s Burnout among the GameCube’s European launch titles.
- Edge issue 116, November 2002: Burnout 2: Point of Impact review (Crash mode’s 15 junctions; eight out of ten).
- Edge issue 117, December 2002: reader’s letter on Acclaim’s offer to pay speeding fines on Burnout 2’s release day.
- Australian Personal Computer, February 2004: Acclaim’s offer “to pay the speeding fines of British drivers for a day”.
- Edge issue 135, April 2004: Burnout 3 preview (the promised “aftertouch”).
- Edge issue 141, October 2004: Burnout 3: Takedown review (Electronic Arts; release 10 September; Takedowns; Impact Time and the Aftertouch Takedown; online modes; nine out of ten).
- Edge issue 155, November 2005, p. 98: Burnout Revenge review (checking traffic; “the complete RenderWare manual”). Same issue: Burnout Legends review, “a ‘best of’ compilation which cherry picks from the first three Burnouts”.
- Aaron Potter, “Burning Rubber: The race to recreate Burnout”, Wireframe issue 29, December 2019, pp. 18–23: “Shiny Red Car”, Paul Glancey on Acclaim and TrickStyle; Alex Ward on Burnout’s reception and Paradise; Matt Webster; Hot Pursuit; the 2018 remaster’s chart success; Three Fields Entertainment, Danger Zone and Dangerous Driving.
- “Criterion co-founders create new indie studio Three Fields Entertainment”, Shacknews, 5 March 2014 (web, secondary): Ward and Sperry’s departure three months earlier and their new studio. https://www.shacknews.com/article/83411/criterion-co-founders-create-new-indie-studio-three-fields-entertainment