10 Racing And Driving Games That Changed Dramatically During Development

Paradigm Entertainment’s Beetle Adventure Racing for the Nintendo 64 was far better than it had any right to be, particularly if you expected a cash-grab promotional tie-in for VW’s New Beetle. Yet it began life as an entirely different pitch, when Electronic Arts enlisted Paradigm to develop a Need For Speed entry specifically for the N64. Next Generation magazine confirmed this back in the day, and some proof even made it to the final product via “NEED FOR SPEED” text lurking in the game’s debug menu. They re-cast around Volkswagen’s quirky compact (or Holden’s Aussie muscle, depending on where you’re reading this) didn’t occur until midway through the project. While it’s fun to think about how an NFS taking advantage of Nintendo’s 64-bit machine could’ve turned out, Beetle Adventure Racing is so uniquely charming that I reckon we didn’t miss much in the end.

After Activision swept Project Gotham Racing devs Bizarre Creations from under Microsoft’s wing in 2007, the publisher issued the Liverpool-based team a formidable, some would say downright impossible task: “to do for racing what Call of Duty did for shooters.” Blur, a Mario Kart-like, weapons-based arcade racer with real cars and a real-ish handling model, was the game entrusted to achieve it. Lead designer Gareth Wilson introduced Blur with a narrative component that was ultimately ditched before release, in favor of expanding “social features,” per an GameSpot interview from 2010. While the final product was indeed a blast — particularly over a split-screen session with three friends — Blur’s success was entirely dependent on the cultivation of a thriving, competitive online multiplayer community that never showed up.

Before Wave Race 64 became a game about racing jet skis, it was a game about racing futuristic, transforming speedboats best compared to something out of Midway’s Hydro Thunder. The admittedly blurry video above was captured at Nintendo’s Shoshinkai trade show in 1995, more than six months before the N64's Japanese launch. While the final version allowed players to race against three competitors, this earlier clip shows races of five, perhaps possible due to the (mostly) static watercraft being less intensive to render and animate than a rider and jet ski together. Rare’s Tim Stamper is credited with suggesting producer Shigeru Miyamoto and the Nintendo EAD team switch the focus from boats to personal watercraft. Those who have played and loved Wave Race 64 over the years would likely agree: it was the right call.

Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs series — basically Grand Theft Auto but in a dystopian future with a bent toward hacking and cyberterrorism — isn’t a driving game, strictly speaking. But it came out of one, namely a cancelled project for one of the French publisher’s other properties: Driver. This was suspected by many fans but never properly confirmed until 2021, in an illuminating piece by VG247 quoting Ubisoft devs:

Driver: San Francisco launched in 2011 to glowing reviews, but lacklustre sales. According to a former senior Ubisoft employee, it was the death knell for the series, “definitely the end of the road for that franchise”.

The same source says that Ubisoft Montreal’s Driver demo was rejigged in response, refocusing on its hacker fantasy: “They just did their own thing and convinced Yves [Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO] he could have ‘his own GTA’ instead of the low selling Driver.”

The source at Ubisoft disputes the timing, suggesting that Ubisoft Montreal’s Driver game had already morphed into Watch Dogs before San Francisco came out. But they agree that hacking was the aspect that pushed the project into new series territory: “It took it too far from anything that felt like Driver. They couldn’t make the concept fit with the franchise.”

If you’ve played Driver: San Francisco before, it’s hard not to be wistful about that series dying so Watch Dogs could live. Name another game where you can teleport from car to car in an open world, and those cars include the Dodge Neon, Cadillac DTS and Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The year is 2005. Polyphony Digital is coming off Gran Turismo 4, one of the greatest racing games ever made. All it really needs to do is focus its efforts on making Gran Turismo 5 as good as it can be, taking advantage of the capabilities of the much-hyped PlayStation 3, which has still yet to come out. Unfortunately, Polyphony and its chief Kazunori Yamauchi were determined to do literally anything but that in 2005, leading to the confusing announcement and prompt cancellation of Gran Turismo HD — a product that, almost 20 years on, I’m still not entirely sure I understand. GTHD was really two games, and here’s how IGN explained them at the time:

In GTHD Premium, players get to sample a portion of Gran Turismo 5, with two brand new courses and 30 cars that fully make use of the PS3's capabilities. This mode will offer arcade-style races, but it continues the spirit of the series by serving as a “pure driving simulator.” Premium mode will not have any elements of the Series Gran Turismo mode, where you earn new cars and courses by clearing events. All cars and courses will be available from the start. [...]

The second mode of play is GTHD Classic, an online racing mode that’s based off both the Gran Turismo HD demo from E3 and the PlayStation 2 beta test that Polyphony conducted a few months back in Japan. [...] In Classic mode, players begin with no cars or courses. New rides and tracks are added via downloads with over 750 cars and 50 courses to choose from. SCE will charge for the downloadable extras, and while pricing hasn’t been finalized, we expect each car to cost between 50 and 100 yen (50 cents to 1 dollar) each. Polyphony plans on adding more cars and courses on a weekly or monthly basis, with some cars available in limited quantities.

So, to sum up, GTHD “Premium” was more or less the free demo released as Gran Turismo HD Concept in 2006. Except not really, because Concept only had one track and far fewer than 30 cars. Also, GTHD “Classic” — seemingly a cut-down version of Gran Turismo 4 Online Test Version with no conventional single-player campaign, loads of microtransactions, more competitors in races and even a few bikes from Tourist Trophy — simply never came out. Both were scrapped in favor of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, which finally launched with online play globally in 2008.

Electronic Arts is the exclusive producer of World Rally Championship-licensed games now and going forward. But 20 years ago, the responsibility belonged to Sony and Evolution Studios, makers of MotorStorm and Driveclub. Evo put out five WRC titles between 2001 and 2005, with the series reaching its zenith in WRC 4 and the more arcadey WRC Rally Evolved. But the studio originally had a slightly different vision for that first entry in 2001, aiming to utilize the PlayStation 2's power to bridge the gap between the interactive and broadcast rallying experience.

TV commercials were to be “interjected” between stages, as Evolution’s Martin Kenwright told Edge, while the campaign was supposed to transform into a more authentic, punishing experience after the player’s first championship win with narrower, “actual WRC width” stages. By the time the game released almost a year later it was missing both features, and Evo seemed to sour on the idea of fake in-game ads. For good reason, I’m sure we’d all agree.

Grand Theft Auto — you know the one — actually was a racing game in another life, before becoming a blockbuster celebration of violence and hedonism. The project was titled Race’n’Chase when DMA Design started development in 1995. The original concept was still based on a top-down perspective like the first few GTA installments, but the focus was “to produce a fun, addictive, and fast multi-player car racing and crashing game which uses a novel graphics method,” according to an early design doc. From day one, run-ins both with and as the law were to be a pillar of Race’n’Chase, in the way Need For Speed later incorporated pursuits. “The game was cops and robbers and then that evolved fairly quickly,” former DMA creative director Gary Penn told Gamasutra in 2014. “Nobody wants to be the cop, it’s more fun to be bad.”

Oh, Most Wanted 2012. If you’re a Need For Speed fan, you no doubt have strong opinions about this game, which was basically a worse Burnout Paradise reskinned to pass for the racing franchise EA always cared more about. Criterion’s stab at Most Wanted wasn’t a bad game, but it was arguably a bad Need For Speed, with a remarkably empty feeling. A feeling later explained in part some years later when prototype builds of the game began surfacing bearing a slightly different title: Need For Speed Most Wanted 2.

Yes: The Most Wanted reboot was initially pitched as a Most Wanted sequel, with a story mode that was scrapped prior to launch, along with elements like actual car ownership and “safehouses” (NFS speak for garages). The theory is Criterion simply didn’t have time to realize this more grandiose vision of the game, so it cut the experience down to the fundamentals. What could’ve been, indeed.

“Back in 2007 I was asked to work on an animatic for a destructive street racing game,” former Evolution Studios developer Anthony McGrath posted in the description to the footage you see above. “The game involved racing around cities and causing mayhem and destruction.” It was called Urban Smash, and looked sort of like a take on the Burnout car-combat formula, only with an emphasis on destructible environments. While Urban Smash never came out, it did inform a game that did: 2011's MotorStorm Apocalypse, which brought the high-octane off-road racing series to a post-apocalyptic city.

It may come as no surprise that the one Ridge Racer installment that never looked, sounded or played anything like the rest, and came courtesy of FlatOut and Wreckfest developer Bugbear Entertainment, was never supposed to be a Ridge Racer title to begin with. Rather, publisher Bandai Namco slapped the label on it midway through development, which prompted Bugbear’s Joonas Laakso to make some last minute changes to try — in futility, one might say — to couch the game in the RR universe. From his interview with Eurogamer:

“After we knew we were going to make a Ridge Racer title obviously we made changes to make it fit into what we felt a quality Ridge Racer title should be like,” Laakso continued. “Even though it was going to be very different.”

“We took a long hard look at Ridge Racer’s ‘artificial’ feel to make it mesh with what we were doing.” Laakso specifically notes Unbounded’s lighting and music as examples of this. “We tried to make it feel more stylish and mature.”

The reason? Less-serious racing games were struggling at the time (as illustrated by the prior example of Blur) and Namco believed a tie-in with an existing property would give Unbounded the best shot at success. Only, the sudden heel turn didn’t really convince anyone, particularly not longtime Ridge Racer fans. Whatever few of us were left, anyway.

There you have it: 10 driving games that changed profoundly from pitch to launch. Which of these games did you play, and do you believe the changes made impacted these racers for better or worse? Let us know in the comments as always.