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You might remember Driver – but do you remember the game itself was?
You might remember Driver – but do you remember the game itself was?

Pop CultureJune 19, 2019

20 years ago, Driver reinvented gaming and nobody knew it

You might remember Driver – but do you remember the game itself was?
You might remember Driver – but do you remember the game itself was?

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Driver, a game whose innovations pioneered some of gaming’s biggest present-day trends. Sam Brooks takes a look at the groundbreaking game’s launch – and the series’ unfortunate decline.

The year is 1999. The first Super Smash Bros. has come out, the fourth Tomb Raider game to use the same engine as the first game has descended, and the Grand Theft Auto series is still a top-down, two-dimensional graphical nightmare. Out of its infancy, gaming had become an inescapable part of life, like a 12-year-old you’ve parented through childhood but now will have to deal with as they hit puberty.

Enter Driver, released 20 years ago this month. Developed by Reflections, which would later become Ubisoft Reflections (remember that Ubisoft part, it’s important later), Driver was meant to be a tribute/rip-off of Starsky and Hutch. As such, the concept wasn’t anything new: you play as an undercover getaway driver, traversing the streets of photo-realistic cities as you elude the cops. The game takes place entirely in a car, which seems adorably prehistoric now, but trust me, in 1999 we were used to games that only did one thing, and did that one thing kind of well.

You should also understand that in 1999, photo realism looks a little something like this:

Photo-realism is a comparative, sliding scale, you see.

We were grading on an invisible curve, you guys. Applying the ‘realism’ descriptor to any game released in the 20th century is like calling Manu Vatuvei the best dancer in the country in 2019. But what makes Driver a landmark – though sadly forgotten – achievement in gaming are two things that it shakily pioneered, two things that would later be perfected by one of the biggest games of all time.

First off, the driving. Driver was hardly the first game to include driving, or even to have it as a focus, but the full-bodied weight of this game’s driving felt new. This wasn’t a racing game like Gran Turismo, or a game where the intention was to destroy other vehicles, like Destruction Derby or Twisted Metal.  It was a game in which you could choose where you drove, and the goal was to drive well, not just fast.

Thanks to the newfangled vibration of the DualShock, when you didn’t drive well – like if, say, you drove your car into a wall or another car – you felt it. It wasn’t quite like playing one of those arcade games that put you in the driver’s seat for $2 of uninspired race-car driving, but it was the closest you could get in the comfort of your own home.

This difference came to a head in the very first mission of the game: a tutorial in a parking lot. It required the player to accomplish a range of stunts, none of which you would ever have to do in-game, but more importantly, none of which anybody had in any game in history. A notorious complaint about the game is how few people actually got past the original mission because they couldn’t accomplish a slalom.

But when you got past that mission, there was the undeniable thrill of driving a car across a real-life city. If you were a nine year old, like I was at the time, it was the closest thing you could get to the feeling of actually driving. As it stands, video games are still the closest I get to driving. Of the four times I’ve gotten behind a real-life car wheel, I have collided with other objects thrice. Video games save lives.

The other thing that Driver pioneered, the thing that is featured in nearly almost every triple-A game today? Open world, baby.

It’s the Golden Gate Bridge, in photo-realistic* detail.

Looking back, this was the best thing about Driver and the thing that I would find interminable if I was to play it now. There were four real-life cities (Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City) in the game, and the story mode was split up between them. They looked primitive, but you have to remember that we were barely half a decade removed from two-dimensional sprites and Lara Croft’s triangular breasts – this was basically Google Earth.

Where the game got special was the Survivor Mode, which allowed the player to roam around these cities as they pleased, as long as they didn’t piss off the overly-aggressive AI police by going even a bit over the speed limit, driving on the wrong side of the road, or hitting another car with their car. (Admittedly, all these things would get you noticed by the cops in real life, which is proof that realism is not always a good thing.)

This was my first introduction to open-world gameplay, and my rose-coloured glasses were firmly on. The agency of being able to wander wherever I wanted and do what I chose was there; the immersion of not just being a part of the game but a co-creator of my own personal narrative of the game was there; and the wish-fulfillment of just driving a car around a city on the other side of the world was there. The fact that the city was pretty empty, I always got caught by the cops within a few minutes, and there was no real point to exploring the world didn’t matter to me.

Here it’s worth noting that Reflections would later be incorporated into Ubisoft, the gaming industry’s foremost practitioner, if not proponent, of open world gameplay.

So, for all this innovation and breaking of grounds, why is this game forgotten?

A little series called Grand Theft Auto.

No, that’s not Driver with insanely upgraded graphics.

One of the biggest video game series in history needs no introduction, but the moment when the series fully grew its beard was Grand Theft Auto 3, the first version on the next generation of consoles. The series had always been critically acclaimed, but the shift from the mission-based, top-down perspective of the first games to a free-roaming, third-person perspective lifted the series into the stratosphere. It was the best-selling game of 2001, won a slew of Game of the Year titles, and set up as juggernauts both Rockstar North (Red Dead Redemption, you guys) and the franchise itself.

On first glance, Grand Theft Auto 3 could be a sequel to Driver. The controls are similar, although GTA3 splits the difference between realism and convenience. While Liberty City is fictional, it is transparently based on New York City. Most of the missions revolve around driving, and many of those involve evading the police.

Even GTA3′s most laudable improvement is one pioneered by Driver 2, the sequel-slash-expansion-pack that came out in 2001. That improvement? Letting you get out of the car and explore on foot.

A man? Outside a car? In a video game? Groundbreaking.

It was this innovation that spelled success for GTA, and eventual doom for the Driver franchise. When Driver’s Tanner got out of the car, it felt perfunctory and clunky. He moved around like he had eaten too many carbs and was ambling towards the nearest bathroom. You always preferred being in the car.

But when GTA3‘s mute, unnamed protagonist got out of the car, it was as much of a thrill as driving was. You would shoot up problematically-written gangsters, throw grenades, and enact all sorts of thrilling crimes. It was an integral part of the game, not something tacked on to fill up an empty world.

Grand Theft Auto continued to master what Driver had pioneered so well, even as the games slowly leaned away from driving-based missions and more towards the third-person slaughterfests that became so popular amongst both gamers and scaremongers.

Meanwhile Driver spun out, to use some driving parlance. Driv3r [absolutely sic] doubled down so much on the out-of-car aspects that it might as well have been called Walk3r. The dismal reviews reflected that, and a pre-GamerGate scandal involving reviews and Atari buying adverts sank the game like a stone.

Driv3r, looking a little bit like Grand Theft Auto but worse.

Driver: Parallel Lines fared better with reviewers, but continued to double down on the aspects the original games had pioneered, but GTA had perfected to considerable acclaim and even more considerable sales.

By this time, so many GTA clones had popped up – remember True Crime: Streets of LA? – that Driver was lumped in with one of them, like a first wife turned 17th concubine. Multiple handheld games passed with little fanfare and slighter sales. Reflections officially became Reflections Ubisoft, and the studio would work on the absolutely-existent series Just Dance and the middling online-only racing game The Crew.

The final game in the franchise, Driver: San Francisco, seemed like it could be a success. It stripped the series back to its core – fun driving, photo-realistic cities, open world – but the damage was done. Reviewers liked it, but nobody bought it, and now it exists as a footnote.

Despite the series’ decline, it’s important to remember the ground that original game broke. If you’ve got anybody to thank for the ability to roam around aimlessly on your horse in Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s the developer of Driver. Hell, the game even had a Director Mode which set up your car chases with then-revolutionary cinematic camera angles and cutting.

On the flipside, if you’ve got anybody to blame for empty open worlds with worthless tokens to collect, you can probably also blame Driver. 

Maybe being first doesn’t mean you’re remembered. But there’s something to be said for doing something first so somebody else can do it right.

Keep going!
AP in the Red Bull Music Studio (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)
AP in the Red Bull Music Studio (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)

Red BullJune 18, 2019

A rap rite of passage: in the studio with Red Bull 64 Bars

AP in the Red Bull Music Studio (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)
AP in the Red Bull Music Studio (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)

To celebrate the eighth season of this local institution, Hussein Moses goes behind the scenes of the series putting New Zealand rappers to the test.

David Dallas is waiting. It’s mid-morning on a weekday in May and as he sits in the control room of Red Bull Music Studio Auckland, a camera crew sets up on the other side of the glass. Seated next to him is Ben Lawson, the studio’s longtime audio engineer, who was involved in the making of his 2017 album Hood Country Club. Today, it won’t be Dallas stepping up to the mic.

Both are here to record the new season of Red Bull 64 Bars, the video series co-created by Dallas and the brand that’s found a new way to get emerging hip hop artists in front of New Zealand rap fans. The series puts local rappers to the test by asking them to write and perform a 64-bar verse – around three minutes of non-stop rapping. The performances regularly clock over 100,000 views and have uncovered some of the best underground talent in the country.

It’s a high-pressure environment, especially for the young artists that haven’t performed in front of cameras before. If anyone would know what it’s like, it’s Dallas. He made his name off an unforgettable verse of his own when he appeared on Scribe’s ‘Not Many (Remix)’ in 2003, and has since established himself as an icon of New Zealand hip-hop, with four solo albums to his name and a heap of awards to match.

Ben Lawson and David Dallas (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)

As usual, he’s hand-picked each of the three artists coming into the studio to record their 64 today. Now in its eighth season, the series has become a rite of passage for a legion of underground hip-hop acts. Recording a track is an invaluable opportunity to work with Dallas, and provides vital exposure. Many of those who laid down bars in Red Bull’s Auckland studio – think JessB, Melodownz, Raiza Biza and SWIDT’s INF – have gone on to become veterans of the local culture.

It’s an opportunity many would kill for, but at the end of the day, says Dallas, it’s all about who’s going to benefit the most from the exposure. “There’s just no point in getting someone that everyone knows is a fucking awesome rapper.”

The Red Bull 64 Bars series has been so successful in helping gain mainstream exposure for young up and coming artists, it has even recently expanded into Japan and South Africa.

Mo Muse (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)

The vibe in the studio is surprisingly relaxed as the first artist of the day steps into the booth. Mo Muse reps Mt Roskill, Massey and Dunedin in his music – but that hints at just a small part of the 25-year-old’s journey so far. He moved to New Zealand as a refugee when he was two after his family escaped civil war and famine in Somalia. Only recently has he begun to open up about it as he’s come to understand the importance of his history and that’s become an important part of his music.

“I think I owe it to a lot of people from similar backgrounds to get my story out there,” he says.

Muse recorded his first song just four years ago, but it’s clear that he’s ready to take the next step. He has a new EP is on the way and then he plans to get to work on a debut album.

Personally, the call from David Dallas came at a vital moment. Questioning his future in music, being asked to take part in Red Bull 64 Bars was “a real saving grace,” he confesses.

“That was the point I felt the lowest in terms of my music. I didn’t know if I could keep doing this.”

It’s the middle of the holy month and the Muslim rapper is observing Ramadan. As it’s customary to abstain from water during the day, he’s determined to lay down his 64 bars in the first take or two before his mouth dries out. He makes it look easy, with a clever and unapologetic verse that touches on everything from his life as a refugee to New Zealand’s youth suicide problem.

“You talk to everyone who’s young in New Zealand and they know somebody, or know of somebody that’s committed suicide,” he explains. “This is an epidemic. It’s that bad.”

In April he released ‘Friday’, a protest song dedicated to the people who lost their lives in the Christchurch mosque attacks on March 15. He had a close connection to the Muslim community in Christchurch, often travelling up to Al Noor mosque during the five years he studied to be a pharmacist at Otago University.

“We were really close to the family that had the three-year-old boy murdered. He was the sweetest little boy. For that to happen… it just made me feel so sick,” he says.

In the song, he takes aim at conservative politicians and media commentators like Mike Hosking and Winston Peters, who he says have contributed to creating a narrative of othering and Islamophobic sentiment.

“There’s years of things that brew up for a tragedy like that to happen. It’s disingenuous to the victims to act like this happened out of the blue – and that this is not us.”

Muse is unafraid to speak out about the injustices he sees in his community, even though he was recently targeted by racist online commenters for doing so. The hostile reaction to an interview he gave to the NZ Herald about the stigma that refugees are “bottom-feeding leeches” is something he dives into with his bars.

“My writing style is very unapologetic,” he says. “It wouldn’t be real otherwise. As a person, I’m very open, very respectful, very polite. But when it comes to my penmanship, it has to capture the emotion I’m feeling at that time I’m writing.”

Sven Illy (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)

Sven Illy is next to arrive. The rapper, who just released a new EP HIGHSIDE, proudly calls Mangere Bridge home and is hungry to prove his worth in the studio. Back in the day the 30-year-old would write rhymes to ‘Big Time’, one of David Dallas’ earliest singles. “He’s the biggest name in the NZ hip-hop scene,” Illy says of Dallas. “So for him to reach out to me to come here… it’s too much.”

Despite this kind of attention being so new to him, he exudes a quiet confidence. This is his first time performing in front of cameras. It’s also just the second time in his life that he’s been interviewed. The first was by the film crew downstairs only minutes earlier.

Illy grew up in a sports family – his brother Shea Ili plays point guard for the New Zealand Breakers – but music was always his thing. He honed his craft at SAE Institute, ditching the schoolwork for more practice time in the studio. By day he works as a sexton, where he looks after the grounds of a cemetery in Papatoetoe – a “gravedigger”, as he likes to call it.

Writing is like therapy, he says. “You don’t have to share all your raps.”

Outside of the booth, Illy doesn’t say much. He’s soft-spoken, almost to the point of shyness, but when the time comes to record he transforms. His delivery becomes animated, and his voice gruff. Like his outward persona, his lyrics are layered and subtle. The longer you look, the more you understand.

“If you listen to it the second time, you’ll hear more,” he promises. “I’m not giving my opinions on the world, or my life, or that shit. I just say shit that will make people think.”

AP (Photo: Graeme Murray / Red Bull)

The rapper born Albert Purcell, AP holds court for the final session of the day. At 19, he’s the youngest of today’s performers, but he’s not the youngest to ever drop 64 bars. That honour goes to Elijah ‘Church’ Manu, who together with AP has released two acclaimed EPs in the past year as Church & AP.  Church’s own 64, recorded when he was 17, was lauded by local rap fans and has set the bar high for his rap partner.

“I learned a lot from Church,” AP says of his collaborator’s performance. “He’s a genius. I don’t know how to explain it.”

The two first bonded over a Chance The Rapper mixtape back when they were at Mount Albert Grammar School and started going to a nearby youth programme that had all the gear they needed to record songs. AP took inspiration from grime artists like Skepta, JME and Section Boyz when he first started writing. In them, he found permission to share his unique identity and experiences on the mic.  

“I was like ‘this is crazy, they’re rapping in their accent and everyone loves it. I can do the exact same thing’. I don’t have to fake it or put on a front or an accent just to try and make it be cool. I can just be myself.”

His peers at home seem to inspire him just as much: he’s quick to shout out Abdul Kay, Nauti and Dirty – three rappers that have also taken part in the project – for helping to pave the way.

Things have been moving fast for Church & AP lately, something AP admits has at times felt overwhelming. They’ve sold out shows, played summer festivals, and on Monday night played their first show in London. Soon they’ll be boarding a flight for LA. When they return they’ll be back in Red Bull studio to record their debut album. Then they’re off on a nationwide tour in August.

The duo’s main goal, says AP, is to be financially stable. “It’s easy, in a way, to get money. The harder part is trying to keep it.”

Back when they started out, AP would often get tagged as the introvert of the group – but with all eyes on him in the studio, he comes off as self-assured and lays down his 64 convincingly. Learning to adapt to the newfound attention was something he had to do, he admits afterwards. “You have to, or else you’ll be anxious all the time. Finding comfort in everything I do is the best thing. Not to be afraid and just to do it. I was nervous coming here but I had to get over it.”

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Dallas quietly nods in approval as the two sit down together and listen back to AP’s verse booming out of the studio speakers. His characteristic humour shines through his punchline-heavy bars, and it’s easy to see he’s made strides as a lyricist. “It’s real crazy,” says AP, “to think that a year ago I was writing raps just for the fun of it.”

As Dallas already knows, one verse can change everything.

This content was created in paid partnership with Red Bull. Learn more about our partnerships here.

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