There’s nothing quite like visiting a publisher to see a game, only to leave with far more than you bargained for. Criterion’s passion for each project bleeds into the games themselves. However, it’s not restricted to the class of 2010 – when we decided we wanted to get the real story behind Burnout 3, Alex Ward was keen to reunite the original team and, over the course of our day at the Guildford studio, we got to see old friends reunited after several years. It wasn’t long before sparks started to fly that made the ones in the game seem like sparklers by comparison. And amid the banter, the revelations and the stirring of long-dormant memories come a number of genuine world-firsts; we’ve barely sat down when Ward first mentions a cancelled project – one which nobody outside the company had ever seen before – that directly led to Criterion’s finest work and one of the all-time great racing games.
So what is this mystery game? You could guess until you were blue in the face and were rocking a Tier 1 Operator-style beard and we reckon you’d still be no closer, so we’ll let outspoken swear box frequenter Alex Ward fill you in. “Criterion started talking to EA in 2002, and they asked if we’d be interested in doing a remake of the old C64 and NES game Skate Or Die,” he reveals. “These guys wanted to make a skateboarding game, so we did it. This is the first game Criterion made with EA and these guys were on what was then the Airblade team. Sony were interested in a sequel but the guys didn’t want to do that. Nobody knows about this and we’ve never shown this before.” We feel somewhat privileged when we realise that we’re the first people outside of Criterion and EA to witness anything on this MIA extreme sports remake, and the team are far more open and less inhibited in talking about their internal workings than any other we’ve encountered – where others might only mention such a perceived failure in passing, here we’re instead introduced to a number of the original team and shown everything from concept videos to gameplay footage. Designer Craig Sullivan eagerly gives us a little background on both himself and the project.
“I grew up in Cardiff with the guys that went on to do Dirty Sanchez and I street skated from when I was about to 13 until about 21,” he tells us, and with his skating credentials in order, he goes on to explain what the team wanted from the game. “In Tony Hawk’s you were always on the board, and it was all about tricks and high scores, but I wanted to explore what it was like to just go out for a skate and have that feeling of just doing whatever you want. There was that experience from when I went skating in real life that just wasn’t captured in videogames. I wanted to be able to get off the board – this was way back in 2002.” But for all the ideas it might have had, the guys had apparently already seen a glimpse of the future when Airblade was altered due to publisher pressure, as Ward explains. “Acclaim, on Burnout and Burnout 2, gave us pretty much free rein – we made the game and they released it. These guys worked with Sony Europe on Airblade, which started as Tony Hawk on a flying board, but then we had Sony pushing the influence of story, and Shenmue I remember them talking about. We were happy with it, right?” The table rumbles with agreement. “But it didn’t fulfil everything we wanted it to do. So then with Skate Or Die, we were working with the big boys, with EA. We had people coming to us early in the project wanting to know where it was going to be.”
“Obviously we wanted to work with EA because we were an independent studio at the time and we wanted to work with the best publishers,” Ward continues. “We’d talked to all the publishers when we went to sell Burnout and EA was the only one to actually ask us questions about the gameplay. Everyone else was like ‘the game looks good, do you want a million dollars? When will it come out?’ Then the Burnout guys after 2, we were talking to EA Canada about doing a Need For Speed game, so we put together a pitch to do a stunt racing game called Need For Speed: Split Second.” But with even with two potentially massive titles on the table, it wasn’t to be all smiles and rainbows. “We didn’t even know the rules of the game,” he admits. “EA was a much more professional company than Criterion – we were only maybe 130 people, if that. It was an eye-opening experience. At this time, the Airblade team was the A team and the Burnout team was the B team. We were told ‘you can’t just make a Tony Hawk game – it’s got to be like GTA’ and that was the first time we were like ‘really?’ ‘It’s got to be open world’… well, what does that mean? Nobody really knew.”
We watch as the game changes direction before our very eyes, from classic skating game to GTA-inspired open-world ideas through to an ingenious skating evolution concept but the simplicity with which the various videos flow onto the screen belies the confusion and trauma the team went through in trying to score when the goalposts were moving so quickly and so frequently. Sullivan tells us of a number of serious illnesses he went through as a result of the constant stress, and he wasn’t alone – the team was, according to all present on this 2010 summer’s day, in turmoil. Something had to be done. A decision was reached on the future of Skate Or Die. The team chose Die.
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