Tag Archives: project gotham racing

Lucid Games has teased that “mid-May” will be an interesting month for the studio.

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Microsoft is in talks with several third-party European developers about rebooting Project Gotham Racing, according to a report from Develop.

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Speaking to VG247 at Develop in Brighton today, Bizarre Creations boss Sarah Chudley has revealed that the Activision-owned developer co-owns Project Gotham Racing’s Kudos dynamic.

Although the firm can still use the series’ trademark idea, however, the notion of a Bizzare-developed fifth game in the much-loved racing series – being considered after the release of Gotham 4 under Microsoft – died when the firm sold to Kotick’s publisher.

“Gotham’s owned by Microsoft,” said Chudley. “They will be doing with Gotham whatever they want. So no, we’ve said goodbye to the Gotham series.

“We still own the Kudos element,” she added. “We have a joint patent with Microsoft, so that’s something we could use in the future if we wanted to.”

Gotham 5 was being mooted at Bizarre when Activision moved on the developer.

“We were thinking about what to do in the future,” said Chudley. “Do we do Gotham 5? Do we stay with Microsoft, do we look for another publisher? Obviously we have a great relationship with Sega, so do we go down that route?

“And it was at that point that Activision came along and said, ‘Look guys, we need a really good racing game.’”

As well as deciding future direction, selling to Activision has given the company air to breathe away from Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport, said the exec.

“Obviously, Microsoft’s very protective of its Forza brand, and Gotham had to fit into that. So, going forward, we were obviously going to be restricted about what we could do, and now we’re not.

“I mean literally, Activision has said, ‘Just go and do the game you want to do,’ which has been absolutely amazing. It seems to have gone down very well.”

Chudley told us that the firm is working on two projects under Activision, one of which is, unsurprisingly, petrol-related.

“I think they obviously said that since they haven’t got any racing in their portfolio, I think it’s pretty obvious that there is a racing game coming up,” she said.

According to this, Bizarre Creations’ Gareth Wilson is scared the racing gene is too limited to acheive what needs to be done with the company’s first Activision-funded racing title – making a game people will want over the next Call of Duty game.

“The focus for our new title,” said Wilson, “is how can we make a really, really big-selling racing game, something that people will buy over Call of Duty 5.”

He added, “I worry that [racing games] might become an extremely niche area unless we work out a way of making it become more mass market”.

Nothing is known of the game Wilson is working on at the moment, but something with “Gotham” and “5″ in the title probably isn’t a million miles away from the mark. Or maybe it is, if they’re looking to achieve monster sales. Who knows? We don’t. And that’s the end of the story.