The player

Driver San Francisco brings in a gimmick that aims to recreate the thrill of classic cinema car chases, writes JOE GRIFFIN

HURTLING along a packed freeway in a powered-up Ford Thunderbird, the driver manages a last-second hairpin turn before teleporting, as if by magic, into another car, a Ferrari that’s speeding the wrong way up a one-way street. Fractions of a second later he’s flanked by his pursuers, who also switch from car to car at will.

The multiplayer game is Drive San Franciscoin "shift mode", a controversial new gimmick for the franchise. These races are dizzyingly fast-paced and truly cinematic. The crisp graphics whizz by at 60 frames per second (more than twice as many images per second than a traditional movie), making for visceral, clear chases.

"When the shift feature is added to multiplayer it really comes alive," says Martin Edmondson, founder of Reflections Interactive, which made the first Driver San Francisco. "When we added it years ago we got excited about what we could do with it. It's allowed us to do things that people wouldn't associate with a multiplayer driving game. It keeps you in the action and maintains a frantic energy that's often not in racing games.

“It was the total opposite of the situation I’ve been in before, which is adding multiplayer for the sake of it. Here, we were all over it. As soon as we designed shift, we knew it was going to shine in multiplayer.”

The shift feature also appears in the single-player campaign of Driver San Francisco, in which our hero dreams of his pursuit of criminals. Think of it as a 1970s car-chase movie with Inception-style qualities.

In fact, much of the inspiration for Driver San Franciscodoesn't come from videogames. With one or two exceptions, most of the films that Edmondson cites are from the golden age of action movies from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

“Ronin certainly was an influence. That’s one of the more successful, relatively contemporary car-chase movies. The Bourne series too – real car chases, real stuntmen, no CGI. We tried to follow the way that chases were made in the ’70s, with no digital trickery.

"Other influences would be The Driver, The French Connection, The Blues Brothers, and even TV shows like The Dukes of Hazard. We take inspiration from anything with skilled driving and quality car chases. But we also take influence from other places, like in the game's cut scenes, the way Michael Mann edits scenes to music. Inspiration comes from a lot of angles, but mainly movies, not games."