10 Racing And Driving Games That Changed Dramatically During Development

Credit: Declan Simons via YouTube

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.