We recently had a chat with Ralph Fulton, Chief Games Designer for Race Driver: Grid, and while that discussion focused on the tech behind the game, we couldn't help slipping in a question about V8 Supercars and its popularity here in Australia. When asked why the studio decided to do Grid and whether the V8 series will be back at some stage in the future, he told us:
There are a lot of V8 fans at Codemasters too, but it quickly became clear that incorporating the series into GRID would have resulted in an unacceptable compromise, both for V8 fans and for the rest of the global audience we hope to reach with GRID. To put it into perspective, Forza Motorsport 2, which doesn't have the variety of racing we have, shipped with 12 tracks on the disc. The V8 Supercars license would have required us to build 14 individual tracks. There was no way we could do justice to V8 and still make the global racing game we wanted to make, so we had to take the hard decision not to include the series. We are actively investigating a standalone V8 Supercars game at the moment.
13/05/2008
PSN: MONKEYCHEEZE