“Small bills.” Those are the first words uttered by Driver’s player character, four or five missions into the game. Before then, you’d be forgiven for assuming that this undercover cop and former race car driver was a silent protagonist. But no: Tanner, as he’s called, simply prefers to let the roaring engine of a 1974 Gran Torino do the talking.
Oh, and he likes to be paid in small bills. That’s all we know about him, aside from the fact that his last career ended in a fiery crash – which is how most failed missions end in Driver, too. Thankfully, the gangsters, pimps, and informants on the other end of Tanner’s phone readily fill the air. They speak in the idiom of blaxploitation cinema, the ’70s subgenre of action film which celebrated the slang and agency of its African American criminal characters, even as it made money for white writers and producers by leaning on racial stereotypes.
In this world, San Francisco is “Frisco”, a woman is a “kitten”, and mission-givers expect you to know what they mean when they ask, “This disco your beat?” Once you put the phone down, however, the filmic influences shift to the car chase classics of the era: The Italian Job, Bullitt, and The French Connection. Newcastle studio Reflections built a driving model that was nothing less than extraordinary for the early days of 3D gaming – the equal of Gran Turismo in its weight, momentum, and buoyancy. Then it set the handbrake to ‘always on’.
Street furniture
The goal was to position players at the very edge of control. Driver’s chases feel thrillingly desperate, soundtracked by the ‘wicka wicka’ of funk guitars and the constant screech of tyres. On the first or second corner of every level, without fail, a hub cap will fly from your car and careen across the road or pavement. It’s a detail that sums up Reflections’ dedication to squeezing cinematic touches from the strained PS1 hardware.
In an era when driving games took place almost exclusively on tracks, it’s impossible to overstate the impact of Driver’s urban environments. Suddenly success was as much a matter of hazard perception as it was racing excellence; even the greatest escape could be derailed by a Sunday driver making a left turn as you shot across a junction.
The mere presence of slow-moving obstacles lends the experience of hurtling down a Miami street a sense of danger you could never find on the Laguna Seca Raceway. There’s something about the metronomic regularity of the lampposts that allows you to measure, on some unconscious level, just how irresponsibly fast you’re going.
It’s made very clear to you that you ought to slow down. The police forces of Driver’s four American cities patrol in black-and-white squad cars, which you notice by their vision cones on the minimap. In these moments, Driver is a vehicular stealth game: step on the gas too hard or put a rear end out of line within sight of the law, and you’ll trigger a high-speed chase.
As you bash bumpers with your pursuer, your felony level increases, and so these encounters quickly get out of hand, spawning road blocks and more kamikaze cops. But toeing the line whenever you come across a police car is rarely an option: with one eye on a tight mission timer, you’re forced to floor it in full view of the fuzz. That’s no shame, though – if you survive, all those near-collisions give you material to work with in the Film Director mode, a fully-featured tool for making your own Bullitt.
Lend us a tanner
It’s important to point out that, at the time, Grand Theft Auto was still in 2D. If you think Rockstar wasn’t bothered about that fact, consider exhibit A: the GTA 3 mission named ‘Two-Faced Tanner’, in which you hunt and kill a “strangely animated undercover cop”. You’re told Tanner is “more or less useless out of his car” – a transparent dig at the fact that Driver players couldn’t step out of their vehicle.
Clearly, Rockstar was both indebted to and threatened by Reflections. And although the Driver studio would never overtake GTA again, it triggered a race that saw 3D open cities become the most exciting playgrounds in gaming. Not bad for a ’70s throwback.
This article originally appeared in PLAY Magazine #3, the successor to Official PlayStation Magazine.
