Metropolis Street Racer/Development

Back to: Metropolis Street Racer.

Metropolis Street Racer development
Missed release date(s):

MSR's origins date back to 1997 when Sega's Kats Sato was tasked with finding out who had developed the PlayStation games Formula 1 and Formula 1 Championship Edition for Sony Computer Entertainment. Reportedly Sato purposely pulled the power cable at a display at E3 1996 to see the game's intoductory credits, and, upon discovering the team was Bizarre Creations, a meeting was arranged with Kazutoshi Miyake in an attempt to get the team to produce games for Sega instead.

Sega initially wanted the team to work on Sega Saturn titles, but the plea was rebuffed. Bizarre Creation's head, Martyn Chudley, however kept in contact, and was won over when Sega demonstrated a prototype Dreamcast (then codenamed Dural). Bizarre weren't keen on the original proposal to create more Formula One games, but agreed to make a "serious city-based game with real cars".

MSR entered production while the console was still being developed, which led to numerous engine revisions as the Dreamcast SDKs matured

Metropolis Street Racer had an extremely rocky development cycle, being announced well in advance of the Dreamcast's Western launch and repeatedly missing deadlines over the course of a year. It was reportedly the first Dreamcast project to be started in the United Kingdom.

While initially aimed at the Dreamcast European launch date (1999-09-28 as it was then), the game did not materialise fully until November 2000, at a time when Dreamcast sales were on the decline.

Thirty hours of real-life footage from the streets of London, Tokyo and San Francisco were captured in order to create accurate representations of the host cities, as well as 32,000-35,000 photographs. Initially the team wanted to let players drive down every street, but to maintain the same level of accuracy across the experience, the task proved too daunting. Some of these roads are partially modelled in the final game, but are blocked off by invisible walls.

The cars in Metropolis Street Racer are officially licensed and are designed around real specifications supplied by manufacturers. The use of licensed cars, however, meant that none of the vehicles were allowed to be deformable. The physics model is mostly accurate, but the handling was slightly adjusted to make the game more fun.

Richard Jacques who had at this point composed many soundtracks for Sega, provided the audio for the game. He recorded car revving noises at a "motor industry research centre" (whose location was not disclosed through fears of tipping off rival developers).

Associate producer Jose Aller borrowed Kats Sato's Fiat without his knowledge to obtain engine sounds for the game, taking it up to 140mph on a test circuit.

A replay option, included in review copies of the game, was scrapped at the last minute due to time restraints.

Development on a Japanese release was started but never completed. It remained in the Japanese release schedules for more than a year and was even given a dedicated website but never made it to retail.

Promotional screenshots

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Comparison

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Development environment

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Timeline

Timeline (Dreamcast)

09 10 11 12 2000 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 2001 01 1999-08-28: IFA 1999 2000-03-31: Tokyo Game Show 2000 Spring 2000-09-03: Dreamcast Première, ECTS 2000 1999-11-10: Prototype; 1999-11-10 2000-05-09: Prototype; 2000-05-09 2000-10-10: Prototype; 2000-10-10 , Final build date (GD-ROM (EU)) 2000-10-20: Final build date (GD-ROM (EU)) 2000-11-21: Final build date (GD-ROM (EU)) 2000-11-30: Final build date (GD-ROM (US)) 2000-10-24: AU release 2000-10-26: ES release 2000-11-02: DE release, FR release 2000-11-03: EU release, PT release, UK release 2001-01-16: US release