The Guardian recently ran an interview with Craig Sullivan, creative director of Criterion Games, the studio behind the upcoming Need For Speed: Most Wanted remake/revamp. The conversation is a great look at how the studio approached the creation of their latest title, and also touches upon the fact that a small, relatively scrappy studio was able to push the genre of arcade racing forward with their homegrown Burnout franchise. And at a time when the genre was relatively limp.
Their success was eventually rewarded, when they found themselves the new stewards of one of the most recognized brands in all of racing, EA's Need For Speed. A franchise that had lost its luster and which needed serious work to get back into the fighting shape. And which Criterion has been able to successfully achieve. So given Criterion's new job, it is easy to believe that Burnout is a thing of a past, but not so says Sullivan:
There's still a lot of stuff we want to do with driving…We will make another Burnout game at some point. Obviously, as we're working on NFS we're thinking of really good ideas that aren't right for this series; there are ideas that we're going to explore with Burnout.
Even more exciting is word of how Criterion might soon tackle yet another EA property with features wheels:
When we did Burnout Paradise we did some motorbike DLC and now everyone thinks that we're going to do Road Rash at some point… I had a lot of fun playing that game, we think bikes are fun. We might make a Road Rash game…
Road Rash seems like a good fit for Criterion…
