Bizarre Swaps Wheels for The Club

The Project Gotham Racing creator tells us how it wants to bring its flair to shooters. First screens.

The success of the Project Gotham Racing series had the side effect of making people think that all Bizarre Creations was good for was driving games. For the 35 in-house developers working on The Club at the company's studio in Liverpool the challenge going forward is to change that view.

The Club, which Bizarre is working on for Sega, has been compared to Brad Pitt flick Fight Club, though design manager Nick Davies preferred to side-step that analogy when we spoke to him about the game. It is, however, useful shorthand in that it captures a core element of the game, which sees you taking part in organized underground fighting that takes place around the world.

There are three main factions in The Club, starting with the moneymen who oil the disgusting operation. There are the hunters, who wilfully spur on the bloodsport, and then there's you, the prey. Prey have only one goal: kill whoever is in their way and stay alive.

As strong as the theme is, for Bizarre, it was the gameplay mechanics that came first. Third-person gunplay serves as the foundation for an arena built from the remnants of a more hardcore time, said Davies.

"What it really is is a return to that intense arcade action that Sega is really renowned for," Bizarre told us recently. "We're talking about really fast-paced, five-minute levels - really short, intense bursts of gameplay."

The levels, which take place in arenas dotted around the global underworld, may not last long, but it's what you do in those precious minutes that matters. Driving these snippets of gameplay is a scoring system where the great will be able to distinguish themselves from the merely good.

So how does a studio renowned for driving games move over into third-person shooters? The key is technology sharing, at low levels and higher up. That's how online concepts devised from later Project Gotham Racing games will end up in The Club. And perhaps the games aren't that different, as Davies:

"In terms of the genre, it's a departure from the games we've made, but in terms of the way the game plays, it owes a lot to the way PGR has redefined racing games," he said. "It plays very much like a racing game. It's about learning the levels, learning the route through the levels."

A shooter, obsessed with scoring and smelling of driving games? How Bizarre.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo