Richter grin.
Early last year, three talented British studios were preaching the resurrection of the mass-market arcade racing game. Racers were stuck in a hardcore rut, they argued. Players demand cinematic action, spectacle and storytelling, and fierce, ruthless competition, they said. We can be up there with first-person shooters if we just dream big enough, they claimed.
Then two of them released their games � Bizarre's Blur and Black Rock's Split/Second � and although they were both excellent, they flopped, sales dwarfed by games in the simulation 'niche' they were trying to escape. Blur's failure eventually led to Bizarre's demise a few weeks ago, a respected developer brought to its knees in two and a half short years.
You have to wonder if gamers are as desperate for the brash Hollywood racing experience as these studios thought. With Criterion staying out of the rhetoric and weathering the lean times in Need for Speed's impregnable brand bunker, it's just Evolution Studios � the Sony-owned Cheshire outfit located not too far away from Bizarre's now-empty premises � left standing in the pulpit, looking rather exposed.
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