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There have probably been better times to be pitching around ideas for a new racing game than the summer of 2010. Following the release of Bizarre Creation's Blur and Black Rock Studios' Split/Second - both excellent, forward-thinking takes on a genre that's famous for going round in circles, both failing to find an audience - racing games were entering a period of crisis. For Bizarre and Black Rock, the crisis would prove fatal. For Playground Games, a UK studio formed late in 2009 by veterans of the genre from Codemasters, it made getting its first project off the ground daunting. "It was not a good time to be a racing developer," says Ralph Fulton, one of Playground Games' founders, as he looks back at the studio's early days. "It wasn't a good time to be pitching racing games to publishers. More than one told us that racing is dead, that they didn't want anything to do with it. There were a number of times over that period that were really difficult for everyone involved. In those situations you always have to come back to: why am I doing this? Why did I get into this, and what are we hoping to achieve?"
Playground Games kept on doing it because it had some ideas on what would make a great racing game and a certain amount of confidence that it had the team to make them happen. "We started with not a great deal - not a lot of money, not a deal, not anything like that - but we had a strong group of people who had been working with each other, in some cases, for 10 years. We had a heritage making racing games and that felt like the right thing to do. We felt, if we had a strong team - which we did - we'd prevail. We'd find the right partner and we'd find the right project."
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