e've spoken to Alex Ward, Criterion's Creative Director previously on Game Informer Online about Black, but now we talk with him about the origins of what truly put them on the map - Burnout.  We find out everything you need to know about the upcoming Xbox 360 version of the game, what makes it special, and why it's one of the must have Xbox 360 titles this Spring.  Plus, now that development has finished with Black, we follow up on a few things with that title, as well.

Game Informer:  Going back to the first Burnout, whose idea was it and how did you guys come up with the concept?

Alex Ward:  I was working at a publishing company in London, and was an A&R guy, and I used to travel the world and meet developers.  After doing that job for a couple of years I kind of figured it was time to become a developer because I figured that was where the action was.  I joined Criterion in 2000.  I was working with a group of guys who were new and young and had never made a game.  They had a deal on the table from a publisher to make a car game that was going to be mission based and the premise behind it was that you were a policeman and it was like Crazy Taxi with police.

We went to America to talk to the publisher about this game. We hated the guy at the publisher because we figured this guy would be really into great driving games, but instead, within five minutes after the meeting started he told us that if he could choose between playing a board game and a video game he’d choose a board game – so I knew we were hosed.  We sat in the hotel bar that night and one of the designers on the project Chris Roberts – who went on to design Crash Mode – said, “I’ll do this game, but I wouldn’t buy it.”  So I said, “What’s the point of doing a game you wouldn’t buy?” And he said, “Well, what else are we going to do?” And I said, “Okay, we’re going to make a driving game with car crashes in it.”

The reason I said that was because I’ve been waiting a long time to play a game since OutRun, or Need For Speed on 3DO where I could drive at high speed, drift, and crash the car.

GI:  So do you have some weird fascination with car crashes?

Ward: No, not really.  It’s not like that James Spader movie, or anything like that.  I was in a car crash once in America where the girl I was with fell asleep at the wheel and rolled it end to end eleven times.  But I was asleep at the time, I just woke up hanging out the back window.  So maybe that was the time it drilled into me that car crashes are tremendously entertaining.  No, I didn’t understand why all of these licensed car games that were out – they weren’t allowed to do the one thing that you wanted to do.  When I used to play F1 games the first thing I would do was turn the car around and drive the other way to smash everything up.  You watch children play with toy cars and the first thing they do is ram them together.  I used to eat the wheels off them myself.

GI: How exciting has it been to watch the series progress to where it is today?

Ward:  Amazing.  It’s like giving birth every year.  It’s very satisfying for us because as you know, if you followed it, I can remember starting this game and having every door in the industry slammed in my face.  So for it to still be going in 2006, and it to be recognized all around the world and win awards, and people get into what we’re doing is something I’m immensely proud and satisfied with. 

GI:  Is your goal to have Burnout become a yearly series?

Ward:  No.  In the internet land everyone thinks there’s this grand master plan and conspiracy because we work for Electronic Arts. There’s Burnout 06, Burnout Most Valuable Player – it’s not an EA Sports game.  It comes out if we want to make one, and when we want to do one.  So in order to build a great game you have to keep turning it up.  When we made Burnout 1 we decided to make Burnout 2 straight away.  We took time off and we hooked up with EA to make Burnout 3.  And we made Burnout 3 because every publisher was knocking on our door asking to do it.  And we made Burnout 3 and it took off in America, and everyone got it, so we made another one. 

But there’s not some master plan where some shady shadowy figure is telling us it’s all planned out and we have to do it. 

GI:  Well let’s move on to the Xbox 360 version. You guys have been known in the past to do brilliant things with the PS2 hardware and even Xbox and GameCube.  It’s amazing what you can do PS2 versus Xbox in making the PS2 version look better (in my opinion).   Now you’re getting to toy around with the next generation hardware. What’s it like having that extra processing power and extra boost?

Ward:  You’ll see it straight away.  You literally can’t take your eyes off it.  It’s by far one of the best f****** things we’ve ever done.  I’m so excited about it.  I met with Microsoft this morning and they’re really excited with what we’re doing on Live.  I mean, it looks amazing. It’s hi-def so you can see the world like never before.  You can really see the detail and what we’ve put into it.  The cars look incredible. They wreck with a fidelity and force that you’ve never seen.  We have the interior of the car.  Not only does it look amazing in HD – we haven’t been speaking too much on what we’ve done graphically because – so what – that’s what we expect from 360. 

The crux of what we’ve done is online on Live, and it’s just something that when this thing hits in March, everyone’s just going to get excited about it.  We showed Microsoft and they’re really impressed with what we’ve done and they’re excited and they took the software away.  I think they’re real happy with what we’ve done.  We’ve got some unique stuff for Live, that uses Xbox Live in a way that it’s never been used before.  There’s a lot of rich functionality in Live that developers are still getting to grips with, and hopefully when they see Revenge on Xbox 360 they’re going to get a good feeling for what can be done.

Because at the moment you can only send messages to tell me what you’ve done in the game, whereas in a month’s time your mailbox is going to be full with other people sending you their best clips from Burnout. 

GI:  Let’s talk about some of the Live functionality you’ve built into the 360 version of Revenge.

Ward:  One is called Save and Share.  Ever since Burnout 1, we thought it would be a cool idea to be able to see your best wrecks.  We didn’t really go back to that feature on Burnout 2 because we weren’t online, and it’s really a feature that needs online connectivity to really work.  What’s cool on the 360 is that you can watch the replays. We haven’t done replays in a while with Burnout, but the replays in Burnout look better than any other game because there’s so much action, excitement, and rush.  You can record up to 30 seconds of action, that can be six five second clips or one 30 second clip. You can swap the cameras around so it looks cool.  You can then upload that onto Live and you can have five clips to share.  You can download clips from other people, and then you can rate them and see whether they’re cool or not. 

You’re not just downloading their video. You’re downloading their actual sequence so you can change the camera with something you download. Once you’ve made a clip you can broadcast it out to everyone on your friends list.  You don’t spam everybody. You can select who you want it to go to. Or you can mail everybody. You can broadcast it out to your friends. They can watch it, rate it, whether they think it’s cool or not.  You can see the clips I’ve made. You can see the clips I recommend. You can download the top 20 clips in the world. You can recommend them, and I can see the ones you really like.

GI:  Is this still possible if you don’t have a hard drive?

Ward:  You can still put clips onto memory cards if you don’t have a hard drive, but if you do have a hard drive it’s better.  Microsoft tells us that 90% of the install base has the hard drive, anyway.

GI:  Could you explain what the Live Revenge elements are?

Ward:  When we’ve been building the Burnout games, this is our third online experience after Takedown and then Revenge – what we like about Live is, obviously we have voice, right? Basically when we used to play Halo 2, it got really exciting after you played five or six matches because by then what kept me playing was me trying to kick your ass.  We had relationships between the matches and we would talk about the match in the lobby. 

However, what we do in Burnout we’re tracking consistently all of the takedowns.  Every time you’re taken down and who you’ve taken down.  We’re tracking those relationships.  If you think of the friends list in terms of the enemies list, as we call it, the game is tracking what you’ve done and who’s done what to whom.  So even if we’ve never raced before on the start line, everybody sees a unique race intro depending who they are and who the other people are. So if we’ve all never raced before whoever is furthest in the game in the rankings, they get called out as, “this guy’s the hotshot.” Get him. He’s the standings leader.  So we all see that we’ve got to get this guy.  If I’m the new guy, all the other guys in the race see that I’m the new guy and get told to school me.  If we’ve raced before, you’re going to see, “Here’s Alex. He’s beaten you the last three times you’ve raced.”  So you need to get him.  I’m seeing you and having to carry on the rivalry and put you in the wall. So we’re seeing the relationships between the racers before the race has even begun.

GI:  That sounds pretty cool… and dangerous.

Ward:  When you’re playing an online road rage, even if we’re on the same team and we’re on the chasing team, we might not catch up to the other guy. But I’ll know that you’ve been beating me the last two times we’ve raced so I might take my revenge on you and put you into the wall just to settle the score.

GI:  Now you’re going to be able to see all this data over Xbox Live, is there going to be a website that’s tracking this at all?

Ward:  No, at the moment it’s not tracking on the web.  We are interfacing with the web for the best clips in the world.  That’s a cool idea that we’ve thought about, but we’re not doing right now, but it is a cool idea.  But the Xbox 360 is tracking a couple of thousand races – what you’re doing and who does what to whom.  You’ll know that if you’re coming into a match with me, and we’ve met before, we’re telling you that we’ve met before and who’s in the lead. And in the game, when you settle the score, the HUD is telling you who’s ahead of you. You get some icons that are either red or green, either seeing who’s ahead of you and who’s not.  So you’ve always got a target.  You’re always a target to someone else.  It’s about making you play longer, and making it be more meaningful and compelling.

GI:  A lot of people I’ve talked to have asked me if this is just a glorified port with a lot of extras, with HD – basically 360-fied.  How much has been rebuilt for the Xbox 360, and how much has been added?

Ward:  We’ve rebuilt every car. We’ve looked at lighting, color, and tinting on every single track.  We’ve remodeled every car, we’ve relooked at deformation, we’ve changed music, the whole front end is completely different.  But again, 60% of our efforts have been focused on Live Revenge and Save and Share.  The other 40% - we knew we could make it look good.  As of right now, I’m biased – I think it’s the best looking thing on the hardware.

GI:  Are there any new tracks?

Ward:  There are no new tracks.  We’re making Burnout Revenge on 360.  There are no new tracks but new content.  There are new vehicles in the game, and how the experience works is unique to 360 and Live.  There are 20 new crash junctions. 

GI:  You’re offering special downloadables at retail stores.  How many different ones are there?

Ward:  Oh god, there are so many.  Off the top of my head I don’t know.  We’ve worked with a lot of different partners.  There’s an exclusive car for the band Yellowcard, there’s a car for GameStop, Dolby. We have a NASCAR in the game that’s number 51 for 5.1. There’s a special 360 car where you can take your memory card to a kiosk and download that too.  You see that car on the front end so you can work out how to get it.  We’ve done a whole heap of stuff like that.

GI:  Is there going to be any other way for people to get these cars other than having to have a memory card?  Are you guys going to offer them as downloadables through the Xbox Live Marketplace?

Ward:  We’re looking at that and we’re talking to publications and seeing how we can distribute that other than through memory cards.

GI:  Are you working on offering a playable demo?

Ward:  We don’t know yet.  We’re just in the closing stages of development.  We’ve been asked to do it. We might do it, but I don’t have an answer for you right now.  I know we’re putting a trailer on Live Marketplace imminently, which will explain the online stuff and explain what’s different.

GI:  How was your experience working with the Xbox 360 hardware versus the other platforms you’ve worked with?

Ward:  Well, we like them all.  We’re not these developers who can do one and not do the other. That’s something you normally hear from PC developers, where they love the PC and hate everything else. We’ve been fine.  We’ve been able to get it up and running very quickly and we’re able to really make the game look outstanding.  I mean, everybody is calling our game a port because it’s a new version of a game that’s already been released.  The same way a DVD comes out, and it can be a new version with new content. I think when you look at it you’ll be more than happy with what we’ve done.  I am so excited.  Seriously.  I cannot wait for the game to come out.  I’m so proud of what the Burnout Revenge team has done.

GI:  So what’s next for the Burnout series? If you could make your dream Burnout game, what would you like to add?

Ward:  Well, the dream Burnout game of course is the one with the real cars in.  But that’s not going to happen.

GI:  Yeah, Mercedes probably wouldn’t want to have their cars obliterated on screen.

Ward:  All I’ll say on Burnout is that we’ve been looking at films for the past five years, and we won’t rest until the films are borrowing from us. 

GI:  So you mentioned you were going on vacation.  I’m assuming Black is finished?

Ward:  Black is done.  I had an e-mail today that the Xbox version has now passed Microsoft.  We’ve passed Sony so yeah we’re done.

GI:  What was it like switching gears and working on a game like Black?  Was it refreshing trying something totally different?

Ward:  Yeah, we had a lot of fun with it.  It was a game that we wanted to make for a long time. It was very tough physically to do because we did it right after finishing Burnout. We went straight into finalizing Black.  Making two games almost at once is very difficult to do.  We’ve certainly never done it before and we found it very challenging.  But we’re really happy with what we did and we’re really happy with Black and how it turned out.

GI:  What’s your favorite thing about Black?

Ward:  For me, I loved the mine field bit in the steel works level. That’s level three.

GI:  Is Black under the same strategy as Burnout where you’ll come out with a sequel when you want to?

Ward:  It might do that.  We might do something totally different.  We don’t know yet.  We’ll just have to see how we go.  I just hope we do all right.  We haven’t even released the game yet.  All we can think of at the moment is suitcases and plane tickets.

GI:  You’ve always made games generally that feature a lot of destruction, a lot of blowing things up. Would you be opposed to ever making a game that is a bit more peaceful?

Ward:  No, not at all.  If we had something that was strong and compelling that we felt right with and felt that we had to bring it out.  At the moment we’re going for maximum entertainment because we don’t see a lot of people doing that. And we know we can do that.

GI:  Can we hope to hear some new announcements from you guys at E3?

Ward:  You can hope!  I think we’re really looking forward to E3 because we get to come and see new games. We won’t be trapped in a dark room showing games to you guys for three days.