Driver is one of the year’s most eagerly awaited games. Here’s why…

Detective Lieutenant Frank Bullitt remains, for many, the finest man to drive an unmarked police vehicle. For the film Bullitt, read the videogame Driver…
Steve Bradley

Driver. From the people that brought us Destruction Derby, right?
Bang on. Quite literally. Codeshop Reflections formerly had a publishing deal with Psygnosis but that expired a couple of years ago, so rather than jumping into bed with another immediately, they got on with producing Driver without the financial backing of a publisher. But when GT Interactive cast covetous eyes over Driver, Reflections couldn’t resist their charms.

What’s this Bullitt business?
Okay, the game is based on the premise of car chases. Bullitt (1968) is a cop/car chase film starring Steve McQueen and it’s one of the game’s major influences. Better still, another work of importance for Reflections is The Driver (1978) which starred Ryan O’Neal. Amazingly, two of the actors in The Driver are called Frank Bruno.

No!
Yes!

So it’s a retro modern game, then?
Yeah, kind of. The cars are chunky, late '60s/early '70s sorts, and include some magnificent coupes among their number. Driver isn’t specifically set in the past, it just has a real '70s feel to it, borne out of the great cop movies of that era. You play the role of an undercover cop and receive your mission details via a motel room answering machine. This means you can still get chased by cops, but GT won’t suffer any of the attendant bad publicity which inevitably surrounds ‘realistic’ games which involve playing the role of a criminal. Think DMA’s Grand Theft Auto.