Blur's real legacy: how Project Gotham's designer fell in love with kart racing

Sumo Digital's Gareth Wilson is a man at the mercy of some heavyweight irony. He once designed racing games for Bizarre Creations, former custodian of the Project Gotham Racing series, whose fabulous 2010 offering Blur poked fun at Nintendo in its marketing materials.

"Race like a big boy," snickered an infamous Activision TV spot, juxtaposing Blur's sexy neon violence with the chubby childishness of a Mario Kart parody. Two years later, Bizarre Creations is a fading memory, Mario Kart 7 has sold over 4.5 million units worldwide, and Wilson is lead designer on Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed, the second of Sumo Digital's Sonic-fueled homages to the plumber's trackside antics. Bit of an unfortunate turnaround, that, but the PGR veteran isn't letting it cramp his style.

A few days after playing (and rather enjoying) Transformed, I approached Wilson and fellow Sumo man Steve Lycett for their thoughts on "grown-up" racing, kart racing and what the two have in common.

Thanks for making time for me, chaps. Gareth - it must be interesting to work on a kart racer, given your experience with more realistic racers.

Wilson: I'll tell you where I went wrong I think. When I first came onto the project I thought I needed to dumb down all the handling to make it really easy and actually that was a bit boring. If anything, over the course of the game we've made the handling a bit more involving, a bit more interesting and a bit more challenging and people are enjoying the game more and more, so if anything I almost went too far the other way. I was almost overly aware that this isn't a "proper racing game", when actually it is a proper racing game.

Lycett: It is. We've always seen this as a cross between something like Outrun and the characteristics we've introduced into it - we've got air and water racing and they've got to be just as developed. We started off with a simple mechanic where you press a button and you can drift around any corner, but we've added a bit more depth in there - you know, we've got run-off surfaces, so if you see ice up ahead you might want to come off the gas a little bit as you come to a corner. It's not ever going to be a game about braking distances and things like that but it is nice that there's a bit more depth because it gives you something to get your teeth into.

You've got vehicle upgrades in Transformed, which is novel for a kart racer - it sounds like a callback to your previous projects. How do they work?

Wilson: Well it's not a huge thing. What we've got is that the characters, once you unlock them, you level them up and as you do you unlock vehicle mods. What they do is change the stats of the vehicle itself. So you can add a handling mod to Eggman and that will increase his handling but decrease his top speed, or you can add an all-star mod and that makes his all-star last longer at the cost of another stat. The characters still remain in their archetype, but you can nudge them around using these mods.

Lycett: It's there for two reasons really. One is to give the players something to find and collect, and modify the cars to match the way they play. But it's also there for reasons like the fact that we can only have one of each character. If you're in an online game and you like to play in a particular way, you can nudge a character to match a character that you like if that one's not available. It's all about choice, really.