W hile most classic driving games would make players participate in races, stunts, or demolition derbies, Driver has players do things like helping crooks flee the scene of a bank robbery or delivering a stolen car to a chop shop.
In Driver and Driver 2, you play as John Tanner; a former race-car driver turned undercover cop who has pitched himself to the thugs of the underworld as a reliable deliveryman and an unfailing getaway driver. Under orders from a lieuten- ant trying to break up a crime syndicate, Tanner heads to Miami and begins the case without his badge or any back-up.
The first game in the series was released for the original PlayStation in 1999 and followed by its first sequel in 2000. They were developed by British studio Reflections Interactive, now known as Ubisoft Reflections. In the late 80s and early 90s, Reflections made titles like Ballistix and the Shadow of the Beast trilogy for Atari ST and Amiga home computers.
By the time Reflections started working on Driver, they had already created vehicle-based games like Destruction Derby, Destruction Derby 2, and Thunder Truck Rally, all for the PlayStation. They had also been acquired by another company called GT Interactive, hence the change in name to Reflections Interactive.
Destruction Derby ’s 1995 release kicked off a sixteen-year period where Reflections worked primarily (if not strictly) on vehicle-based games. It was clear that the programming team had a knack for driving games.
When you begin the first Driver, the game starts off with a tricky tutorial that you must overcome before you can actually start playing the story missions.
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Conor was hooked on gaming as soon as someone handed him a Game Boy and a copy of Tetris in the mid-90s. His first console game was Donkey Kong Country for SNES, which made him a devout Donkey Kong fan. He has taken his hobby with him everywhere he's gone, from his home state of Illinois to Florida, from the University of Iowa to Upstate New York. While in college, Conor wrote game reviews for The Daily Iowan. Much more recently, he started writing Game Grappler--a blog where he wrestles with assorted gaming topics, including the preservation of video games, odd characters, and game analysis.
