Black Rock Studio, a long-term developer of racers, believes it has made the ultimate racing game for action movie fans. Split/Second: Velocity (SSV) was born when a team there decided they wanted to make something a bit different. Owned by Disney Interactive Studios, which has ties to Jerry Bruckheimer (producer of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean and Gone in 60 Seconds) and massive film companies like Pixar, they sat and thought ‘why don’t we create a Hollywood-style racing game?’ Taking a lot of influence from blockbuster action movies, they wanted the game to be over the top, packed with visual effects and crazy explosions - basically something like Michael Bay, the producer of the Transformers movies, would make.

But what a job - their research was to sit down and watch over 50 action movies from Transformers and Batman through to Bad Boys and Terminator. Tough break eh? From there they worked out what they wanted to see in the game - those iconic action moments where you sit back and go ‘Wow!’ when you see a scene for the first time.

To create a game of this scale isn’t easy however. When the team started working on it, there wasn’t the software available to create all they wanted to achieve, so they had to build a lot of their development tools from scratch.

For example, the game has ‘Power Play’ scenes that involve lots of spectacular explosions and to create these they built a new animation timeline for the level designers to use.

‘As you play out an animation, you’ve got different effects going off in different areas. This timeline allows artists to be more flexible in how they work,’ explains Jason Ried, the game’s producer. ‘They can run an animation, see how the lighting gets affected, and then add little effects to add volume, more impact…depending on what angle it’s approaching, an explosion at the back might look a lot better.

‘This timeline was a big thing for us because it would allow us to stop and then add anything we wanted to happen. You can break down an explosion to see if it looks right, and edit it accordingly, so we could check what we were doing whenever we wanted.’ ...