Rush The Stage

How the DriveClub developers have redefined the arcade racer in record time.

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We didn’t think this was supposed to happen anymore. It is barely 18 months since Codemasters announced it had given a new home to the team that made DriveClub at Evolution Studios, which had been shut down by parent company Sony. In just a year-and-a-half, this team has devised a new game concept, built a new engine to power it, and announced it on Sony’s stage at Paris Games Week. And not only that. Onrush was up, running and playable internally at Codemasters within just three months. “It’s about working smartly, more than anything else,” game director Paul Rustchynsky tells us. “We learned a lot from previous projects about how to do things in a much better way – especially when we were working on a service on DriveClub, having to deliver features and content on a monthly basis. Having to adapt to that sort of schedule heavily influenced how we do things now. It’s been a whirlwind: 18 months is a short period of time to do what we’ve done, but we’ve only been able to do that because we’re not building a new team. We’ve got the knowledge, we understand each other, and we already had all these processes in place. We’ve got some of the most skilled racing-game devs in the UK, if not the world.”