METROPOLIS STREET RACER

BIZARRE CREATIONS' RACING GAME LAUNCHED IN THE YEAR 2000 WITH A SOUNDTRACK OF FLAVOURFUL RADIO STATIONS, ROARING ENGINES AND PHENOMENAL MUSIC. WE TALK WITH COMPOSER RICHARD JACQUES ABOUT HOW HE BROUGHT THE SOUNDS OF THE CITY TO LIFE

- WORDS BY JAMES TOCCHIO

Much could be written about the many ways that Metropolis Street Racer innovated the well-travelled roads of the racing genre. Its Kudos System tied progression as much to how stylishly you drove as it did to rankings and lap times. Its photo-realistic texture-mapping of real-world city streets predated Google Street View by seven years. Its dynamic day/night cycle worked with the Dreamcast's internal clock so that races in any of the game's three real-world cities would take place at the actual time in those cities.

The sum of these (and many other) new design ideas imbued MSR with a feeling that's rarely felt in a racing game: that its streets were alive. This sense of life was also baked into the game's incredible soundtrack. Each of MSR's three cities, London, San Francisco and Tokyo, featured unique radio stations populated by local DJs, real-life radio advertisements and a selection of region-specific songs which beautifully matched the vibe of each locale.

MSR's soundtrack wasn't just music. It was world-building through audio. recalls Richard Jacques, MSR's composer. “They said they'd just signed this new game with Bizarre Creations, an exclusive being made for Sega Europe, so I knew that I had to do all the music, sound design, including the car sounds, all the dialogue, DJ scripts, basically anything you hear in that game. It was a huge amount of work.”

As it turns out, Rockstar's GTA sequel started off as an early starting point for MSR's