"Checking traffic" and the Traffic Attack game mode added something new to Burnout Revenge—beating up the innocent bystander vehicles as well as the rival racers. But where did the idea come from? We asked Iain, Matt and Hamish for the details.

So tell us about Traffic Attack. How did it come about?

Iain: We originally called the feature Rush Hour Revenge…It was about getting your revenge against rush hour traffic.

Matt: It was always that thing you wanted to do. You're stuck in traffic. Don't you wish you could just stomp on the gas and plough your way through all those slow-pokes…It also came from that question of "Why can't I hit traffic?"

Hamish: We looked back at Burnout 3 from a player's point of view, where if I hit you, I take you down, and that's a Takedown. But if I hit a traffic car it's a crash. We were looking at some way of being able to use the traffic in Takedowns a bit more.

What's interesting about Traffic Attack is that probably not since Crash mode in Burnout 2 would we come up with a mode that influenced so many areas of the game and turned out to be to be more controversial.

How did it start, exactly?

Hamish: It was February 2005, when the first pass of game design was like Crash mode except instead of crashing, you weren't crashing. You were just doing traffic checks and you got the same scores.

Iain: The thing we'd decided earlier that week is that the score gave you time. In order to keep going you had to keep scoring. And you got more money if you made the second lap.

Matt: We had been watching a bunch of crash reference. We had that "Bad Boys moment", watching the chase scene in Bad Boys 2. We had just got some proper physics into the game and we wondered "What would happen if I was hitting traffic? What might it look like?" That sort of behavior came in first.

Hamish: The first version we tried it on was an early Eternal City track, where you had an indoor section and massive jump. We changed it since then because it was too much like San Francisco Rush. Although a lot of people reading this will probably think that would be a really good thing, it was really silly so we changed it—as we always do.

Matt: The thing that I remember was, there was a buzz going around the office one Friday night: "go play this, go try this". Someone had something hot. We got the framework in, we had an early version of the timer, and suddenly someone said, "Go get a whiteboard." We needed to put some scores down.

That's when we knew we had something because suddenly people were tracking scores. We were all playing it. There was a crowd of people around Iain's dev kit, and it was, "Right, it's my go, I can beat that score."

Hamish: We all went across the street to the pub to kill time while they rebuilt the game, and then came right back to see who could be the first to get past a million.

Iain: I think we learned a lot from that early version; it only really worked on that Eternal City track, because the traffic suited it. There were some gaps in Eternal City where there's no traffic, gave it a bit of pacing. It didn't work so well in some of the other tracks. We knew that to make it into a whole game mode we'd have to still do better work.

Matt: Then we thought, "Ahh, hold on a minute, hitting the cars is slowing me down. The gaps in the traffic are when I'm hitting the boost to close the gaps, because I'm against the clock. There's nothing like a ticking clock to keep the tension.

Iain: So it wasn't just checking traffic; it was also driving quickly when there wasn't any traffic. And obviously crashes.

Matt: Also, it's not just the same-way traffic that's important, it's how do I attack the traffic on the other side of the road? Because obviously I can't hit them, right?

Is that where the name came from?

Matt: The name changed once we realized that the only people we want revenge on are these guys taking you down—the focus of Revenge went on to the rivals. The term "checking" comes from Ice Hockey. We always pull our references from sports and use fighting metaphors.

So what's the big misconception about Traffic Attack?

Hamish: The big thing about Traffic Attack is that it's still misunderstood by a lot of people. At the start of the game, the first Traffic Attack experience you have is not necessarily representative of what the whole thing is and I know for a fact that there are some people who've not played Revenge at all because they've played Traffic Attack and said, "What have they done? They've changed it. That's rubbish. Burnout 3 or Burnout 2 is better. Having to avoid the cars is more exciting."

I think people played the first one on Sunshine Keys, which was very deliberately designed so that, we could really go to town with it, minimize the oncoming, just put as many cars in there that we could. It was like, this is new for Burnout, it's going to be fun and over the top because that's what Burnout is.

But I think people didn't understand how strategic it got later on, and how that helped us push traffic setup on the courses anyway, and I think it's only when you get to Traffic Attack on White Mountain or Angel Valley, you see that to run multiple laps you have to be smart.

Looking back, do you think having Traffic Attack at the start of the game was the right choice?

Matt: I think it needed to be there. It was really important that this mode was first in the game. It was telling players that this is a new capability in Burnout, and a new event. We always bring something new in, so let's put it front and center.

Iain: The first one was so easy because it was so different. It was to teach people about a new feature in the game.

Very often when people play Traffic Attack for the first time they instinctively weave around the cars and not touch them, and dodge them, like when you play Burnout 3, so it was kind of a change of mindset to play the game in a totally different way.

Hamish: I think one of the other things people don't understand about us is that we're never interested in making the same game twice. We thought traffic checking changes it, it's more fun. It's more fun when you get taken down, it was more fun to be able to ping cars across the road.

I was playing Revenge again recently on 360 to get the gamer score, and the Traffic Attack achievements were the best ones. It was probably more fun than Road Rage and I didn't think I'd ever say that because I love Road Rage so much, but Traffic Attack is cool.

Did it impact Crash Mode?

Matt: It impacted all the modes, really. It changed racing in that I could score Traffic Check Takedowns. In Road Rage, you got to use Traffic Check Takedowns in order to score the targets. And Crash Mode, now you were able to use the traffic setups to be able to crash into areas you wouldn't otherwise have been able to...

Iain: ...and create much larger crashes over a wider area of the track. Before, in Burnout 3, you could only crash your car once but with traffic checking you could cause several crashes on your way to your big crash. It was a design challenge in a way—to keep Traffic Attack and Crash Mode separate.

Matt:There are certainly a lot of Crash junctions where you have to check traffic to collect all those vehicles and score the biggest wreck. You can start with a few traffic checks to block roads near the start, then pile into the main junction and join up all the crashes with a crashbreaker.

So I assume you guys are the masters of Traffic Attack then.

Hamish: I don't think I've ever done more than 4 or 5 laps.

Matt: People must be doing 8 or 9, easily.

Hamish: Well we've always got really hardcore elite players on Burnout. We have a really hardcore fanbase but people tend to go nuts and get really into it. And Burnout's always had pinball scoring, big scores, that's one of the fun things about it.

But yeah, I think one of the reasons for talking about this is that I don't think a lot of people really understand - skillshot, trickshot - how they work, how we set it up, how we thin traffic out, to make it more strategic.

Matt: I remember when we were doing traffic setups and we realized that there was that level of strategy, because obviously I can't check big vehicles but it's great to see those wreck, so why can't I check a traffic car into those things and get scores from them? The logical extension of that is why can't I check traffic into oncoming and score a wreck over there as well? That's where the trick shot and skill shot come in, and then it becomes all about the traffic setups themselves.

Iain: In the later Traffic Attack events in Revenge it becomes absolutely crucial that you use those things. It's the only way you can score.

And you double the scores on the laps, right?

Hamish: It's just a multiplier. It goes back, you know—double money, triple money. It's just a fun way of scoring so you can see a clear difference in someone that can make it last and make multiple laps rather than getting fluke scores by hitting buses and lorries. It goes back to Family Fortunes (or Family Feud as it's called in America) where they'd play for double money in the second half of the show, after the ad break, if you remember the Les Dennis years, you'd come back and play for double money, for "big money". It was a game show mentality, game show scoring.

Matt: It ups the ante, you've got the ticking clock, you get to the lap and suddenly you're making double score. It's amazing when I think back on how explicitly designed those traffic setups actually were. We had all the "herbivore" set-ups where there was lots of oncoming traffic, but it was small traffic so you'd have to check a lot of it. Then there was the "carnivore" set-ups where there weren't so many checkable vehicles... so I'd have to go for trick shots with the big oncoming vehicles. There were only a few opportunities...

Carnivores??

Matt: That was Hamish, using his Discovery Channel metaphors. A herbivore eats a lot, so to get a big score you have to graze on a lot of same-way, but a carnivore eats something big once a day...

Iain: See, I thought the real low point of this interview was the Family Fortunes reference but now we're talking about The Discovery Channel, herbivores and carnivores....

Matt: Just goes to prove that there are influences from everywhere in Burnout!

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