Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other’s work. This entry was contributed by Mladen Bošnjak, creative director at Misfit Village, currently working on their SCP based thriller Go Home Annie for PC and Consoles.
As was the case with many households in Croatia, by 2005 we had a PlayStation 2 sitting under our CRT TV. I knew GameCube and Xbox were a thing, I’d just never seen one of them in person or in stores. For us, only PC and PlayStation existed.
Piracy was so rampant in those days that PS2 consoles came with a modchip pre-installed directly from electronics stores that were officially licensed to sell the console. I’m still curious if Sony was aware of these illicit practices.
I’d like to say that Burnout 3: Takedown’s cover captivated my 12-year-old imagination with its sports car narrowly escaping a big ol’ explosion front and center. Having played many a Need For Speed game beforehand, the EA Games logo on the bottom would have further convinced me I needed to play this.
This game knows what it is. You will be driving cars. Fast. You will also be crashing cars. A lot.
But the truth is my first encounter with Burnout 3: Takedown was a jewel case with a blank, white cover and a burned DVD inside, with “Burnout 3” handwritten on it in black marker.
As I was already making mods and small games by that time, and knew that actual people made these things, I had an ever-so-slight feeling of guilt when spinning up this pirate treasure. The choice was to either not play the game, or to play it pirated. And that’s not much of a choice when you’re a kid and don’t know better.
With its pre-rendered (but using in-game assets) intro with cars racing and crashing to early 2000s punk, Burnout 3 quickly and firmly establishes the tone for the rest of the experience. This game knows what it is. You will be driving cars. Fast. You will also be crashing cars. A lot.
The main way in which Burnout differentiates itself from other racing games is that, in addition to aiming to finish first, you’ll also want to wreck your opponents by ramming them into oncoming traffic, guardrails, walls, and so on because that expands your boost meter, giving you an edge over your rivals.
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Taking down an opponent results in the camera focusing on their wreck for a few seconds, with time slowing down and sparks, tires and bits of metal flying freely all around. It’s a glorious visual feast and a big technical achievement when taking into account the PS2’s rendering capabilities.
My favorite feature in the game is the Aftertouch, which allows you to slow down time after crashing your car and gives you a chance to try and maneuver your wreck into your opponents, causing them to crash in turn.
This gave me the feeling of freedom in an unconventional way. Most game developers would have set up an invisible collider to stop your freeflying wreck from reaching a far-off mountain that barely has a texture on it, but not Burnout 3. In fact, one of my favorite activities in the game was seeing how far away from the intended racing environment I could go. Turns out you can get pretty far indeed.
Crash Mode is a different beast entirely, where your main objective is to drive like a madman into an intersection full of traffic and cause as much mayhem as possible. From that description, you’d think it’s a mindless, chaotic mode made to show off big explosions but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s actually a trial-and-error puzzle game in disguise. Crashing your car into exactly the right taxi at just the right angle so that a giant fuel truck crashes into it shortly thereafter is no easy feat. And the sense of accomplishment after setting up a perfect catastrophe is unforgettable.
Brilliantly designed tracks with large vistas, a bunch of detailed cars, particles flying off every which way, the sun’s reflection glinting in the incoming traffic’s windshields. And all at 60 frames per second.
All these fun gameplay systems work impeccably on the skillfully realized environments of the various tracks. Throw in the awesome soundtrack and the cringey DJ interrupting it, and you get one of the best games ever made. Whenever I hear The Ramones’ ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’, I get flashbacks of sports cars crashing into each other in beautiful, sunny weather.
Trying to 100% the game becomes quite a chore at the last 5%, what with having to drive a Formula 1 car down icy roads full of traffic (it’s as hard as it sounds). But I persevered. My obsession with the game even spilled over into real life (no, I didn’t try to crash my parents’ car) as I tried to remake the trophies you get for achieving a certain number of takedowns using my toy cars, mom’s mugs and some gold spray.
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The sequels that followed Takedown experimented with the core formula a bit, but couldn’t recapture the essence that made the third entry so great. Burnout Revenge caught the ‘brown and gritty’ bug of the mid-to-late 2000s – gone were the blue skies and sunshine. Burnout Dominator’s tracks just weren’t as fun and it felt like a rushed effort all around. I can’t help but feel both of these installments were more like reskins than full on sequels.
Burnout Paradise came out when everything had to be to be open world, so of course Burnout went open world. It’s a great game in its own right, but for my money it can’t hold a candle to Takedown. For me, a handmade track, with every corner, prop and vista carefully and deliberately designed and placed, beats a giant open world any day of the week.
Remastering Burnout 3 wouldn’t require any major changes to the game except running it at 8x the original resolution
What made all this technical wizardry in Burnout 3 possible was Criterion’s RenderWare suite of software. If you played games in the early 2000s, chances are you played a game created using Criterion’s technology. All the games I played that used RenderWare looked exceptional: Darkwatch, Killer7, THPS 4 and of course GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, to name but a few. But when Criterion used it themselves, that’s when it outshone most everything on my PS2.
Running Burnout 3 or Black through an emulator at 4K proves my point. Running most other older games at a higher resolution usually reveals muddy textures and blocky meshes, but in Burnout 3 it just accentuates the game’s timeless, sharp graphical presentation. Brilliantly designed tracks with large vistas, a bunch of detailed cars on the track at the same time, particles flying off every which way, the sun’s reflection glinting in the incoming traffic’s windshields. And all at 60 frames per second.
If it weren’t for complicated song licensing issues, remastering Burnout 3 wouldn’t require any major changes to the game except running it at 8x the original resolution – so, EA, please help me get rid of my adolescent piracy guilt and get to work on that remaster. I’m sure there’s a lot more of us that would be happy to actually buy the game this time.
Burnout 3 was the perfect game for its time. Playing it now, twenty years later, the game works like a time machine, transporting me back to the carefree mid 2000s, a time when racing games were at their peak and Burnout 3 was at the very top.