MSR Alpha Gameplay Footage

A few posts ago we looked at the newly-discovered alpha version of Bizarre Creations' exemplary Dreamcast driving sim Metropolis Street Racer. James, the owner of the GD kindly sent me some gameplay footage of this November 1999 alpha which he recorded from his TV, and so I set about creating a little video showing some of the more interesting aspects.

Below you will find the fruits of our combined efforts, and the video highlights some interesting things from this early version of MSR that are missing from the final build. For instance, the 'lens flare' effect from the vehicle brake lights and the real-world shop front textures. Other things such as the audio placeholders, the real-life recordings of actual radio stations (complete with traffic updates for the M4 and British Telecom adverts) and a very early recording of Live Your Life as sung by Richard Jaques in what sounds like a broom cupboard. Anyway, enjoy the video.

MSR Playable Alpha Discovered

I remember the first time I ever saw a screen of Metropolis Street Racer in a magazine. It was a tiny little image that showed a couple of sports cars blasting through a Tokyo bus station, and what really excited me was that a game featuring real-world locations was coming to the Dreamcast. As we all know, MSR isn't one of those fabled games that was teased but never released - it went on to be one of the Dreamcast's most championed racers, and even spawned a host of semi-sequels on the Xbox and Xbox 360 in the form of the Project Gotham series.

Buses are behind barriers in the final game

But lets go back to that early image I mentioned (see above). Looking at it now, it's clear that MSR underwent some drastic redesigns before it became the game we know and love today and it'd probably be fairly safe to assume that the early alpha version had been lost to the mists of time, or at the very least rotting on an old Bizarre Creations dev kit in a rubbish tip somewhere. However, we're very happy - and slightly shocked - to report that this isn't the case.