A Strange Bizarre Creations CD Appears...

We've covered Metropolis Street Racer with alarming regularity in the recent past, looking at some cool locations and trackside details you may have missed; the mystery of the hidden missing persons posters and finally the treasure trove of development images and press releases we were sent by a mysterious benefactor. If you've never heard of MSR, it's a racing game set in three cities around the world and spawned the seminal Xbox series Project Gotham Racing. Also, what are you doing here if you've never heard of MSR? Go and play it!

Anyway, said mysterious benefactor has once again bequeathed The Dreamcast Junkyard with a fairly esoteric item related - we think - in some way to Metropolis Street Racer, and here it is:

As you can see, it's a CD case. The cover shows a bunch of car keys with a Dreamcast logo on the keyring, and the date '30.03.99,' which equates to the 30th March 1999 by UK date standards. Or any standard come to think of it, there only being 12 months and all.

The spine of the case has a sticker with 'Invitation Cover 9.3.99' written in biro (bit of an inconsistency there, Columbo fans):

The CD-R itself has 'Invitation Cover 9/3/99 Bizarre Creations Confidential' written on it in marker:

The back of the case is empty so there's no other detail as to how or why this thing exists, and delving into the contents of the CD itself, there aren't really any other clues to work with:

There are Quark Xpress, PhotoShop and TIFF files, along with a TrueType font file; and the image files are basically just the image from the font cover - a bunch of car keys and the date 30.09.1999 (well, the PSD file does - the TIFF is free of a date). Note: I can't open the Quark Xpress file because the last known person to use Quark Xpress vanished up his own backside 9 years ago and has never been seen since.

Quite what this date means and what the 'invitation' is for, I'm not totally sure but cross referencing this date with the MSR development diary we published a while back could shed some light. See, the penultimate entry in the dev diary is from 29th January 1999, and this passage references an upcoming demonstration of MSR to some 'Sega VIPs':

"Last week was the week of the big telly. We have to demo the game to some Sega VIPs next week, and showing it on a little 15" monitor or a 14" portable TV wasn't really showing it at its full potential. So we went out and got a HUGE 29" TV, which really makes it look cool! Matt (the Lead Coder) has it weighing down his desk and giving him eyestrain at the moment!"

The dates don't line up perfectly, but there in the same ball park so I'm guessing that the artwork on the CD-R, plus the use of the word 'invitation' has something to do with the previewing of MSR to various Sega bigwigs.

So, not the most Earth-shattering of items and nothing as exciting as the confidential press disk (from which the image above is from - see here), but I'm sure you'll agree that it is pretty interesting to see something like this which was never intended for public consumption. Thanks go once again to the nameless benefactor supplying us with all these goodies!

Related articles:

• The Bugs Of MSR
• The MSR Development Diaries
• Some Interesting MSR Details You May Have Missed
• The Great MSR Missing Persons Poster Hunt
• MSR Playable Alpha Discovered

A Metropolis Street Racer Treasure Trove

OK, this is the third Metropolis Street Racer related article I've posted here in the space of a fortnight, but this time I think you'll thank me for it, rather than shake your head in disgust before falling to your knees and screaming at the sky as dark, ominous thunder clouds gather and threaten to unleash a maelstrom of biblical proportions. After the preceding articles about some of the more interesting track side details to be found in Bizarre Creations' epic racer; and the follow up article detailing the hidden 'missing persons' posters dotted around the San Francisco and Tokyo circuits, comes this third instalment in which I will showcase some images and documents I'm pretty confident have never previously been published online.

A few days ago, I was contacted by somebody on Twitter (a person who wishes to remain anonymous) who asked if I was interested in a Dreamcast-related disc. Naturally I was, and a few days later the disc turned up in the post with no letter and no return address. Very strange, I'm sure you'll agree. Being the kind of person who risks infecting his computer with malware first and asking questions later, I threw the disc into my drive and explored the shit out of it with wanton abandon. I was met with things, most wondrous things...but mainly a treasure trove of Metropolis Street Racer screenshots, artwork, logos, shots of the game's wire frame models and development screens, as well as some press releases and a developer interview.

Personally, I have never seen a disc that looks like this before. I've seen all manner of GDs and prototype discs in my time, but never one of these blue and white Sega Europe branded 'confidential material' discs. That said, I do know that several collectors in the community have these, and their contents vary wildly, and some even contain the Dreamcast SDK on them.

There's over 250MB of stuff on the disc, and for something produced in 2000 that's pretty hefty. On closer inspection, it appears to be the type of high quality, pressed CD-R that would be sent to magazines of the era or other media outlets, and the documentation included reinforces this theory. However, for the preservation of your sanity's sake I'll only be reproducing some of the most interesting stuff here, so the main developer interview and some of the previously unseen wire frame/development screens and hi-res computer generated artwork. If you really want to see the press releases etc., then let me know in the comments.

Are you ready? OK - let's kick things off with some nice shots of the 'behind the scenes' stuff...

Some Metropolis Street Racer Details You May Have Missed

Yes, I'm writing another post about Metropolis Street Racer. I simply refuse to apologise for it, and that's because this is a game I adore. The world of MSR just feels so tangible, so credible and so authentic, and not least because Bizarre Creations spent hundreds of hours accurately modelling the three cities in which the vehicular challenges and races take place. However, there's a little bit more to the sterile, simulated reality of Metropolis Street Racer than first meets the eye.

While London's Horse Guard Parade and San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf may look very close to the real thing as you whizz around in your sports car, if you stop to take a closer look you'll discover some rather interesting - and sometimes suprising - extra details that you may have otherwise missed.

With this in mind, let's buckle up and go for a little joy ride, and investigate some of the finer details you may have overlooked scattered throughout the world of Metropolis Street Racer...

Metropolis Street Racer: The Development Diaries

I do occasionally find myself browsing old websites via the Wayback Machine, and they usually tend to be websites linked in some way to the Dreamcast. Whenever I flick through the manual of an old game and spot a URL, I have an urge to just go and have a look at the contemporary online presence the developer or publisher had. I know I've waffled on about my affection for the Wayback Machine on multiple occasions but there's just something so fascinating about trawling the long forgotten sites of old, sites that date from before the internet was as ubiquitous as it is today. I mean, even fridges and dishwashers can connect to the internet these days, but back in the early 2000s just getting online was an arduous process - even if you had a Dreamcast. 

Anyway, due to my insatiable thirst for the widely forgotten, I found myself looking at the Bizarre Creations website when I noticed a tab for a development diary. Weirdly, it is now only accessible by using the 'console friendly' (read: Dreamcast compatible) version of the site, but upon clicking it I was met with a fascinating insight into the development process of one of my favourite Dreamcast games. Here, buried in time being read by precisely nobody was a glimpse into the past. Anecdotes about nights out on the town with other Dreamcast developers of the era, office politics and even some fascinating tales of pranks played in the MSR engine by the programmers (I'd kill to see the 'MSR with rabbits' that's referred to!). I had never read any of this before, and I thought it was worth preserving and sharing with like minded fans of Metropolis Street Racer. 

Naturally, what makes this even more poignant is that Bizarre Creations, even after the critical and commercial success of later titles such as Project Gotham, no longer exists. So, read on and get ready to be whisked back to 1998 and the inner sanctum of Bizarre Creations' Liverpool offices...

A Tale of Two Cities

Many of the Dreamcast's finest titles lived on after the console's untimely death. Either through being ported to other systems, or having whole new series spawn. The Soul Calibur series, while not really a Dreamcast exclusive as it's roots are on the PlayStation, has gone on to have great success on subsequent hardware generations. Likewise with Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis and a whole load of others. It's true that Shenmue still hasn't been granted the final part of it's intended trilogy...but that's a whole different kettle of fish. The point I'm trying to make here, is that the Dreamcast wasn't just a great machine for all the reasons we've been banging on about for the last (almost) decade here at the 'Yard - it was also a springboard for some of the finest games on today's more contemporary systems.

So now the threadbare segue has been reached and jumped like some rickety stile, let's get down to business: Project Gotham Racing is an absolute beast of a racing series on the Xbox and Xbox 360, and was/is a complete masterpiece. The final PGR game in the saga (PGR4) is one of my favourite games ever. Not just favourite racing games - I mean of any genre. It has looks to die for (I'm yet to see a PS4 racing game that looks as good as PGR4, by the way. Drive Club - I'm looking at you) and the car handling is sublime. Tracks are innumerable, the challenge is immense...and above all, the game is super fun. That said, the previous games were also of exceptional pedigree - PGRs 1-3 are all fantastic racing games too. But before this turns into an Xbox love-in, let's go back to the origins of the series - the Dreamcast's magnificent Metropolis Street Racer. At this juncture, I have a confession to make. While I was thinking about writing this post, it suddenly dawned on me that Project Gotham Racing is so-called as it is a reference to the fictional city in which the caped crusader punches creeps' faces in. How did I come to this realisation? Metropolis Street Racer. Project Gotham Racing. PGR's name is a subtle nod to the city of Metropolis (aka Superman's 'hood)! Yes - it's taken me the best part of 15 years for that in-joke to filter down into the inner-reaches of my brain and initiate 'Eureka Mode.'