BOY RACER

How a childhood movie memory brought DRIVER into being

- Jeremy Peel

If you’re still seething over Driver’s infamous car park level, you might well blame series creator Martin Edmondson. But the real culprit is the film that planted the idea in his head some two decades earlier. The Driver (1978) was a crime chase thriller in which a wheelman proved himself by flinging an orange Mercedes between the pillars of an underground garage. It’s all there: the handbrake turns, the speed test, the reverse 180 – even the slalom that would-be drivers found so tricky to master.

“It was actually the first film I ever went to the cinema to see,” Edmondson explains. “My dad had to go first just to check it wasn’t too violent.”

The level’s difficulty, however, is all thanks to Edmondson. “I could do that garage in just under 25 seconds,” he says. “So to me, giving you 60 seconds was plenty of time. Well, it wasn’t. If I went back and played it now I probably couldn’t do it.”

Those who did manage to get past the garage opener were treated to more ’70s car-noir. Like The Driver’s protagonist, your player character seldom spoke, and only ever saw the four walls of his motel room after hours. Tanner lived the empty life of the criminal professional, as exemplified by Robert De Niro in Heat (it’s no coincidence that Michael Mann initially offered Heat’s script to The Driver’s writer-director, Walter Hill). Driver belongs to the same lineage – or would do, if not for interference from the game’s original publisher, Sony.