IbizaPocholo
NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

Inside the Driver game that died so that Watch Dogs could live
News, reviews and opinions on the biggest video games.

The story of Driver’s transformation into Watch Dogs, and the consequent rise of one new Ubisoft franchise while an old favourite has languished, takes place a long time ago – ten years to be exact. Recollections are hazy, and one source contacted by VG247 initially said Watch Dogs’ link to Driver was an urban myth. But look closely and you’ll see the tyre marks: the telltale signs that show us how one bestselling series was supplanted by another.
When contacted for this piece, Ubisoft declined to comment. But the company’s North American president Laurent Detoc gave an interview to IGN in 2013, in which he revealed that the studio behind Watch Dogs was originally building a different game. “They were working on a driving engine, we had the Driver license,” he said. “At some point it changed. That’s at least three years ago, and then the Watch Dogs project reused some of the work that had been done on this driving engine.”
The way Detoc tells it, the game was initially wholly focused on driving, until a team reshuffle led to a new creative director and a project reboot. The result was an open-world game in which much of the action took place on foot.
“I wouldn’t say that Driver became Watch Dogs, because that’s not true,” he added. “That’s not really what happens. What happens is that a game gets cancelled, and then you take pieces of that game to make a new one.”
The story VG247 has uncovered is slightly different, however. Speaking to three sources – one working at Ubisoft, the second a former senior Ubisoft employee, and the third Driver’s original creator, Martin Edmondson – a picture has emerged of a game that gradually and organically grew beyond the bounds of the Driver license, birthing the Watch Dogs series we know today.
Check the link for more.