Interviews// John Doyle: Need For Speed ProStreet

SPOnG: EA Trax is a pride of many games such as the Need For Speed series. Is there any information to the soundtrack in ProStreet at all?

John Doyle: Well, we’re certainly going to have one this year. We’re in the middle of signing a lot of the artists to that right now. We’ve also got some composed work coming too, which sound great as well. But in general we’ve taken a number of different music styles this year and focused different genres of music to particular game modes. So, you would hear what you would expect playing a drag race in America but that would sound altogether different to playing a speed race somewhere in Tokyo.


SPOnG: Do you have any names lined up at all for the tracks?

John Doyle: Nothing I can talk about yet (smiles). I think it’ll all come soon though.


SPOnG: Ah, I see. So, it doesn’t look like the police are involved. They’ve been a staple of past Need For Speed games; will they be involved in ProStreet at all? Might we see some events that go horribly wrong and the police will end up having to chase you or something?

John Doyle: (Laughs) Well, we’ve used the police in the past couple of games to provide consequence. You know, if you mess around with them too much in Most Wanted they’re going to chase you, and that’s quite fun. If you push them too far you get ‘Busted’, and if you get Busted too many times you lose your car. They’re kind of the ‘teeth’ of the game. This year we made damage that ‘teeth’.

We wanted to keep the cars on closed tracks and in street locations but we did not put in traffic. We did not put in cops this year, so the goal is really about that racing performance and not so much on the police. But I don’t think you’ve seen the last of the police in the Need For Speed games.


SPOnG: Electronic Arts has caught some flak over the years for being a studio with not a lot of originality in its projects. With games like Need For Speed ProStreet coming out though it tells a different story. What kinds of things inspire you and how hard is it to strive for originality in your projects?

John Doyle: Need For Speed is a challenging series for that because we do have a game that’s been out every year for the last several years, and it’s a challenge all the time to come up with a fresh, new and original idea. What we’ve done is that we have two teams running at the same time, so you have a team that’s planning what the next game in the series is going to be while there’s another team building the current year’s release. There was a team building Carbon and getting that ready and there was another team of senior engineers, artists, producers and designers working on what became ProStreet. We try and work in two-year cycles and still get a new product released every year.

So, that’s one of the ways we try to drive creativity, by giving ourselves a lot more time to be creative. And I think for ProStreet we probably had five or six concept ideas that we threw out before we settled on this one, based on our research and all of the design work that we had done.