Not LittleBigPlanet. Not GTA. When I think PlayStation 3, I think MotorStorm — and I don't think it gets anything like enough recognition. It's one of my absolute favourite racing games on the console, and one of my favourite racing games full stop. Nearly twenty years on, I still play it regularly, and it still looks stunning.
It helps to remember what else was going on when it turned up, though, because MotorStorm was never just a racing game. It was Sony's homework.
Sony turned up four months late with a paving slab
Here in the UK we had to wait until 23 March 2007 for the PS3 — Japan had it the previous November — and it arrived at £425. In 2007. For a games console. Worse, that was the only option: Sony shipped just the 60GB machine here at launch, while mainland Europe paid €599, something like £390 at the time. We got the thickest end of the wedge and a lecture about VAT. Meanwhile you could buy an Xbox 360 for considerably less, the Wii was flying off the shelves, and Sony rocked up late carrying something the size of a paving slab saying "yeah, but look how powerful it is, guys." Games like MotorStorm had a lot of work to do.
It was developed by Evolution Studios, the British team behind the World Rally Championship games on the PS2, and Sony pushed it hard as proof of what its ridiculously expensive new box could do. We'd already had a glimpse at E3 in 2005, and I remember that footage blowing my mind — mud flying everywhere, vehicles smashing into each other, bits of cars all over the place. It genuinely looked like the future. There was just the small matter of actually making the game look like that, as is often the way. No, the finished thing didn't match that infamous early footage. But what we did get was still seriously impressive for 2007, and it did exactly the job Sony needed it to do at a UK launch that badly needed a win.
Sensible racing, in a bin, with a big rig over the top
The big idea was to take sensible racing, put it in a bin, and drive straight over it. You're out in Monument Valley, off-road, at some enormous festival, and rather than everyone turning up in roughly equivalent cars you've got seven classes sharing the same track: bikes, ATVs, buggies, rally cars, racing trucks, mud pluggers and big rigs. Completely fair, obviously.
The clever bit is that the tracks have different routes through them and your vehicle choice really matters. A bike can nip through gaps and take the higher, tighter lines; a big rig ploughs through the mud and, more importantly, ploughs through you. So you're constantly hunting for the bit of track that suits what you're driving — and then somebody lands on your head and you're sailing through the air with some lovely ragdoll physics anyway.
MotorStorm has absolutely zero interest in encouraging careful driving.
The crashes were a massive part of the appeal. Vehicles crumple, bits fly off, drivers go flying. You can hold the boost until your engine overheats and explodes spectacularly, which is pretty much always what I do, especially if I've not played for a while and I forget. My favourite trick is timing it so I explode just before the line and sail over anyway.
What still impresses me
It's the small stuff. The terrain deforms — cars leave tracks in the mud, deeper ones in the really wet stuff, and it persists so you see it again next lap. Mud splatters your visor and blurs your view. Your bike gets filthier and filthier as the race goes on. Plenty of people point to PS1-to-PS2 as the last really big generational leap; I'd argue it's PS2-to-PS3, because this is the generation that brought us high definition. The jumps from 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 feel much smaller to me than what games like this were doing compared to what we'd been seeing on PS2.
Playing it back for the video, the faults are where they always were. It sits at 82 on Metacritic, and the criticisms were fair enough: nine tracks isn't many, even with the four that later arrived as downloads, and the loading times are just slow enough to be annoying when you want to get on with a race. The original didn't have split-screen multiplayer at all, which still feels like a bizarre omission for this sort of game — online only, in 2007, for a game this obviously built around sitting on a sofa winding someone up. The music, incidentally, is fantastic. I had to run it with the volume right down to avoid a copyright strike.
It's also hard. The AI goes out of its way to run you off the road. I'm not bad at this game normally and I still came second on the first track, then made an absolute mess of Raingod Mesa on a bike and finished fifth, the better part of ten seconds back. Bikes are quick and nimble but unforgiving — go off the edge and you're done. I prefer a medium vehicle, or a quad; the big rigs are just too slow for me.
The sequels, and the sad bit
One correction for the comments section before it fills up: I mention monster trucks during the playthrough, and you're right, they weren't in this one. They were new to Pacific Rift, the 2008 follow-up set around tropical volcanic islands, which also added four-player split screen — so they fixed that, eventually. Plenty of people call that the high point. I had it at launch and I've never quite got into it as much. Nothing wrong with the game; I just think the original is where it's at, possibly only because I've played it so much more.
After that came Arctic Edge in 2009, the odd one out in every respect: the only MotorStorm never released on PS3, and not an Evolution game either. Bigbig Studios built it for the PSP, and the PS2 version was ported by Virtuos. Then Apocalypse in 2011, which had rotten luck. Its release landed within days of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and a game built around racing through a collapsing city was suddenly the last thing anyone wanted to put out. The UK release slid from 16 to 31 March, America went from April to May, New Zealand was shelved after the Christchurch quake, and Japan was postponed and then cancelled outright. The last outing was MotorStorm RC in 2012, an overhead radio-controlled take that arrived on Vita first and PS3 after. I own it and never really engaged with it, and I suspect I wasn't alone, because that was the end of the line.
Evolution went on to make DriveClub on the PS4 and were then closed by Sony on 22 March 2016, which is genuinely sad. The slightly happier footnote is that the team didn't scatter: most of them moved to Codemasters a few weeks later as Codemasters Evo, and in 2018 they made Onrush — an arcade off-road racer that is MotorStorm in all but name. It reviewed well and sold badly, and more layoffs followed. So the people are still out there. The series, for now, isn't.
It's one of the franchises I'd most like to see come back. Until then: if you've got a PS3, go and find it. Wonderful graphics, a fantastic sense of speed, the explosions, the crashes, the physics — it all just clicks.