“In many ways, GTA 3 was inferior to what we created,” said Mike Rouse, “and it made us even more emboldened.”
This sounds like hubris or denial from a developer escape. as GTA 5 Celebrating the third major release of its third-generation console, it’s safe to say that the pre-release competition between Sony’s Soho team and Rockstar North is now favoring the latter in the long run. There’s no Oasis vs Blur-esque discussion about who wins this particular battle for pop culture dominance.
In some respects, however, Rouse was right. While The Getaway’s linear adventure through London is out of tune with GTA’s new free-roam paradigm, the passage of time suggests it’s a forward-thinking game – putting actors’ faces and performances in the game and rejecting arcade-like elements like Infuse detail and authenticity into the city. In fact, Rockstar’s eventual decision to fund and publish LA Noire (the follow-up to The Getaway built by its core team) is a tacit understanding that its Team Soho competitor had already dabbled in something years ago.
At the time, Rouse joined Sony as an intern, first working on This Is Football 2002—a handy way to carbon-date his career. A few months later, he finished college and joined the Soho team full-time, contributing to The Getaway. “This is a very exciting time for me,” he said. “Working for PlayStation and making a AAA game as my first game exceeded my expectations.”
If everything about The Getaway development was new to Rouse, it was also new to the rest of the team, regardless of their experience level. “This is the first game of its kind,” he said. “Every day feels like I’m doing something I haven’t done before. There are very few reference points.”
Motion capture, a new art in the entertainment industry at the time and not the mainstay of AAA games today, was heavily leveraged to deliver the playable version of Snatch that The Getaway promised. “It was amazing to see the actors interact with the wooden props,” said Rolls. “And then seeing the impersonated actor’s character on the screen in real time. It’s still relatively rare to see it in a game.” The only lifeline for kidnapping children – the tension is palpable.
The choice reflects the Soho team’s determination to dedicate its budget to the tiniest of details – albeit an enormous 10-square-mile area in London. Rouse and a colleague would travel across the UK with a list of cars to photograph. Although The Getaway has many licensed vehicles, the team cannot rely on references sent by the manufacturer.
“Everything we create has to be real or as close to real as possible,” he said. “Everything from deflated tires to shattered windows to body deformations in real time. These race cars were way ahead of any other race car in games at the time, and it was a lot of fun to create them.” And faithfully mirrored, Rouse’s two-hour daily commute to Soho becomes surreal, his virtual world blending with reality.
In the Scottish capital, Rockstar North is acutely aware of Team Soho’s open-world aspirations and vice versa. “We’ve been aggressively competing with them to get a head start,” Rouse said. “Both teams understand each other’s projects.”
Ultimately, the complexity of The Getaway meant a year-long delay, so GTA III got there first. It quickly redefines public expectations about what an open world is and how it should work, hurting The Getaway at launch. “When I look back, I think we created something very different,” Rouse said. “Open worlds were a big thing at the time, and gamers didn’t see that. In many ways, I think The Getaway is more of a game like Uncharted than Grand Theft Auto.”
In the years since, some have managed to reevaluate The Getaway in their own way — like Nik, a 26-year-old translator known on YouTube as RacingFreak. Nik runs thegetaway.uk, a portal designed to replace the defunct official Getaway game site and provide a home for its community and conservation efforts.
The Getaway was the first PS2 game Nik played, and won him over with its flawlessly animated cutscenes and mostly naked HUD. He even enjoys the challenge of navigating London using subtle turn signals instead of directional arrows. “As a car enthusiast, what really struck me was seeing all these licensed vehicles in such an accurate and detailed rendition of London’s open world,” he said. “It was exciting and, frankly, still is.” A love of British heist movies and solid TV police procedural The Bill led to a lifelong relationship with The Getaway. By the early 2010s, with the series dead and tied up in a suitcase in a Sony parking lot, Nik had to delve into the game to discover its secrets.
“The myth of how the axed BMW and Jaguar are gone forever is still talked about,” he said. “It didn’t take long for my first breakthrough to be the discovery of a cut beta car. Since then, I have been on an almost one-man mission to the best of my ability, documenting and studying the game’s almost All aspects – sometimes switching to The Getaway: Black Monday thanks to the fact that both are running on the same engine.”
Black Monday is the follow-up to Team Soho. It launched in 2004, stubbornly stuck in London rather than exploring new cities, and apparently wasn’t as popular. “It’s a more dynamic story, with more content, more cities, and more unique game mechanics,” Rouse said. “But by this time there have been quite a few open world games and the focus is more on the arcade experience of those games, while the Getaway series is still leaning heavily towards its narrative-based gameplay and cover shooters mechanism.”
Several more sequels went into production at Sony, but were canceled at various stages of development. Perhaps the real successor is L.A. Noire — “obviously influenced by the team’s experience with The Getaway,” according to Rouse — who even briefly guest-starred ex-Mark Hammond’s Don Kembry as his Getaway The character’s older relative. In this age of classics and crossovers, there’s an argument that these two games exist in the same universe.
In recent years, Nik has continued to work on excavating The Getaway in search of hidden wonders – building relationships with the game developers who made this article possible, and posting his findings online. After years of unsuccessful attempts, Personal Highlights has managed to bring a beta Ford Capri to the game. Not long ago, Nik discovered The Getaway’s texture format, unlocking the potential of advanced mods like custom cars and characters.
Meanwhile, Rouse still thinks of The Getaway when he’s in London. “To this day, I’ve been able to move around based on games and world creation,” he said. “I would find myself on a street and I recognized it and knew where I was and had never been there before.”
