If you were around the Australian LAN scene at any point, chances are you would have seen one of two games being fired up when it got into the late hours: FlatOut 2, and the excellent Blur. The latter was hugely entertaining, but launching around the same time as Split/Second and ModNation Racers hurt the game’s commercial viability. Activision shut down Blur developers Bizarre Creations in 2011, but before their doors closed, the studio put together a prototype for a sequel.
Footage was uploaded to YouTube over the weekend from a build of Blur 2 featuring nine tracks. It’s part of a deeper investigation from German YouTubers AltF4Games into the history of Blur and the cancelled Blur 2. You can watch that deep dive into Blur 2 here, although it’s entirely in German with no English subtitles, so you might struggle a little.
What everyone can enjoy, however, are some of the ideas Bizarre Creations had in mind for the sequel. One of the levels, Dubai, would have featured loop-the-loop sections, driving on the side of buildings, and plenty of tight passageways through construction areas and the Dubai cityscape. Other levels would have visited Hong Kong, Miami, North Africa, Odessa, a place just called “Ski Resort”, Detroit, and two segments in Los Angeles.
The prototype footage doesn’t showcase any new powers or cars. The main difference is in a lot of the track design: there’s more narrow segments, more shortcuts, and a greater sense of speed from the constant changes of elevation. The original Blur had a lot of wide, flat tracks, whereas the sequel’s tracks would have been more dynamic and more technically challenging.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a snippet of a Blur sequel. Back in 2013, we reported on one of Blur‘s former art developers showing off footage of a Blur prototype sequel on their Tumblr. Chris Davie, a former art director on the game, showed some videos of the Dubai level, as well as new visual and environmental effects the studio was playing around with.
Those videos have since been taken offline, although there is still some footage online of the Dubai level with more of an asset pass. It looked good, although given where the gaming world was at the time, I can understand why Activision – fresh off the heels of Call of Duty 4 and Black Ops‘ enormous success, would have had little faith in a sequel.
You can’t buy Blur today. The game was pulled from digital release, likely because of problems around licensing for the music in the game. You can listen to most of those songs, however, through the Spotify playlist below.
Comments
3 responses to “It’s A Shame We Never Got A Blur Sequel”
I will admit, I much preferred Split/Second when I got both games.. From memory I essentially ‘finished’ Split/Second’s single player mode, but hardly touched Blur’s. Multiplayer was good in Blur, but it did feel like a less fun Mario Kart.
I too preferred Split Second *thank you Xbone GWG for preserving that! All 3 of this racing games came out at the same time and none of them survived to see a sequel yet there seems to be endless Dirt and V-Rally games!
I thought Blur was pulled due to vehicle licensing rather than music licensing (something like Audi not wanting any representation in a product that didn’t make stupid huge sales right off the bat)
Such a shame it got pulled though since it might have done well over enough time filling such a distinct niche between serious racing games and kart racers – like Mashed/Wrecked it had some really cool tactics in high level play (like being able to reverse shots with really good timing to avoid getting ‘blue-shelled’ in tight multiplayer games), and it’s only the second game I know of to combine licensed vehicles with arcade powerups (not counting eventual licensed DLC in Mariokart) – and unlike that one Blur actually offered 4P splitscreen!