So you've played every racing game since Ridge Racer and found each had some unique ingredient that tantalized your taste buds usually accompanied by a somewhat less tasty morsel that made you want to ralph. Ever wondered why it is that game designers don't just play every previous game in the genre, keeping the good stuff and flushing the chunky bits? Umm…we hadn't either. That is, until we hoisted a few with Simon Donbavand, Rage Software's producer/designer for their upcoming street rally 'boy racer', Midnight GT. Though we dutifully stayed with portions of the Rage crew 'till the wee hours having a few too many, celebrating Scott Johnson's birthday (youdaman!), Mr. Donbavand made an early evening of it so he could nip home for a quick shower and then get back to work.

As you can imagine with deadlines approaching, the seven member team (Donbovand and veteran "Wipeout" programmers Jason Denton and Rob Smith plus artists Russ Flaherty, Dave Smith, Dave Griffiths and Chris Rodenhurst) is in full crunch mode. Nevertheless, we've managed to come back from the UK fully loaded with screen shots and AVIs of the cars plus we just received some shots taken from a spanking new track only completed this week to go with our preview.

It would be fair to call the team 'driven' when it comes to this game, in fact, Simon stated in a recent Sharky Extreme interview,

"I am a fanatic about racing games (as are the team!), I wanted Midnight GT to contain all the cool features of my 'favorite' race games as well as hopefully 'improving' on some of the things that really annoy me! My biggest influences for one reason or another have been products such as Motorhead, NFS III, Gran Tourismo, the Ridge / Rage Racer series, the Test Drive series, Grand Prix Legends and Colin McRae / TOCA1 & 2. I have played them all to death, loves and hates from all of these and more have helped decide which routes to take in a number of different areas."