This episode went through a lot of rewrites. Part of that was simply the need to keep my meandering writing habits in check - I love this game, and it was pretty easy to go off onto tangents. I had wanted to say something about the evolution of its artstyle (the original billboards didn’t glow and had more muted colors, and the original crash palette washed out most colors but over-saturated red). Also both the soundtrack and “Paradise City” itself deserve more coverage for how they impact the game, but, you know, ContentID. Also, the way the game scales its difficulty by event class is an interesting way to promote open-world mission selection.

But really, a lot of the editing was just trying to figure out how to frame the way Burnout Paradise thinks of cars. I didn’t want to be reductionist and boil the game down to just some kid’s plaything, but it’s hard to describe iconography and symbolism of cars removed from any specific makes or models. But there is something there, I think! Like, an abstract notion of “car-ness,” especially in automobile obsessed America. Some of it is the common language of road signs and markings. Some of it is the materials cars are made of - leather and glass and polished steel and chrome. And some of it is the sensations cars provide - a hodgepodge of smells and sounds and sights. Pixar’s Cars tapped into a lot of this - I mean, look at that logo, with its chrome and speckled red paint!

And if I had to identify an underlying thread, I think it’s nostalgia. Both Cars and Burnout Paradise chase this image of cars from the past that maybe didn’t really exist. For Cars it’s a sort of 1950’s-infused lamentation about the increasing irrelevance of smalltown middle America with the arrival of freeways. For Burnout Paradise it’s more of a “I Can’t Drive 55“/”Paradise City” 80’s-era teenage love of gas-chugging power before global warming and electric cars moved in. Cars: Aspirational symbols of the youth that become nostalgia icons as the decades pass? Maybe.

Anyways, the transcript:

Wait, wait, hold it. I know the game’s tied inexorably to this song, but this is YouTube and… well, can we start over with music that’s at least a little less likely to be flagged?

There has never been a racing game quite like Burnout Paradise. Oh, there have been open world racers before, like Need for Speed Underground. And we’ve had plenty of crashy, arcadey racing games - including the previous entries in the Burnout series. And yeah, Burnout Paradise has informed subsequent games - Criterion’s Need for Speed Most Wanted perhaps most of all. And its influence can still be felt in series like Forza Horizons, where billboards can be broken, boost is rewarded for driving close to oncoming traffic or drifting, and races take place in an open world anchored by a few key points of interest. And yet there’s something about Burnout Paradise that helps it endure more than a lot of those other racing games - I still replay most of it once every year or so. But why *this* game in particular, with its obnoxious DJ Atomica, its missing PC content, and its awkward EA login screen?

Well, last year I suggested that Destiny is like a pack of knockoff brand scifi action figures you sort of imposed your own imagination on to. I think Burnout Paradise works in a similar way. It is, basically, a Hotwheels race track blown up to a grandiose scale. Okay, Trackmania is probably Hotwheels race tracks blown up to a grandiose scale, but Burnout Paradise feels like an attempt to recapture what it means to play with toy cars as kids and present it in a way that’s palatable to adults. So how does it do that?

Well first of all, Burnout Paradise excels as open world game in ways that few others do. It understands that open worlds aren’t about the spaces between points of interest, they’re about making the space itself interesting. Too many open world games are designed to take you to ten or fifteen key locations while the rest of the map exists to provide optional content on the side. Those games encourage you to explore, but there’s also the skeleton of a main storyline to provide structure. Approaching world design this way undercuts whatever narrative that main storyline may have; robbing it of urgency or any sense of pacing whatsoever. Take Skyrim - where in the face of the end of the world by dragon invasion you can hang out with thieves or get married or become the leader of the mages guild for funsies. The optional content feels self-contained and disconnected to the point where it feels like filler, while the main story is super important but can be deferred so easily that it feels like it doesn’t matter. Burnout Paradise avoids this by making any and all exploration the main use of the space. Exploration isn’t a fun side thing, it’s literally what you do in this game. Your goal is to find events, complete them, and rank up to a Burnout license. Since just about every intersection has an event and every event counts towards your license, none of the events are really side missions. The game’s exploration is more about finding a style of event you like than veering off the main questline. This way the whole map becomes important in ways that other open world games neglect, and Burnout Paradise feels internally cohesive in a way Skyrim doesn’t, because the whole space is used to progress instead of a few key areas.

But it succeeds as an open world game by doing more than just saying that “every quest contributes to the main quest so just, you know, do whatever.” There’s a ridiculously meticulous use of space in this game. Burnout Paradise rewards exploration not just with events, but Super Jumps, Billboards, and Shortcuts. Each of them give the game a sort of collectable aspect. But - and this is key - those things are still useful *after* they’re found. Super jumps and billboards refuel boost and are counted as a score multiplier during stunt runs, and shortcuts can give you the edge in a tight race or lead to great stunt run areas. You didn’t just explore to find the random shiny collectibles, you explored because complete knowledge of this space made you a far better, more capable player than you would be otherwise.

It’s also shockingly dense. Most open world games are proud about how large their maps are, how many square miles of terrain are reproduced. But the philosophy driving Burnout Paradise is to provide an average-sized map and simply pack it with stuff. In edition to proper events at intersections and all those collectibles, each road has a time trial associated with it, allowing you to compete against default times or against your friends. Each road also has a crash mode - a minigame where you try to maximize damage to other cars by bouncing the remains of your vehicle off of cars and buses. On roads with parallel parking spots, there’s even a mode where you try to drift perfectly into a parking space. There are secret airfields and quarries for stunt runs. Unlockable cars can pass you by anywhere on the road, triggering a mad dash to wreck them before they escape, turning any back alley into an opportunity for a showdown. It’s a refreshing approach to open world design because often the goal is to simply provide space between things to do, but Burnout Paradise was about filling it with things to do. It’s sort of a Tony Hawk Pro Skater school of level design - you don’t need a massive amount of space as long as every piece of that space is designed to play off of one or more mechanics, and that lesson is taken to heart here.

All of these densely packed and interconnected activities, collectibles, and events present a world that is, for lack of a better word, playful. It’s a city that is excited for you to play with your cars, and wants you to do so no matter where you are. The world is less a lived in real city than one of those top-down city road rugs you’d have as kid or one of those preconstructed platic parking garages.

It’s not just the design of the game world that works for me, though. The other reason Burnout Paradise shines is that it feels like it’s in love with cars. But not in the way videogames normally are in love with cars. Like, most arcade racers don’t care about the vehicles at all - Mario Kart or Sonic All Star Racing put you in wacky nonsense vehicles, and even car-focused arcadey racers like Blur or Split/Second aren’t into the cars themselves as much as the on-the-track hijinks. No, games that care about cars are usually the more self-serious racing games like Gran Turismo and Forza. There cars are exotic consumer goods fetishized to the point of being eroticized. There’s an undeniable… sexiness with the way they talk about and frame cars - the slow closeup pans, the meticulous detail with which they’re rendered, the usual options to inspect or take photos of them. The relationship borders on the voyeuristic. And brands, always with the brands! Car manufacturers are treated as storied institutions that demand reverence. Forza actually has a mechanic that lets you build affinity with individual manufacturers. There’s as much focus on the logos and licensing as the tuning mechanics and paint selection. These video games typically present cars as min/max stat modification toys for the super rich, and they let you have a taste of their power, their glamor, and the smarts it takes to tweak them. They’re engineering feats to be lusted after; they’re conspicuous consumption you get to experience vicariously through a game.

But if Forza or Gran Turismo talk about cars the way your gearhead coworker talks about cars, Burnout Paradise talks about cars the way your third grade nephew talks about cars. It’s not about the sexiness of real cars as a consumer good, but cars as the power fantasies kids have before they become the mundane thing that takes you to work. Races, crashes, leaps and rolls. The roar of the engine and the squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal and the smell of gasoline. That is how cars are defined in Burnout Paradise.

For example, the consumer fetishism is pretty much absent. Gone are the loving tributes to real brands - instead we have fictional car manufactures. Their names - like Krieger, Kitano, Carson, and Rossolini - as well as their logos tell you a lot about the kinds of cars they make, and provide what is perhaps the closest the game really gets to worldbuilding. And, instead of sleek, shiny vehicles for purchase, every car you unlock in Burnout Paradise has been junked. Piles of scratched metal, dented exteriors, and broken glass are your rewards in this game, and you pick them up in a junkyard. Cars in Forza or GT are placed in showrooms and cleaned gently with diapers, but these cars? These cars get used up. They’re scratched and worn and beaten because the cars get crashed and raced and played with. The goal isn’t to collect them but to drive them. Even the act of unlocking new vehicles itself frames cars in a completely differently: compare buying a known quantity in, say, a Ford Focus that has been put in a racing class with certain performance stats with “Hey! A new car! What’s it handle like? How fast does it go? How cool does it look when we fix it up?” One is a cold, mechanical purchasing decision, and the other is full of curiosity and excitement. It’s not a strategic decision or one made of brand loyalty, but a question: What can this car do? Can it do things?! Let’s find out!

The lack of brands also means Burnout can indulge in a gratuitous damage model. Burnout Paradise *loves* crashes. It loves them so much it has a mode just for crashing. It loves them so much it has an event dedicated to causing them. It loves them so much it actually cuts away from the racing to show you each and every crash in slow motion. Burnout Paradise firmly believes that crashing cars is a cool phenomenon! Again, it’s a childhood toy mentality here. There’s no one in these cars, this isn’t a perverse fascination with *real* crashes, but rather it’s a videogame version of a kid going *verrrrr kapuuushh!* with their Matchbox cars. And that’s hardly a deep read; the game actually makes this point itself by literally including a “toy cars” DLC pack that has miniature, uncrashable versions of several cars from the game.

That’s not the only indication that this is a childhood power trip made by adults. There’s an odd, subtle nostalgia to the whole thing. For instance, there’s a “famous cars” DLC pack that contains parody cars of vehicles from the Dukes of Hazzard, the Night Rider, Ghostbusters, and my personal favorite, Back to the Future. They’re cute callbacks, but they’re also - all of them - definitively from the 80’s. So too is the Carson Inferno van, a reference to the A-Team’s vehicle of choice.

Then there’s the song. Burnout Paradise has three soundtracks - an EA Trax licensed affair, a bunch of classical music, and a selection of techno and rock tracks from previous Burnout games including a “Burnout Paradise” theme song. But it’s Guns and Roses’ 1987 song Paradise City that plays at the beginning and end of the game, as well as every time the game is launched, in its entirety. Burnout Paradise hitched itself to that song in particular, and it cements itself as having one foot in the past - specifically the past of the game’s 30 something developers.

There’s a real sense of the developers reaching back to their own childhood to find what made cars special before they could realistically drive them, and trying to capture that feelingin this game. And there’s two ways to look at that. This game could be seen as immature, afraid of dealing with more intellectually stimulating ideas like tuning suspensions or tire tread. It’s a game that’s all “vroom vroom crash” without any respect for the engineering, the history, or the culture of cars. But another way of looking at it is that it has a sense of wonder about cars unclounded by crass commercialism or arcane technical details. It loves cars *because* they’re vroom vroom crash machines. And that makes the game somewhat timeless (or at least as timeless as the idea of cars can be given that they’ve only been around for a hundred years).

In the following years games like Need for Speed Most Wanted and Forza Horizons have tried to expand on the Burnout Paradise formula, and neither has really managed to recapture it. And I think a lot of it has to do with these two ideas - a really strongly designed and dense open world and a sort of naive wonderment at the concept of cars. Their worlds are larger, but feel far more empty; they feel less interested in cars than they do in brands. But Burnout Paradise not only managed to do both, but to combine them in a way where they complimented each other. The open nature of the world sells us on that big promise of cars - freedom to go and to do as we please. And that undeniably playful nature of the world just gels with that childlike sensibility about cars. It’s not an open world about trudging from key point to key point, and it’s not a serious racing sim asking you to choose a strength of shock absorber before a race; it’s a kid unbearably eager and excited for you to sit down and join them in playing with their toy cars. And even at 31 year old? I have a hard time saying no to that.