The Crew in development for four years

In a recent interview, Ivory Tower's Julian Gerighty has revealed just how long The Crew has been in development: "This game started over four years ago. The game hasn't changed, its just taken that long to get it working and working as well as we want it to be working."

"All of the concepts that we have here are concepts that the team has been working on for the last 10 years," the game's creative director continued in the interview with Digital Trends. "The massive open world that's shared with hundreds of other players? That's something that the team did for Test Drive Unlimited [in 2006], which was ahead of its time."

While that game might have been ahead of its time, The Crew was originally intended to join it in being a current-gen release, but Gerighty revealed that the studio's vision of the game required it to be held back for next-gen consoles.

"It happened about a year and a half ago, where we realized we can push this a little bit further, we can push the personalization of the world, the non-procedural nature of the world, a little bit further if we do it on Xbox One and PS4. So our Miami is radically different from our New York, which is normal but it takes a lot of work to get it to that level of quality. And that's only possible on this next-generation."

You can read our preview of The Crew right here, and below is our interview with Julian Gerighty at this year's E3.