Ian Bell on the Project Cars 3 flop: Codemasters ran over me

Bell claims that he had little input on the game despite trying to make investors see his vision.

The talkative, marketing-savvy producer Ian Bell has directed the development of productions such as GTR 2, Project Cars and Need for Speed: Shift and now that he has put together a new team, with new funding and new staff - and intends to tow Simbin's old GTR legacy. Many of us are of course curious about what really happened to the absolutely record-breakingly horrible Project Cars 3. By this time, Codemasters had bought Slightly Mad Studios and the owner Bell had been told to take a big step back and not interfere with the development very much, since Codemasters with Project Cars 3 obviously wanted to try to reach a broader "casual" audience with a more easy-to-drive and arcade-friendly focus. Something that really didn't work. In a recent interview with Bell, he has now commented on this.

Ian Bell on the fiasco that is Project Cars 3:
"Project CARS 3 is the one game that I didn't directly input the minutia. Every game leading up to that I was directly involved in, and would drive the car constantly, feedback constantly. But during the Project CARS 3 development, I stepped back and, once we were taken over by Codemasters, I was advised to stop being involved in the micro details completely. I'm not sure that was an overall positive. Additionally, we didn't want to call it Project CARS 3 at all. I sat around the table with twenty other people at Codemasters and openly stated that we wanted to call it Project CARS: Sideways, giving the community an indication that we're going off in a different direction, to have sort of semi-open-world areas.

The idea was that we'd go in a Forza Horizon direction as compared to Forza Motorsport. I was overruled, and I was overruled because I was told that the investors were insisting that we called the game Project CARS 3 because that's what would sell. That decision was completely against my remit, completely against my advice, and something that I didn't agree with. So that's not a game I'm proud of. And that's not a get-out, either. I did my best to try to at least change the name. I did my best to try to position it such that it would be more of Forza Horizon as opposed to a Forza Motorsport. You know, we sometimes must accept these decisions because the investors are paying insane amounts of money to make these things happen."

What did you think of Project Cars 3?