Driver 2

Imagine sitting behind the wheel in a living city where you can pick any street, shift into gear, and vanish from the police in your rear-view mirror long before the world discovered the shorthand GTA III. That's exactly what the Driver series offered, and its second installment raised the bar even higher.

Driver 2 was created at the studio Reflections under the publisher Infogrames, building on the success of the first game that enchanted players with cinematic car chases in the spirit of '70s crime thrillers. The atmosphere of burnt rubber, Bullitt-style pursuits and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three wasn't just a backdrop here, but the very essence of the game. Reflections understood superbly how a car should hesitate in a corner with a slide and when the wheels bite back into the asphalt.

The sequel's key novelty was the ability to step out of the car and steal another. It sounds obvious today, but in 2000 it was an ambitious step on the PlayStation, pushing open cities closer to what we now consider standard. The player was no longer just a driver strapped to a single chassis, but a pedestrian who could decide which machine they needed for an escape right then.

Visually the game traveled through real locations like San Francisco, Havana, Las Vegas, and Rio de Janeiro. Each city had its own rhythm, its own intersections, and its own traps. That expansion to four metropolises and the addition of on-foot navigation, however, balanced right at the edge of the PS1's technical capabilities, so the game had to be split across multiple discs and at times struggled with rendering compromises.

Even so, Driver 2 remains an important milestone. It showed that the concept of an open city driven by automotive action held enormous potential, and it indirectly paved the way for a genre that would later dominate the entire gaming industry. For those who remember it, it's a nostalgic ride full of drifts and police sirens; for students of gaming history, it's evidence of a small studio's courage to push the hardware past its limits.

Why play it: Cinematic chases and open cities across four metropolises at a time when that was still a rarity; a nostalgic classic that was ahead of its time.