Driver

Driver (1999) from the British studio Reflections Interactive cast the player as an undercover cop named Tanner working his way into a criminal gang, with driving skill as his only real credential. The game opened with a test in an underground parking garage that had to be passed before the first story mission even began, and the whole campaign played out entirely behind the wheel - no walking the streets, just chases through recreated districts of Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, shot with a camera style echoing 1970s movie car chases. Outside the story it offered a free-roam Take a Ride mode letting players just drive around any city with no mission pressure, and that focus on a pure driving experience set Driver apart even before Grand Theft Auto came to define the open-world crime genre.

Driver 2 (2000) stayed on PlayStation but added the ability to get out of the car and walk, expanded the roster of cities with Chicago, Las Vegas, Havana and Rio de Janeiro, added a split-screen two-player mode, and became one of the platform's best-selling titles despite the console's aging hardware. It carried the series into a new generation with a reputation for staging chases better than anyone else.

Driv3r (2004) moved the series to PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC, added its first extended third-person shooting sections on foot, and was set in Nice, Miami and Istanbul - an ambitious step undercut by technical problems and unfinished edges that overshadowed otherwise solid driving and damaged the series' reputation with both players and critics. Parallel Lines (2006) responded with a tonal reset: a story split between 1978 and the present day, a new protagonist, and releases on PlayStation 2, Wii and a differently built Nintendo DS version as well.

The portable spin-off Driver 76 (2007) for PSP told a prequel to Parallel Lines, and the series then went quiet for a while, having been one of the first franchises to prove that chasing through an open city could carry an entire game - two years before Grand Theft Auto III brought that idea into the mainstream. The cinematic camera work and pure driving focus that Reflections Interactive built the series around from the start later echoed through other racing-action hybrids drawing on the same movie-chase sensibility.