I'm not really a huge
racing game guy in general, so I hope it means something when I tell you that one of
my five favorite video games of all time is a game called
Driver: San Francisco. Released by Ubisoft back in 2011 and part of the long-running Driver
franchise, Driver: San Francisco is the type of game that
you could easily walk past at a store, take one glance at the cover, and think is just another racing title - and that kind of reaction
would be understandable, but it would also be
wrong, because this game is one of the weirdest video
games anybody has ever made, which I suspect is one of
the main reasons I've been so obsessed with this game
since it initially released. First, the premise. Driver:
San Francisco begins as sort of this normal racing-action game
where you're a cop named John Tanner - the same cop as in all
the other Driver games - and it's the very first
mission where things immediately begin to go off the rails. The end of that mission sees
Tanner, your protagonist, getting in a disastrous car accident that leaves him suspended in a deep coma. I feel like this is the point
where any other video game story would time-skip
forward a few months or years to the protagonist waking up from the coma and sort of scrambling to put
the pieces of what when down, but that's not what
Driver: San Francisco does. Instead, Tanner - and you, as the player - spend the entire rest of the
game inside of that coma. Also, he doesn't know
he's in a coma but you do. Also, the entire game takes
place inside of his head within that coma. And also, and this is the
best part, in the coma-world where the game takes place, Tanner has this sort of
superpower to leave his body and instantly take over
the body of anybody else driving a car anywhere in San Francisco. I know that's a lot, but bear with me. This ability is called shift,
and it sits at the core of what makes Driver: San
Francisco such a special game. By tapping the A button,
you immediately snap in to this overhead view of the city, and by tapping that button again, you pop right into any
vehicle you can see. So instantly, in the blink
of an eye with no load times, you're in control of that vehicle. It all feels ridiculously
snappy, which is great, because if you're playing
this game properly, you will end up use this feature a ton. (upbeat music) Now, t Shift mechanic has
some really wild gameplay and story ramifications, but
I think the craziest thing about it is that it just
completely, flawlessly works. The game is also extremely generous about letting you use this power, too - aside from enemies, like
opponents in a street race or cops during a car chase,
you can jump into literally any car at any time and your
use of the power is unlimited, so there's really no meter
or anything else governing your ability to use it. If you're having trouble
wrapping your head around this concept, the
best thing I've come up with to describe it - and I hate
myself for saying this - but the best way to describe
it is Super Car-io Odyssey. That's basically what this game is. This is Super Car-io Odyssey. Now the developer Reflections - now known as Ubisoft Reflections - gave you a ton of freedom in this game and it opens up a lot of really interesting
gameplay possibilities. So, for instance: let's
say you're in the middle of a police chase and you're
on the run from the cops. In Driver: San Francisco, you can shift into a civilian car that's
heading in the opposite direction in the oncoming lane
and then swerve that car into a head-on collision. And that's just one of countless
options at your disposal. It's actually kind of stunning
how much of a gameplay difference it makes to be able to
instantaneously control other NPCs in a racing game. If I could only pick one example of what makes this mechanic so special, I would have to point to one
YouTube video in particular. It's a video called "A clever
trick in Driver San Francisco" and it's one of the first
videos I ever uploaded to YouTube a whopping eight years ago. Here's the summary: I'm
in a dirt buggy race, and after taking a bad
turn, I manage to screw up and accidentally flip
my car all the way over. The opponent racers in
this race all zoom pass me, so I quickly hop out of my
body and use the shift mechanic to zoom over to a nearby highway that intersects with the racetrack looking for some sort of
a vehicle to help me out. It's at that point that I
spot this enormous city bus, and veer that bus off the road, then manage to sort of
perpendicularly parallel park the bus across the entrance of the racetrack making sure to leave a tiny opening, just a tiny slit, to drive my car through. I then switch back into my buggy, and then watch in awe as
every single one of the enemy AI racers smash into the
side of the bus I had parked, and then I just sort of
perfectly slide through that opening, which instantly
takes me from last place to first place and ultimately
wins me the entire race. I remember this very clearly. It was an insanely gratifying moment, one that I could never could have achieved in any other racing game, and it's one that perfectly
demonstrates the incredible emergent gameplay possibilities
of the Shift mechanic. (interesting music) There's so much about
Driver: San Francisco I want talk about,
including one of my favorite final missions of any video game... but before I can talk
about any of that stuff, I need to shift gears for a second and talk about something else. See, when I set out to make this video, I didn't think it was gonna
be a hard video to make. After all, this game isn't that old, it's a last-gen game that only
came out like seven or eight years ago, so I figured it would
be easy to get my hands on. It wasn't. See, first, I went to
Steam, fully expecting the game to be available
there but, strangely enough, I couldn't find any trace of
it anywhere on the service. At that point, I figured maybe
it was a Uplay exclusive, and naturally, I opened Uplay
for the first time in years and searched for Driver: San Francisco... and, once again, the game
was nowhere to be found. I even found links to the
old Steam and Uplay pages for the game - and the
Steam one just redirected me to the front page of the Steam store, and the Uplay ones led to a
broken, blank Ubisoft website. At this point, I kept digging. I went to the Xbox 360 digital game store, where the game was listed as "currently not available." I went to the PlayStation store, where the game was now
listed as "disc only". The only things left on the
store page for this game are like a few of
49-cent PS3 user avatars, and this item in the store
called the Uplay Asspop. Er, sorry, Uplay Passport, which I think was just
Ubisoft's fancy words for the online pass. Remember those? Remember online passes? They were those one-time-use
codes that publishers implemented to try to
discourage used games, they were a big thing back in like 2010. Anyways, long story short,
I spent a whole afternoon just poring over various
forums and seeing countless other fans frustrated that
they could not find this game for whatever reason, and after all that, I did something pretty desperate: I turned to the dark
corner of the internet where game key resellers
hang out, and from there, things immediately got weird. Before long, I found
myself on a website called GamingDragons.com, where
Driver: San Francisco was listed as out of stock, which was unfortunate, because
the game had apparently just been marked down
from $9.99 to $13.40, which is a whopping negative,
negative 41% discount. So, on to the next one. I bounced from website to
website for a little while until eventually, despite
a very aggressive warning from Twitter that this
was not a safe website, I found my way to G2play.net, which is one of the few
place that still had Driver SF Uplay codes available for sale. I would happily pay that
to play this game again. This was the furthest I'd
gotten in this process. I was actually able to add the
game to my cart successfully, head to the checkout,
and boom, there I was, just a few clicks away from finally owning a digital copy of Driver: San Francisco. But then, right as I got to the very end of the checkout process, I
noticed something peculiar. See, G2play only had six
payment methods available, some familiar, some of
them not so familiar, but one in particular stood out to me and that one was: Subway. (ominous music) At first I couldn't believe my eyes. Subway? Like the restaurant? What could it mean? How could Subway be a payment type? Nervously, I selected the Subway option and clicked through hoping
to make some sense of this and that's when I saw it: Subway gift card. This video game key reseller
website purportedly accepted - as a form of payment - Subway gift cards. I was stunned. Why? Why? Why Subway gift cards, and
why only Subway gift cards? Had there been some mistake? Or was this actually a valid way to buy video games on this website? If I tried it, was there be any
chance this would actually work? I needed to find out for myself. Out of options and
feeling really desperate for some sort of resolution,
I knew what I had to do. - I'm just lookin' to get a gift card. - Right there? Thanks. - Hey! Uh, can I... I'm actually
lookin' to get a gift card. - Can I get $11.72? - 72 cents. - I know that's a very
specific amount of money. - It's... I'm buying a video game with it. - Yeah. - Mhm. - It just... the website
I was buying it on said I could use Visa or
Subway cash card, so... - Isn't that weird? - All right, thank you very much. - From there, I headed home, punched in my Subway gift card code, got the Uplay code
successfully, and lo and behold, after jumping through
about a million of hoops, I finally had my hands on
Driver: San Francisco again, and was relieved to discover that the game was exactly as good as I remembered. (upbeat music) - Coming back to Driver: San Francisco after a eight year break, I think the thing that caught me off-guard this time around was how
interesting all the writing in the game is. And there is a LOT of writing. I reached out via email
to Driver: San Francisco narrative designer Ian Mayor,
who told me that the game the game contains about 270,000
spoken words of dialogue, which is an absolutely ludicrous number for a game of its kind. According to one interview
that OXM conducted way, way, way back when the
game was first coming out, the game apparently has
more lines of dialogue than the entirety of Mass Effect 2. I know that sounds
insane for a racing game, but when you play Driver: San Francisco, it actually kind of makes sense. The game's structure - and in
particular, the shift mechanic that I was telling you about
- means that you're constantly hopping in and out of
new characters' bodies and speaking with their
co-passengers, and as a result, the game has dozens and dozens
and dozens of completely distinct characters, many of whom you'll only ever meet once. - As it turns out, the shift mechanic is also an incredibly rich vein to mine cool narrative moments from. Every time you hop into someone's body in Driver: San Francisco, there's a brief, quippy exchange between
Tanner - who is now possessing someone else - and the person
in the passenger's seat, and every single exchange is dripping with this sort of
underlying dramatic irony, because while you and Tanner both know that Tanner is not
actually the person sitting in the driver's seat, the
passenger does not know that because you're inside their body. Does that make sense? - [Narrator] All of
this, according to Ian, added up to a game with a
grand total of 150 separate, distinct civilian passengers in the city, and not only that, each civilian
has tons of unique dialogue depending on which chapter of the game you encounter them in, meaning
no two players' playthroughs of Driver: San Francisco
will ever be exactly alike. (upbeat music) Half the time, when you possess somebody in Driver: San Francisco,
Tanner is jumping into someone mid-conversation, and has
to fake his way through that conversation so as
to not arouse suspicion. It ends up producing
these sort of microscopic little character studies,
almost like some rapid-fire WarioWare version of storytelling. It got to the point that
while playing the game, I found myself actively scouting for cars that had somebody sitting
in the passengers' seat, just so I could to shift
into their bodies to hear more of this game's dialogue. - [Narrator] For years, I've
wondered about this specific aspect of the game. I wanted to know: who wrote all
these huge boatloads of NPC dialogue, and how did they go about writing it? To answer this question,
I hunted down Tom Jubert, one of the contributing writers
on Driver: San Francisco. Tom was part of a crack
team of external writers from outside the studio who
were brought on specifically to write this exact random NPC dialogue. Nowadays, Tom is a narrative
designer with a lot of major hits under his belt
including games like FTL, The Talos Principle, Subnautica. So I had to ask Tom, how does
one go about writing these tiny snippets of dialogue for
dozens and dozens and dozens of incidental characters? - [Tom] Yeah, it was crazy when
this Driver thing came through, because, yeah, it came
through from the agent. She said to me we're
putting together this team, it's last minute. We need all of this dialogue. I was all set to kind of
take the job and do the work, and not be that excited about it. And then I read the brief! And it said, 'yeah, it's Driver, but by
the way, you're in a coma, and you can take over any car
that you can see at any time.' (chuckles) And yeah, I loved that! What a fun little job it was. - [Narrator] Tom shared
a couple of scripts from the game's writing process
and they gave me remarkable insight into how a game like
this is actually written. - I think we pitched some short overviews of who the characters were
like maybe one sentence each at the start of the project
maybe 24 hours in advance. We totally came up with
that stuff ourselves. They just said we need as
many characters as you can do. - [Narrator] There's a lot
of stuff that can happen when you're driving the car in this game. You can collide with another car, you could collide with a
cop car and get in a chase. And they had to account
for every single one of these options for every
single one of the game's 100 plus characters. - [Tom] It was lovely, it was lovely. It's my favorite kind of
writing because every day you're waking up and
you're doing a new job, a new character, a new
little side story, right, that you have to somehow tell
in the context of the game. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Now, as fun and impressive as all of Driver: San Francisco's
incidental dialogue is, a lot of it is relatively straightforward once you get the concept -
especially when you compare it to the game's overarching story, and look at just how strange things get over the course of this game. I mean, look, Driver: San
Francisco is already a very weird game on its face, which is
why it should mean something when I tell you that I'm
happy to report that it gets weirder and weirder and
weirder as it proceeds. So what do I mean by that? Well, for starters:
the coma framing device is just baked into every
part of the world perfectly. Now, keep in mind here
that you, as the player, know that Tanner is in a coma but for most of the game, he has no clue - so as far as he's concerned, he's just randomly
developed this superpower that lets him quantum leap
in other people's bodies. But as the game goes on, the
coma premise starts bleeding into the game more and more. It starts out subtle, little
things here and there, like for example, if you look closely, the in-game investigation board
is actually an x-ray viewer. But the further you get into the game the more intense they get. One of my favorite examples
of this is incorporated into the shift ability itself. As you progress in Driver: San Francisco, you'll earn the ability to
zoom further and further out, which sort of makes the
ability more powerful. Instead of having to just scroll people in your immediate area,
you can jump from one end of San Francisco to the
other in a matter of seconds. But, if you listen
closely and look closely, the further you zoom out as you unlock these later zoom levels, the sound design subtly
shifts and changes, and when you unlock the
final stage of zoom, it sounds like this: (heartbeat monitor) You can hear the sounds
of a heartbeat monitor and see the faint overlay
of an EKG on the screen - which is, of course,
alluding to the hospital room that Tanner is actually lying down in as this entire game takes place. It's as if the further you
pull back the shift feature, the closer Tanner gets to
the edges of this reality - the closer he gets to the real
world, and the hospital room where he actually spends
almost this entire game. Then, in the later missions of the game, things get extremely crazy. The imagined reality that Tanner inhabits begins sort of deteriorating - at first in subtle ways,
like hearing the voices of the people visiting him in the hospital over his car radio, and then
in decidedly unsubtle ways, like in one of my favorite
missions in the game, Frozen. In this mission, Tanner
is hot on the trail of the main antagonist
and then at one point, out of nowhere, he snaps his fingers, and the game's warm color
palate shifts to an icy blue, and the entire city
completely freezes in place. - [Narrator] Every car,
every pedestrian, everything. Everything, that is,
except for one ambulance frantically swerving through
the streets of San Francisco. Now, in terms of your actual
goal for this mission, you are meant to follow
closely in the trails this ambulance leaves
behind, and as you do that, part of the HUD seems to
indicate that Tanner's heart rate in real life is lowering. - [Narrator] Now, even just
from a gameplay perspective, this mission is unique
and extremely memorable. It turns out that driving
through the streets of an open-world city with
every other vehicle on the road frozen in perfectly in
place is not just a cool visual thing, it's also very challenging thing to do as a player, and it's not something I
think I've ever experienced in all my decades of driving cars around cities in racing games. But from a narrative perspective,
it's also fascinating because you're constantly
getting these snippets of dialogue where you
can hear EMTs in the back of the ambulance trying
to keep a man alive. - [Narrator] It's at this
point that you realize that this frozen city is
an elaborate and shockingly effective analogy for cardiac arrest. In the real world,
Tanner's heart has stopped, and that's represented in
the imaginary coma world by the whole city coming to a halt too. I love this mission because
it's a really elegant marriage of mission design and story design. They're complementing
each other perfectly here: The gameplay is this perfect
metaphor for what is happening in the narrative -Tanner having
this near-death experience - and conversely, the narrative
is this perfect excuse to play with this very weird, experimental, outside-the-box mission design where the city's frozen in place, Something you could never
justify doing in a typical straight-laced open world racing game. This is Tanner reliving the
ride from the site of his car crash to the hospital,
and this mission is Tanner is beginning to come to grips with the fact that he's in a coma. - Now, the moment Tanner realizes this, the mission changes
significantly, because now as you drive into the
cars that are in your way that are frozen in place,
instead of bumping into them, they vanish into thin air
as you drive into them. This mission is noteworthy
because it marks the beginning of a turning point, I
think, in Tanner's psyche. Over the final couple hours in the game, the strange stuff that Tanner experiences becomes more and more frequent, with him eventually even
questioning his own sanity, before finally coming
to grips with the fact that yes, he is in a coma. This awakening leads to
some of the coolest stuff I've ever seen in a video game, because once he realizes
that none of what's happening is real, he effectively
turns this whole game into a lucid dream. - [Narrator] It's moments like this one that make me feel comfortable
describing this game as the Metal Gear Solid 2 of racing games. This game is so insane at every
single turn - from the premise to the actual story, to the
way the story wraps up - that to me it's one of
the most interesting video games ever made by
anyone, and I can think of no greater example of that
than the very last mission. One of the final missions
in the game grants you this incredible,
mind-over-matter superpower: the ability to pick up
and psychically hurl the other vehicles on the road
at the game's main antagonist as you chase him down. - [Narrator] It's one of
the craziest final sequences I've ever seen in any AAA video game, much less a licensed racing game. - But the question remains, why was this game de-listed from sale? Why can't you buy Driver:
San Francisco anymore? For years with no word or
even a heads up from Ubisoft that this was happening, fans
have been left to speculate. Could it be for car licensing reasons? Music licensing reasons? Something other reason entirely? I actually reached out to Ubisoft to get to the bottom of this,
and after a bit of prodding, I got the following answer
from an Ubisoft representative: "[Driver: San Francisco has
been de-listed for a few years. A number of factors go into
evaluating whether to keep a game live including community support." Now, I think it probably
goes without saying that I don't love this answer. First off, yes, they're correct
that it's been unavailable for a few years - from
looking at different posts on the Steam forums and stuff, it looks like they quietly
delisted the game back in 2016... which is heartbreaking, by the way, because it means that the
game was barely five years old when they yanked it from sale. To put that into context a little bit, Driver: San Francisco was a game that took over five years to *make*. - [TV News anchor] Those staff
spent five years designing and bringing to life
every aspect of the game. - And, for whatever reason, the development process
wound up being longer than the window of time
the game was actually available to purchase. Personally, I'm just not
thrilled with the idea that if you don't play
a game within five years of its release, you've missed your chance and it's gone forever. Like, imagine trying to extend
that logic to movies or television. Imagine what if, five
years after being released, you weren't able to watch
any of these shows or movies anymore, and the publishers
just shrugged it off with "yeah, sorry, we didn't feel
like keeping them live"? I also take issue with that
wording: 'keep a game live.' It's really odd,
especially for a primarily single-player game like Driver SF. It implies that keeping a game on sale is something you actively have to do. And it's not. Removing a game from every storefront it exists on is a choice. Not re-upping or
renegotiating the licenses for a game that you released is a choice. Not valuing art enough to
go to bat for it financially is a choice. In all honesty, I think
there probably is a specific, actual answer as to why
Ubisoft de-listed this game, and for whatever reason they're unwilling to share it with us. Gun to my head, I would guess that, yeah, it probably has something
to do with negotiating the licenses for the vehicles
or music in the game. But frankly, even if we
knew the exact reason Ubisoft yanked the game, I just don't think there's an
answer I'd be satisfied with. Maybe this is naive of me, but personally, I think
that when you ask a team of over 100 people to sink
half a decade of their lives into creating a piece of art,
you owe it to those people as the publisher of that art
to do the necessary legwork every few years to just
make sure that thing doesn't disappear. In my view, as the publisher
and as the entity responsible for whether or not this
game lives or dies, you have an obligation to
make sure that the thing that these people poured their
blood, sweat, and tears into doesn't just vanish one day, particularly not because
their corporate overlords didn't feel like spending
the money to keep it around. In my view, if you're
not willing to go to bat for preservation this art form, you're a bad steward of the medium, and should maybe not be in
the game-making business. Now, of course, Driver: San Francisco is not the only game this has happened to. A really great website I
found while researching this video dedicated to this exact subject called DelistedGames.com
says that currently there are over 700 titles that
have suffered this same fate. And to be absolutely clear,
we're not talking about old, rare, limited physical versions
of games from the '80s - we're talking about modern, digital
games on digital storefronts - games that, ostensibly, there
should be infinite copies of that are no longer available to purchase, usually for dumb licensing reasons. The sad truth is that many
times, contemporary digital games have far, far shorter average lifespans than the mainstream games
of the '80s and '90s. I've been turning this
situation over in my head for the past few months
trying to find a positive note to end it on. I don't love making negative videos. And if there's a silver
lining to this statement that Ubisoft gave, it's
the part at the end where they specifically
mention that one of their main criteria when it comes
to de-listing a game is community support. I think it stands to reason that, if there was suitable
outcry from the community, Ubisoft might consider doing
the due diligence necessary to put this cult classic back on sale. Games getting unlisted and
later relisted is actually something there's actually
something that's happened before, and there's even a really
good precedent for this. One of the precedents I
would point to is Alan Wake. That's a game by a developer
I really love, Remedy, that was delisted from digital storefronts back in 2017 and then relisted
a year later in October 2018. How is this possible? Well, according to Remedy,
their publisher Microsoft renegotiated the rights to
the game's licensed music, enabling them to put
the game back on sale. In other words, if a
publisher cares enough, this is possible. This can happen. So, to demonstrate our support
for this, here's my idea. I've put together a change.org
petition to show Ubisoft that, yes, there is a
big audience of people who care about this game. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there is. If you watching this video want to play Driver: San Francisco someday - or if you just want to
support interesting games like this one being
preserved for the future - please take a couple seconds
and sign this petition. There's no guarantee it'll do anything, but the more people sign it,
the better our chances become. And for those of you who think petitions never change anything, the last time we endorsed a petition on this channel, we got Reggie a brand new
Herman-Miller Aeron chair, so... checkmate. On the other hand, maybe it's fitting and even a little poetic
that this weird surreal game that felt like it never should
have existed now barely does. For the entire length of
Driver: San Francisco, Tanner remains in a
coma and now, in a way, the game itself is, too. Completely gone from
every digital storefront and now only available
through resold, old Uplay keys and physical copies that
there are a finite number of, Driver: San Francisco is
sort of permanently trapped between life and death, and there's something a
little romantic about that. But yeah, dude. Driver: San
Francisco just... rules. It's a really, really special
game, one that I wish more people had the opportunity to play, and if you'd sign this petition
and/or share this video with anyone you think would
think this game interesting or wanna play it themselves,
that would mean a lot to me. But, in the meantime, thank
you for watching this video and thank you for
subscribing to this channel, and, yeah, I'll see you next time.
So maybe I'm in the minority here, but if a game exists and the publisher doesn't want to take my money for the game, I'll just go sail the high seas and get it instead of going to shady third party sites where they sell stolen game keys.
Hilarious video, but the game has always been a couple clicks away on any piracy website. Also, accepting obscure giftcards is pretty common for shady industries because they're largely untraceable. This is why most Indian scam centers ask for payment in iTunes giftcards.
Purchase method: Subway?!
I played the original Driver so much.
idk about insane hoops. It's available on G2A via UPlay (though I don't recommend G2A).
[removed]
God that's happened so many times in the past couple of years: I've clicked a really interesting gaming-related video, gotten engrossed in it, realised the dude is gonna drag a fairly simple point out for a half hour, then realised its Nick 'Sex Pest' Robinson and I shouldn't have clicked it in the first place.
Can't watch the video right now but isn't this the game where you can jump from car to car? I remember it being received pretty well and playing it with a few mates. What happened to it, why is it so crazy that he got it?
So he drove to subway for views?? It looked like they had normal ass payment methods available, like PayPal which offers buyer protections...