COUNTY NEWS: Sussex man in the driving seat as he launches new video game

A Sussex dad is toasting the success of his latest video game which has been launched by a global entertainment giant.
Drive!Drive!Drive!Drive!Drive!Drive!
Drive!Drive!Drive!

Gordon Midwood, who lives in Horsham, saw his Drive!Drive!Drive! game launched last month and is delighted with the feedback he has received so far.

The game, which is played on the PlayStation4 among other platforms, has been a labour of love for Mr Midwood, who developed it over the course of the past two years.

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The game designer’s highly original concept was enough to convince executives at media powerhouse Sony to commission his idea.

Drive!Drive!Drive!Drive!Drive!Drive!
Drive!Drive!Drive!

He said: “Drive!Drive!Drive! is a driving game about racing multiple tracks at the same time.

“It is a completely fresh take on the driving genre and is kind of a mixture of arcade racing, track management, repeated stupidity and repeated stupidity. The stupidity comes in through the AI in the game, which in this case stands for Artificial Idiocy rather than Artificial Intelligence.

“Everybody is stupid apart from you, and you must race and manage the situation over multiple tracks at once!

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“As well as PlayStation 4, Drive!Drive!Drive! is out now on the Steam platform for PC and Mac.

For the dad-of-three his job is also his passion.

Mr Midwood, who runs his own games company, Different Cloth, said: “I started making games for myself as a hobby / compulsion whilst working day jobs in technology agencies, at first I made a bunch of Flash web games, then when the iPhone came along I released my first commercial game, lilt line.”

The critical success of this game enabled him to get public funding to create Derrick the Deathfin, the world’s very first underwater papercraft game.

Derrick came to PS3 in 2012 and to Steam in 2014, and is coming to mobile platforms later this year.

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The gaming community is notoriously difficult to please so Mr Midwood is delighted with some of the positive reviews which his creation has garnered online. One reviewer, Jon Irwin, wrote online: “There is a lot of stupid here. And a small part of me yearns for a recognizable horizon around an earthen road. But reality is so 20th Century. Our age is dominated not by what exists but what we want to think exists.

“It makes sense, then, that Different Cloth should release Drive! Drive! Drive! at the tail-end of a year dominated by fake news and fake politicians.”

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