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Suddenly, crashes were no longer a sideshow, it was a way to get an edge over the competition, shunting them into a wall in a shower of sparks as you boost to the horizon. If you can take people out and cross the line in first position, we thought that was way better.

Most racing games have you keep away from your competitors, whereas we wanted to make it a lot more like you see in a movie, with people slamming into each other.

“I think we called it ‘aggressive racing’. “Burnout 3 was about making the crashes more spectacular and making them a part of gameplay,” Criterion GM Matt Webster tells me. Crashes weren’t just a fail state any more: they were part of the game’s soul.

The introduction of Crash Mode in Burnout 2 made smashing your car into another vehicle an event of its own, with higher scores awarded for causing the biggest pile-ups at busy junctions.

The first Burnout game was similarly brutal. The Burnout series exists because of Thrill Drive, a Konami coin-op game about driving as fast as you can through traffic, weaving and skidding between cars - hit another vehicle and it’s all over.

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