Sony’s London Studio revealed a teaser for The Getaway 3 at E3 2006, offering an intriguing glimpse into the next entry in PlayStation’s gritty crime series. The trailer opened with a panning shot of a quiet street in Amsterdam, with cars, pedestrians, and canal boats passing by, as the camera slowly pulls into the hallway of a grubby apartment building where our protagonist stands, gun in hand, over a body slumped up against the wall.
It’s a brief, cinematic trailer, but press reacted positively to the reveal, with many praising the level of detail in the trailer’s environments, hoping to see that translated to an actual gameplay reveal in the near future. But unfortunately, the teaser marked the last the public ever saw of The Getaway 3. London Studio went quiet shortly after, and in 2008, Sony confirmed to GamesIndustry.Biz the developer had stopped work on the PlayStation 3 game in order to reallocate its resources towards more family-oriented exclusives, like Singstar and EyeToy, which would become the studio’s dominant focus for years.
The news devastated fans of The Getaway, but not everyone gave up hope of seeing a revival. A dedicated group of fans keeps the series alive to this day through social media campaigns, preservation efforts, and mods of the original Getaway. With so many PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games from twenty years ago like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and Medievil making a comeback to varying degrees of success, and a host of new jobs and teases for London Studio's next project, many fans think the time is right for The Getaway to make a return. IGN spoke to former London Studio artist Mike Rouse, YouTuber and notable Getaway fan JaybillsGames, and the modder RacingFreak, to find out what about The Getaway instilled this fervent dedication among so many, the canceled projects that never got off the ground, and why fans still keep hope alive for a return 15 years later.
What makes The Getaway unique?
Sony released The Getaway for the PlayStation 2 in 2002, just a little over a year after Grand Theft Auto III revolutionized the open-world genre. But unlike Rockstar’s adventure, which created its own fictional city inspired by New York, The Getaway put a greater emphasis on authenticity and realism as its developers aimed to bring to life its London location.
Team Soho (the team behind The Getaway who later merged with London Studio in 2002) didn’t fill its world with fictional stores or brands, instead depicting real locations and vehicles. Players explored this realistic recreation of central London through the lens of two characters, an ex-prisoner named Mark Hammond and detective Frank Carter, unravelling a story about kidnapping, blackmail, and police corruption.
The Getaway did well enough to lead to a sequel, called Black Monday, that Sony published in 2004, but the follow-up received less favourable reviews than its predecessor, with many critics arguing that it did very little to improve upon the previous title. The IGN Black Monday review, published in 2005, summarised, “While it offers some new, it doesn't offer enough. Furthermore, it doesn't fix many of the serious issues that plagued the first title. A map complete with objective markers is a big help, as are the GPS-driven turn signal indicators, but the game is just as stiff, clumsy, and unworkable as it's ever been.” The story also didn’t continue the events of The Getaway, instead following several new protagonists who exist within the same universe: amateur boxer Eddie O’Connor, police officer Ben Mitchell, and computer hacker Sam Thompson.
Mike Rouse is an artist who worked on both Getaway games and now runs the YouTube channel Retro Gamer Boy, where he shares behind-the-scenes information about the making of the series. He told us that, in order to capture London’s various districts like Southwark, Clerkenwell, and Bloomsbury, Team Soho sent the art team out into the world with bulky digital cameras to capture thousands of images for reference, a process we’ve seen become more common as open-world games like The Division and Watch Dogs aim for some block-by-block realism. This involved visiting London’s Red-Light District, where Rouse claims a member of the team was apparently propositioned for their cameras.
“We travelled the UK hunting down classic cars for texture and modelling reference and spent hundreds of hours photographing and meticulously recreating the buildings and streets of London,” Rouse told IGN. “We set out to create a game that blurred the lines between films and gaming with The Getaway. And while the players enjoyed the story and innovative cover shooter gameplay, I still think the real star of the game was the living London we created.”
At the time, Team Soho’s approach was unorthodox, given that it was still the early days of video game licensing. In fact, Rouse remembers negotiating a deal with one car manufacturer for its likeness in exchange for a handful of PlayStation 2’s, a deal that probably would go a lot differently today when licensing deals are so much more the norm.
This is what made The Getaway so special, though, for fans. The novelty of driving around a one-to-one recreation of London was an uncanny experience at the time and a brilliant showcase for the PlayStation hardware. Even today, it still feels like a fascinating novelty loading up the game and seeing real stores like Pret a Manger or a WHSmith lining the streets. This is something that a lot of games depicting real locations, like The Crew 2, stay away from, in favour of fictional places, typically due to licensing issues.
The Fan Demand
The love for what The Getaway series delivered, and the promise of what could still be, has led to a sustained, dedicated fanbase in the years since its last appearance. JaybillsGames is a YouTuber based in the US who runs the Twitter account @Return2London, a page dedicated to news aggregation, fan speculation, and theories about the future of The Getaway series.
“I started the first page on Facebook in May 2017,” JaybillsGames told me. “At the time, I was busy with high school, but I did my best to build up the page. It didn’t last too long, but later that year, I wanted to give it another shot since the trend of making these campaign pages really shot up when the MediEvil fans, Spyro fans, and Ape Escape fans hit the scene. @Return2London was born in December 2017.”
And now seems as good a time as any in the eyes of fans to bring The Getaway back, given this recent nostalgia-fuelled surge in remasters and remakes of games from the early 2000s, including a slate of open-world games. Recently, Hangar13 remade Mafia as the Mafia: Definitive Edition, making the game more approachable for new players, while giving older fans a way to re-experience their favourite game. Rockstar Games, meanwhile, plans to release the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, a collection of the PS2-era GTA classics, on multiple consoles on November 11.
The Getaway’s London would be in familiar company were it to make a comeback now, and JaybillsGames certainly echoes Rouse’s sentiment that the virtual London the studio created is what made The Getaway so unique for the time. That attention to detail is one of the reasons why he personally wants to see the series make a return today. Though the fan reverence for real-world brands could also be part of the reason the original hasn’t made a return just yet, as licensing deals would likely need to be renegotiated or assets swapped when that isn’t possible. It’s been his and others hope that Sony will eventually remake the original Getaway, before continuing the series with a third entry detailing what happened to the original’s characters after its ambiguous ending.
For those unfamiliar, The Getaway ends with Hammond escaping the explosion of the cargo ship the Sol Vita and fleeing London, along with his kidnapped son Alex and the hitwoman Yasmin, while Carter must fight his way off the ship through legions of gang members to get out in the nick of time. Those cliffhanger moments leave plenty of room for story to be developed after, and with Black Monday’s pivot to other characters, Hammond and Carter’s stories remain unresolved.