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Martin Edmondson is a name you should probably know. Despite his absence from the forefront of game development in recent years, Edmondson's creative influence still permeates the industry decades after he first started crafting games. Developers such as Rockstar, Black Box, and Criterion note Edmondson's taste for and execution of 1970s-style car chases as an influence for their seminal works. After a lengthy hiatus, he's back in the driving seat at Reflections, the studio he formed in 1984 (now part of Ubisoft), and his first work is a return to the franchise that really put him on the map: Driver. The new title, set in San Francisco, blends familiar themes from the 11-year-old franchise with some fresh ideas that may prove to influence the genre as much now as his early works did at the dawn of the PlayStation generation.

Back in the early days of the original PlayStation, Edmondson's team experimented with a different approach to driving games. Up until this point, the majority of 3D racers drew their inspiration from the classics of the time, notably Test Drive, Ridge Racer, and Need for Speed. In Destruction Derby, Reflections' 1995 release for Sony's fledgling console, he introduced the idea of realistically destructible vehicles and physics-based handling: ideas that had been rarely mastered for, and never properly integrated into, arcade-style driving games. The game was so successful that it spawned three sequels before Edmondson and his team decided to spin the lessons they'd learned into something more ambitious.

In 1999 the studio released the original Driver, an open-world car-chase game influenced by '70s cop shows like Starsky and Hutch and movies like Bullitt. Like Destruction Derby before it, the game proved to be incredibly successful and began a franchise that went on to sell more than 14 million copies.

Controversy rocked Reflections and then-publisher Atari in 2004 when the third game in the series, clumsily dubbed Driv3r, was rushed to market due to financial concerns and consequently flopped, both critically and commercially. Edmondson left the company as a result and later sued the publisher due to "constructive unfair dismissal as a result of Reflections alleged repudiatory breach of a contract of employment that necessitated [his] resignation."

After the messy breakup, Edmondson's brother, Gareth, took over the reins at the studio, which went on to produce the woefully underfunded and poorly received retro-themed 2006 release Driver: Parallel Lines. By the end of that same year, Atari was experiencing deep financial troubles and sold Reflections, along with all associated intellectual property, to Ubisoft for $24 million. The studio, renamed Ubisoft Reflections, quickly released a PSP variant of Parallel Lines dubbed Driver 76 before disappearing from public view.

Meanwhile, Edmondson was taking a break from game development. "After the company was sold, I just wanted to go and do a bunch of completely different things," he says during an interview at an Ubisoft press event a month before the game's official unveiling at E3. "I went to spend some time working with a company working on LCD screen technology, and I did some mobile-phone licensing stuff. But my real passion has always been games. On a day-to-day basis, this is what I really want to be doing."

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