PC Gamer contributor Jeremy Peel has a great feature in VG247 about how the game that would become "Watch Dogs" began as an ambitious reboot of Ubisoft's flop "Driver" series. The last game was 2011's Driver: "Driver: San Francisco," which you can see in the header image, which I thought was a blast, but unfortunately didn't turn out to be a huge hit. Since then, the Driver engine has been sleeping.

The "Driver" project, which would become "Watch Dogs," was being developed at Ubisoft Montreal at about the same time as "Driver: San Francisco" was being completed at Ubisoft Reflections. Reflections had been developing this series, but this was the first attempt for Montreal, which had the ambition to give Driver a new and ambitious form.

"It was always going to be modern," a Ubisoft official told Peel. 'There's driving as well as walking, parkour, and combat, all set in an open-world metropolis, and the main hook has always been modern technology and hacking.' After trying to fit this concept into the Driver franchise, the decision was made to make it its own new IP.

This embryo of Driver was apparently so early that there were no textures on the cars, but the question was not so much what the driving and city would look like, but how far away the technology and hacking elements would be from the Driver concept. Of course, such shifts are hardly uncommon in big-budget development, and perhaps the most infamous example is Ubisoft's gold standard "Assassin's Creed," a reboot of "Prince of Persia" It began as.

The exact timeline of when this driver became "Watch Dogs" is unclear, but the commercial failure of "San Francisco" was probably the final nail in the coffin, and Peel's Ubisoft source summarizes the changing nature of the project this way: "Ubisoft Montreal did their own thing and convinced Yves [Gilmo, CEO] that they could do it.

The full article goes into more detail and is well worth a look if you are nostalgic for Tanner and the car-chasing days of the 70s. It's sad that the concept and setting of Driver was such a good fit, especially in a series that might have been better suited for a GTA-style transition to an open world C'est la vie.

Interestingly enough, when we asked, "While the Legion Easter eggs are nice, Ubisoft should make a new Driver," we lamented last year.