Driver 3

Driver 3 (or Driv3r) is a sequel to the well received Driver 2 that came out in 2004 and was published by Atari.

Driv3rgate
The original Driver game sold one million copies on the PlayStation, so Atari had high expectations for the game, they spent so much money on advertising the game that they needed Driver 3 to sell 4 million copies to break even. There was one problem though, their rivals, GTA. The GTA games, Grand Theft Auto lll And Vice City both received critical acclaim and were blowing the Driver franchise out of the water, so Atari needed to rush this game to Christmas before GTA: San Andreas came out, so instead of waiting 6 months, they rushed it. They were scared that the game was going to be commercial failure, so they bribed the Future Gaming magazine to give their game a 9/10 on PSM2 And Xbox World two months before the game came out, Atari said that they would patch all the glitches, but that never happened.

Reception
People were excited for the game, but when it came out, it was a disappointment, recieving mixed to average reviews on Metacritic. The Cininnati Enquirer gave it a 3/5 that the game was buggy, its controls were responsive and the animations were incredibly stiff, while Playboy gave it an 88% for its maps, graphics, and how realistic it was, and The Times gave it a 5/5 for its graphics, vehicles, driving and difficulty. Gamespot gave it a 5/10 and Eurogamer gave it a 3/10, with Eurogamer even saying that it was the biggest gaming letdown of all time.

Driv3rgate Reception
Once people saw Future’s Scores, they questioned why the scores were so high for such a bad game, so Future deleted threads of the game but people who made the threads kept making new accounts, so Nick Ellis, the editor of PSM2, said that they stand by there score, saying that a 9/10 was a little to high but they criticized Gamespot for the low 3/10 score. Future deleted every post of it.

Atari was also being criticized by critics and audiences alike so Atari hired a PR/ QA team called Babel Media to post fake positive reviews for the game, they made the accounts “billywigs and kingchopper”, but they were caught, so they confessed to being part of the Babel Media team but they denied that Atari payed them to do so. Atari and Future have since buried up the drama.

Sales
The game sold a poor 750,000 copies, they were 320,050,000 behind their budget, and Atari suffered a huge loss from that. Atari eventually sold the Driver‘s license to Ubisoft in 2006, who made 5 sequels until they eventually turned the franchise into the Watchdogs franchise. Atari Inc. and Atari Interactive filed bankruptcy in 2013 to sell off from the profit they lost from Atari SA.

Links
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_3

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/drivergate/drivergate.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_2

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_San_Andreas

https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Driv3rgate

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_Vice_City