Burnout

Burnout is the fast, high-risk arcade racing game that launched Criterion Games' long-running Burnout series. Released for PlayStation 2 in 2001 and published by Acclaim Entertainment, it puts the emphasis on speed, traffic and nerve rather than licensed cars or careful simulation driving. Races take place on public-road courses inspired by European and American settings, where three rival cars are only part of the danger. Civilian traffic, oncoming lanes, junctions and roadside obstacles make every pass a gamble.

The core idea is the Burn meter. Driving aggressively builds boost: players can drift quickly through bends, skim past traffic, drive against the flow of vehicles, avoid impacts at the last moment and complete clean laps. Filling the meter unlocks a Burnout, a powerful acceleration burst that turns a narrow opening into a potential overtake. The system creates a useful tension: the most dangerous route through a race can also be the quickest, but one wrong move can erase the advantage.

Crashes are a defining part of the experience, even though this first entry treats them as costly mistakes rather than a scoring activity. A collision with traffic, scenery or an obstacle throws the car into a multi-angle crash sequence and returns the driver to the road with lost momentum and boost. Learning when to push into an opposing lane, when to drift, and when to back off is therefore as important as picking the fastest line. Skilled players can keep earning boost while using it, allowing long chains of acceleration when they can maintain control.

Championship mode provides the main progression, grouping races into increasingly demanding events. Winning opens Face Off challenges against special opponents, and success in those contests unlocks additional vehicles. The car selection includes fictional vehicle types such as compact cars, saloons, pickups and muscle cars rather than real-world makes. Single Race, Time Attack and split-screen two-player options provide shorter alternatives, while the connected course design also supports longer endurance events after the European and American championships are completed.

Burnout's roads are arranged as linked sprints, so a race can move between locations without pretending to be a realistic open world. Different regional traffic details help distinguish the settings, while the routes concentrate on high-speed corners, blind crests and busy lanes. That design makes the PlayStation 2 original feel deliberately immediate: it is a racer about reacting to hazards at speed and converting risky driving into momentum.

Criterion developed Burnout over nearly two years, with creator Alex Ward citing the driving and crash imagery in the films C'etait un rendez-vous and Ronin as influences on its conception. The game was built with Criterion's RenderWare technology and established the fundamentals the later series would develop in different directions. Its GameCube and Xbox editions followed in 2002, but this PlayStation 2 release is the original 2001 version: a compact arcade racer where boosting through traffic is both the reward for bold driving and the reason the next crash is never far away.