FULL INTRO – Driver: You Are the Wheelman (1999) – PS1 Retro Game Cinematic

Before GTA III, before Midtown Madness, before Mafia — there was a PlayStation 1 game bold enough to drop an entire open city in front of you and simply say: drive. That game was Driver: You Are the Wheelman, released in 1999 by British studio Reflections Interactive (today Ubisoft Reflections). And for an entire generation of players, its cinematic intro is one of those memories that just sticks — up there with the sound of a PS1 disc loading or a favourite Saturday-morning cartoon jingle.

The Intro That Felt Like a 70s Movie

Driver's opening is, to this day, one of the most celebrated cinematics on PS1. At a time when 99% of games started with a menu screen and nothing else, Reflections delivered a sequence edited like a seventies cop-movie trailer: low camera angles, lens flare, huge American cars drifting and chasing each other down concrete streets, all set to a heavy jazz score composed by Allister Brimble.

The effect was immediate. Before you'd pressed a single button, the game had already convinced you that you were stepping into a noir world inspired by classics like Bullitt (1968), The Driver (1978) and The Seven-Ups (1973). The protagonist of it all? John Tanner, a former racing driver turned undercover detective for the New York police department — embedded deep in the underworld of car theft and illegal street racing.

This intro wasn't just decoration. It was a statement of style.

The Traumatic Parking-Garage Tutorial

If you played Driver, you don't even need to read the next paragraph. You already know. Your palms are already sweating.

For anyone who didn't live through it: the mandatory underground car-park tutorial is legendary as an exercise in pure suffering. Before you could touch a single mission or free-roam level, the game locked you in a stage where Tanner had to prove he was a real driver — running through a list of manoeuvres against a brutally tight timer. Burnout. 180. Brake to the mark. Reverse 180. Slalom. Lap time.

Get one wrong? Back to the start. The problem was that Driver's tank-like controls, combined with physics that were relatively realistic for a 1999 game, turned that list into torture. There were reports of players stuck in the tutorial for days, convinced the game was broken. It wasn't. It was just genuinely hard.

But anyone who got through it felt like they'd earned the right to be there. It was an admission test.

Why Driver Mattered So Much

The game sold more than 6 million copies on PS1 — an absurd number for a driving title of that era — and was crucial in paving the way for the urban sandbox games that would dominate the 2000s.

The four playable cities (Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York) were compact but recognisable versions of the real thing, with faithful architecture, signage and topography. The car physics prioritised a sense of weight, suspension and drift — something rare in a market dominated by Ridge Racer-style arcade racers. The police "heat" system, with patrol cars trying to box you in, is clearly a direct ancestor of GTA's wanted-level system.

Reflections had already proven its technical chops with Destruction Derby, but Driver was where they became a global reference point. It's no coincidence that open-world developers — including the Houser brothers, in interviews about GTA III — cite Driver as a direct influence.

The Legacy: A Bumpy Ride for the Franchise

After the first game's runaway success, the franchise had its ups and downs. Driver 2 (2000) innovated by letting you get out of your car and jack another one — two years before GTA III popularised the idea. Driver 3 (2004) was a notorious technical disaster, plagued by bugs and sluggish controls. Driver: San Francisco (2011), the last mainline entry, was a small, critically acclaimed gem built around its "shift" mechanic for switching between vehicles.

Silence since 2011. Ubisoft absorbed Reflections, which today works on other projects (it contributed heavily to Watch Dogs: Legion and The Crew). The Driver franchise remains in hibernation, but the flame kept alive by retro-gaming fans hasn't gone out.

Watch It on the Channel

We've published the full intro on our YouTube channel — worth watching whether you lived through the PS1 era and want to relive that grey controller in your hands, or you never played it and want to understand why developers still cite Driver in interviews today. If you're into driving games, the channel also has a Honda Civic challenge in Need for Speed. Hit play, turn up the volume and pay attention to the soundtrack: it's pure seventies cinema in video-game form.

Did you play Driver back in the day? Did you pass the car-park tutorial on your first try, or did you break a controller along the way? Tell us in the comments — we want to hear the story.