Watch Dogs: Parts of Cancelled Driver Title Used for Development

It may sound hard to believe, unless you heard the whole story behind it – which Ubisoft North America president Laurent Detoc shared with IGN recently – but the open world hacking adventure Watch Dogs has parts that were originally intended to be used in a now cancelled Driver game.

As Detoc explains, “Watch Dogs wasn’t started as Watch Dogs. They were working on a driving engine, working on something. We had the Driver license. This was years ago. Then we were thinking, ‘no, this is not the way we want to go with a driving game,’ so we cancelled that and restarted.

“It’s not like Watch Dogs started as Watch Dogs. The Watch Dogs project was initially another game. At some point it changed. That’s at least three years ago, and then the Watch Dogs project reused some of the work that had been done on this driving engine.”

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that the Driver project eventually became Watch Dogs. Rather, it’s more accurate to say that Ubisoft decided to cancel Driver and go in a completely different direction.

“The decision was made that there was another driving game being made and this one should be an open-world game where the guy comes out of the car and does other things. Then the team decides to reshuffle itself entirely. A few other people come in, a new creative director, and then they start a new game.

“I wouldn’t say that Driver became Watch Dogs, because that’s not true. That’s not really what happens. What happens is that a game gets cancelled, and then you take pieces of that game to make a new one. We could have had another driving engine from another team in another place, and then it would have been used by the Watch Dogs team.”

The last real Driver title was Driver: San Francisco, a critically acclaimed title. Meanwhile, Watch Dogs is set to release in early 2014 for Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4, Wii U and PC. Thoughts on this revelation? Let us know below.