What a blast from the past! The venerable Driver series returns to the PC in the form of the community port REDRIVER2. The impressive effort makes Driver 2 on PC finally a reality. Watch the trailer for the mod here!
At what point does a mod stop being a mod, and becomes a game on its own? REDRIVER2 is so much more than just a mod. It’s an enormous effort by a small yet highly talented and dedicated team of programmers that aims to bring Driver 2 to PC.
The team, led by ‘Soapy’, reverse-engineered the PlayStation 1 original Driver 2 and created an open-source native port on PC. It’s quite literally one of the most tedious and difficult ways known to port a game.
REDRIVER2’s base is the regular commercial PS1 release. Starting from that, the programmers meticulously recreated how the game works, how it functions on the deepest level of programming, and ultimately recreated it back for modern PCs.
It cannot be understated just how much work this was. Thus, we are immensely thrilled and thankful that someone still did it. That’s because, Driver 2 never made it on PC. Ever. The title has the dubious honor of only releasing on the PlayStation 1. We don’t count the GBA port of the same name since it bears so little resemblance, it’s really its own game.
REDRIVER2 is still an ongoing project, but the team now released the first alpha of it to the public. The process to get the game going is a bit cumbersome at the moment, but the team wrote a handy guide how to do it here. Suffice to say, you’ll need the original Driver 2 as REDRIVER2 require the disc images.
20 years is a long time but with the franchise on ice, REDRIVER 2 is the perfect place to relive the glory days of the series.
