Ten years ago our little 3 person game studio published Beach Buggy Blitz. Our previous two mobile games -- Riptide GP and then Shine Runner -- were both water racing games, and for our third racing game we wanted to do something different.

Blitz was Vector Unit's racing game with cars, and also our first free-to-play game. Maybe it was the price, or the appeal of racing through a sun-drenched tropical island, but that bootstrapped little project spawned a whole franchise of Beach Buggy games that would be played by hundreds of millions of players around the world and become the focus of our studio for years to come.

In this post I wanted to share a little history, and some fun facts you might not know about Beach Buggy Blitz and the origins of the Beach Buggy series.

Beach Buggy Blitz started as a traditional racer

Our original design for Blitz was a more traditional arcade racer with a colorful retro art style -- a 70's-themed race festival with cool cats and groovy chicks blasting around California beach towns and smashing everything in sight.

Recognize the palm trees in the background? Yep, those are from Hydro Thunder Hurricane. Some of the other props — like the surfboards — actually made it into the Beach Buggy games.

We weren't sure we could afford to develop it ourselves, so we shopped this idea around to a number of companies to see if they would invest in it. Our pitch doc promised lofty goals:

Slip and slide across sun-drenched sands as one of several colorful characters as you race your way to the top of the grooviest off-road tournament around. Think Motorstorm on the PS3, but set in and around a 70’s beach party instead of a post-apocalyptic rave.

Hmnm... a PS3-quality game on iPhone 4? In retrospect, I'm glad we didn't actually sign up to deliver that. After a couple months of no-investment, we decided to go for Plan B: we would fund the game ourselves. But we'd have to scale back our ambitions.

It was inspired by the granddaddy of endless runners

Back in late 2011 we were re-scoping our game design during the day...but at night, we (and most of the rest of the world) were spending our free time sprinting across broken temple walls and gobbling up treasure.

Temple Run came out in August 2011 and quickly became one of the early mobile mega-hits. It has been copied so many times, it's easy to forget how fresh and fun it was at the time. It captured a spirit of exploration and adventure, and wrapped it in an incredibly simple and engaging game loop. All you had to do was swipe left and right and suddenly you felt like Indiana Jones. And each time you died, you thought, "I bet I coulda gone just a little bit farther..."

Yeah but does their game have giant grabs? Didn’t think so.

Like a lot of other mobile developers at the time, we immediately saw how Temple Run's basic mechanic could be translated into a driving game. Instead of creating dozens of unique and incredibly time-consuming race tracks, we could create little driving challenges that would stitch together into a never-ending world. Instead of an endless runner, we could make an endless driver.

On top of its efficiency, we also admired Temple Run's very simple monetization strategy. You didn't really have to pay anything if you didn't want to -- you could just keep playing. It was simple and fair.

There's a reason you recognize those chickens

Before Blitz, there was Shine Runner.

Shine Runner, with its 4 distinct biomes and 10 levels was built by myself and Ralf in just a few months in 2011. We created a ton of content, and we did it by building everything in the game from small reusable parts.

The Shine Runner waterways were made up of square river tile pieces that fit together on a grid, and then decorated with water surfaces and instanced props which we scaled and rotated for variety. We had one wooden hut and one dock piece that we used to build whole villages, and then we decorated these with trees, grass and other props.

Each Shine Runner tile was 128x128m. You could snap together a whole level for playtesting in about an hour, and then decorate with small details and playtest it over a couple of days.

With Beach Buggy, we started with a lot of those same building blocks...literally. If you compare the 2 games, you'll notice that the docks, the crates and barrels, the rock and dirt textures, even the squawking chickens are all borrowed directly from the swamps of Shine Runner. The beach tiles and much of the terrain was new, but the assembly techniques were the same.

In fact, there are some props that have survived all the way from Shine Runner through Blitz and into Beach Buggy Racing 1 and 2. We've polished and upgraded them a bit over the years but they still serve their purpose well.

Every cave is a portal

When you drive 10, 20, even 50 kilometers through the world in Beach Buggy Blitz, you're exploring and discovering a series of themed environments (like biomes). There's the beach, caves, swamps, lava calderas, etc. As you drive along, the game keeps snapping new setups down the road in front of you, which means as long as you don't run out of time, you can literally drive along for forever.

Each environment theme is composed of a series of "setups", and each setup is a stretch of track with an interesting feature, like a sharp turn or a jump over some water. Within each setup, the world is made the same way we did Shine Runner, built out of square tiles that snap together seamlessly, and then populated with little destructible props like trees and chickens.

In this transition setup, the SetupLinkEnter is to the right, the player jumps across an island and into a cave, at which point they pass through the SetupLink_Exit to new adventures!

The setups all have a plug (like an attach point) at the beginning and the end, so they can be stitched together, one after another. The setups in a theme could snap together randomly in any order, but we needed a way to transition freely from theme to theme, and that's where caves came in.

Tech Sidebar from Ralf!

The snapping together of setups was random, but had to be controlled by many constraints and ‘tendencies’. Some examples are:

Avoid snapping together setups that would end up overlapping with another setup that was still active (imagine 3 right 90 degree turns in a row).
Adhere to a broad strategy of staying somewhat near the origin, to minimize 32-bit floating point precision errors. This includes altitude because some setups would gain and lose elevation. I called this the ‘Origin Magnet’
The further you drove, the higher the difficulty became. Setups/biomes were chosen based on difficulty.
Include the occasional ‘rare’ setup, like the treasure room.
Try not to be too repetitive, and make sure that the whole range of tiles/biomes is traversed in a very long drive.

Each theme could transition into and out of caves. So caves acted as the transitions between different themes as you traveled to beach to cave to swamp to cave to lava, etc. Each time you enter a cave, it's a signal that you (might) be heading into a new environment.

Beach Bro was the original hero

Our first car was the Beach Buggy, of course (inspired by the Meyers Manx beach buggy). But what a lot of folks don't know is that our original character wasn't the now-famous Rez...it was Beach Bro!

I personally always felt like a little bit of a Beach Bro myself -- so an unshaven dude in flip flops and an Aloha shirt felt like a natural fit. He was the first character we developed, and we played with him in our game for most of our development. For a long time, he didn't even have a face, he was just a guy in a hat.

Beach Bro, where is your FACE?! Early days in the game.

In January 2012 artist Timm Sewell became the 3rd person on our Vector Unit team, and she brought a ton of new creative ideas to the project, especially for the characters. After she started we added a whole bunch of other characters like Roxie Roller, Disco Jimmy, Benny the Bunny, and the alien B'Zorp.

Some early driver sketches — not all of these made it into the first version of Blitz, but some of them influenced later characters!

Each new character added to the excitement and color of the game, and each was a distinct archetype (dancer, wrestler, fighter, etc.). As much as we loved Beach Bro we felt like we needed a new character to be the face of the game, someone a little younger, with a bit of attitude.

You know the rest of the story. Rez is now the front man for all the Beach Buggy games. But in my mind Beach Bro is now the experienced older vet of the Beach Buggy Racing circuit, the guy who's been on the scene longer than everyone, and reminds people to stop stressing about winning all the time. Just relax and have fun, man.

The music is also procedural

We love games like Mario Bros where each world has a distinctive musical personality, but for an endless runner we also needed an endless soundtrack. We didn't want a single song that just loops endlessly.

Enter Danny Piccione, who composed and played the bluegrass and country inspired music for Shine Runner. He somehow didn't run away screaming when we told him we wanted a procedural, neverending soundtrack inspired by Dick Dale surf guitar that would adapt on the fly to different environments as the player drives through them. He thought it sounded like a fun challenge.

Over several months, Danny developed the iconic music for Beach Buggy Blitz in pieces, creating unique themes to compliment each area of the world, and then tying together their rhythms and key shifts so that they worked together no matter what order you played them in.

When I asked Danny about making the music for this game, he said:

My biggest memory of the procedural music experience was that sense of adventure that follows you throughout the different parts of the experience. Without making it easy to recognize, the music changing over time in different areas helps reinforce that sense of progression in your adventure & experience, so I like the idea of it evolving over time and location and not having to repeat the same single thing endlessly.

The first release of the game was a Tegra exclusive

Beach Buggy Blitz took our small team almost a year to make, and we did end up funding the whole thing ourselves -- ALMOST. We needed a few extra dollars to get across the finish line, and we also knew that we could use every bit of help we could get for marketing and advertising the game when it was done.

Enter NVIDIA. They had invested in Riptide GP to promote their Tegra 2 mobile chip, and now they were coming out with Tegra 3, and looking for a new game to promote its capabilities. In particular, they wanted something that could show off great physics.

Beach Buggy Blitz had physics: cars zooming around and crashing, cool suspensions animating, destructible objects flying into pieces. It was a good candidate for them, but they asked if we could do a little bit more to really push the Tegra 3..

So we developed two unique setups just for Tegra, featuring landslides with interactive rolling boulders. If you were playing on a Tegra, you would sometimes get assaulted by giant rocks that streamed down from the hills and took out everything in their path, including huts and trees.

We also shipped the game a month early on Tegra devices. The game launched in September 2012 for Tegra phones and tablets, and then came out in October for other Android phones, iPhone, and iPad.

The game has been played by over 80 million people

The first few months after the game was released were nail biters. It didn't get a whole lot of downloads right away, despite admirable marketing efforts by NVIDIA. However, between November and December we got some momentum and our numbers jumped -- almost 2 million players downloaded the game in December, and by its 1st birthday in September 2013, it had been downloaded over 20 million times.

It was never a great money maker, to be honest -- partly because as I mentioned earlier it embodied the "you don't have to buy anything!" approach to free gaming. But it did earn a huge following of fans, eventually racking up over 80 million downloads worldwide.

And of course Blitz paved the way for Beach Buggy Racing in 2014, and Beach Buggy Racing 2 in 2019, which are now far and away the most successful games Vector Unit has ever made.

We are eternally grateful for all the great people who helped us make and promote Beach Buggy Blitz, and for all the fan support we've received for the Beach Buggy games over the years. You folks are the reason we get to keep making these games!

Thank you!

The team at Vector Unit