VIDEO games giant Bizarre Creations is launching a new game on Friday it hopes will become a franchise to match the success of its smash hit Project Gotham Racing titles.

Bizarre, which employs around 200 people in south Liverpool, has spent 30 months developing Blur – its first release in two years.

Blur is what Bizarre calls a “powered-up racing” game. Rather than being an ultra-realistic game where the fastest driver wins, players can use “power-ups” to speed up or take out their rivals.

Studio director Brian Woodhouse hopes the game will become the first in a new franchise.

Bizarre’s previous successes included the four Project Gotham Racing titles for the XBox consoles, which together sold over 6m copies.

“This is a long-term strategy for us,” said Mr Woodhouse. “We’ve built a new game that’s almost a new sub- genre in the racing category. We’ve got a lot to build on.”

Blur has been designed to appeal to a wider audience than might be attracted to a traditional racing title.

Mr Woodhouse said: “We wanted to break away from the traditional racer and produce something for the mass market, rather than just something where you do laps and try to break somebody’s time.

“We wanted to break into an area we’d never been into before – and an area no-one else was going into.

“If you’re a hardcore racer it will appeal, because of the multi-player mode and because it’s great fun. But it will also appeal to the mass market – it’s something you can pick up and play, whether for ten minutes or ten hours.”