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Activision announced that it has acquired U.K.-based video game developer Bizarre Creations, one of the world’s leaders in racing games, a $1.4 billion market that is the fourth most popular video game genre and represents more than 10% of the total video game market worldwide.

This acquisition represents the latest step in Activision’s ongoing strategy to enter new genres. Last year, Activision entered the music rhythm genre through its acquisition of RedOctane’s Guitar Hero franchise, which is one of the fastest growing franchises in the video game industry.

With more than 10 years’ experience in the racing genre, Bizarre Creations is the developer of the innovative multi-million unit franchise Project Gotham Racing, a critically-acclaimed series for the Xbox and Xbox 360. The Project Gotham Racing franchise currently has an average game rating of 89%, according to GameRankings.com and has sold more than 4.5 million units in North America and Europe, according to The NPD Group, Charttrack and Gfk.

Bizarre Creations is currently finishing development on the third-person action game, The Club, for SEGA, which is due to be released early 2008. They are also the creators of the top-selling arcade game series Geometry Wars on Xbox Live Arcade.

Bizarre Creations and its games have won numerous industry awards including: Best Racing Game for Project Gotham Racing 2 from the prestigious British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA); the Industry Grand Prix Award from Develop; MCV’s UK Development Team 2006 award; Best Racing/Driving Game from IGN; Game of the Year from OXM and Gamespy for Project Gotham Racing 3; and IGN’s Best XBLA Game for Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.

As far as I’m aware Project Gotham Racing 5 will still be published by Microsoft, seeing as they have the rights to the Xbox-exclusive franchise developed by Bizarre Creations.

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Project Gotham Racing 4 isn’t released on Xbox 360 until October 2nd in America and October 12th in Europe, but developer Bizarre Creations already comments how they will improve Project Gotham Racing 5.

Project Gotham Racing 4 lead designer Ged Talbert mentions about the inevitable racer sequel that: “Obviously Gotham 4’s about to come out and we’re really happy with it, but behind the scenes we’ve already started ripping our game to pieces. We know where we failed in certain areas; for instance we wanted more trackside damage, more particles and smoke effects, a bigger damage system - and all of these things are being stripped out in a post-mortem. Next time it’s more on the detail. That’s what we think; we think the devil’s in the detail. Anyone can make a good looking game but the top games blow you away by being super-realistic, adding things that you didn’t expect and surprising you.

I personally believe there’s a lot we can do by taking our vehicles we’ve already got and putting them into different, more interesting environments. It doesn’t always mean outside of the city, it just means getting lets say more elevation - somewhere we can finally do big jumps. That’s what we’re looking for in the next game; going to deserts - that kind of stuff. Seeing how they affect the gameplay, see if we can get Kudos working there as well. We could bring cruisers in, we could bring ATV-type bikes in. None of these are definite, but there’s are whole world of things for us to do,” quotes CVG in an interview.

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