BROTHERS Martin and Gareth Edmondson hope to speed away from their rivals when their new car chase computer game hits the shops next week.

Driver San Francisco is set to reach game players around the world, going on sale first in Europe, the Middle East and Asia on September 2 and then in North America four days later.

It has been four years in the making, with work contracted out to places as far afield as China and Vietnam.

But the project was masterminded at the Newcastle Business Park studio of Reflections where Gareth Edmondson is managing director and older brother Martin is creative director.

There, a workforce which peaked at 220-strong, and with several nationalities represented, has been striving to take computer gaming to a new level.

Reflections traces its history back to the early 1980s when Martin, then a schoolboy in Ponteland, started making rudimentary computer games with a friend.

“I took the very first game that we wrote to a publisher and he liked it and it went to number one,” he said.

“I didn’t really know it at the time but I was stumbling on a career. We had a hobby which made money.”

His Reflections studio has been sold three times but in 2006 it became part of the Paris-based Ubisoft computer games giant, which has studios around the world. Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle, however, has led on the fifth and latest in the Driver series. The first, released in 1999, won a Bafta.

With serious investment from Ubisoft and supreme attention to detail, big things are expected of Driver San Francisco which boasts all sorts of innovations for game-playing adrenaline junkies.

Martin’s teams of designers have recreated San Francisco on the screen, complete with the Golden Gate Bridge and those hills down which many an iconic, semi-airborne TV or movie car chase has taken place.

Many of these are referenced in the game, notably Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen, which features a 10-minute car chase through San Francisco.

Driver San Francisco gives gamers the chance to get behind the wheel of Detective Bullitt’s Ford Mustang.

A major innovation is that the game allows the player, in the person of Detective John Tanner, to shift instantly from one exciting-looking car to another in pursuit of bad guy Charles Jericho.

More than 100 different types of car appear in the game, although delicate negotiations took place with manufacturers who did not all warm instantly to the idea of their top models being shown getting damaged or, in one case, speeding away with a kidnap victim in the boot.

Some eye-catching “muscle cars” were assembled yesterday for the media preview with the Edmondson brothers posing beside Nigel Fleck’s 1968 Dodge Charger. Mr Fleck, from Bedlington, said in 44 years it had done a “genuine” 55,000 miles. At eight miles per gallon, that’s perhaps not surprising.

Gareth, while reluctant to talk about the next project, said: “This game is very important for Reflections. The first in the Driver series sold 15 million units globally. We have worked for a long time on this one and we are very excited about it.”