Jet Moto 3 - Development

Development

Jet Moto 3 would be the first and only released Jet Moto title by developer Pacific Coast Power & Light and publisher 989 Sports. SingleTrac had been purchased by GT Interactive, and the original developers had no interest in doing a third Jet Moto title. According to former 989 Sports president Kelly Flock, Pacific Coast Power & Light was "nearby and cheap" and was headed by Don Traeger, who had formerly worked on the Road Rash series, so the decision was made to use that studio for development.

Like its predecessor, the game supported the DualShock Controller. The Jet Moto 3 graphics engine and developer toolkit were built from the ground up by lead programmer Ming Lee. Lee was challenged to increase the framerate and graphic quality of the game. To do so he decomposed the opcodes of the PlayStation's graphics processor and rewrote some of the PlayStation's library calls. This in essence allowed Lee to access the PlayStation hardware as he saw fit, allowing him to optimize his code specifically to his hardware calls. In doing so, however, the developers broke compatibility with first generation PlayStation consoles, something that was not caught until after the game was released. Fellow programmer Matt Gaston focused his energies on AI, physics and user interface programming.

With programming optimizations in place, developers were able to use the additional power to add weather effects previously unheard of. Lee noted in an interview with PlayStation Museum that rain particles "actually streak in 3D according to your camera speed", noting that other games used a 2D effect on the game's HUD to produce the effect of rain. Colored fog was also shown in one level, something that the PlayStation console could not do natively, and had only previously been seen in one game, Spyro the Dragon. Real time lighting was also added to the game. Jet Moto 3 would also use CGI cutscenes for the game's introduction, a first for the Jet Moto series. It was released on the PlayStation Network on February 21, 2008 but was removed shortly thereafter for undisclosed reasons.