Slipstream 'Blue Hour' expansion arrives June 28th, 2023

“The blue hour is a brief period of the day, after the sunset but before the night, when the sky takes on a deep blue tone. It’s long been appreciated by painters and photographers because of the beautiful and unique properties of light during this time. The fading light from the sun illuminates everything softly, and the deep blue sky creates a great contrast with the usually yellow-ish urban lamps. It’s a moment of natural beauty that happens every day. And as times of the day have always been a theme in Slipstream, in this expansion I joined forces with Effoharkay and took the opportunity to explore it a little more.” - Sandro de Paula, aka “ansdor”.

All the new tracks are set in real world locations, more specifically in exotic or unexpected locations in Europe: Marseille, Pompeii, Transylvania, Granada and Edinburgh. Ansdor’s skills have improved a lot since 2018 and he also added many new features to the Slipstream engine, and the new tracks make heavy use of them, like a fog system, a dynamic lighting system that allows cars’ headlights to illuminate the track in real time. The expansion looks like an early 32-bit game, while the original was more like a late 16-bit game. As a natural technical evolution, he wanted to try new techniques and do artistic experiments that weren’t possible in the original.

On the music side, Effoharkay’s goal was to maintain some consistency of the same synthy vapor OST but without relying on synth sounding instruments. Most of the songs were inspired by the eccentric electric club-ish racing tunes of Ridge Racer 4, Need for Speed, and Wipeout. He wanted it to be pulsing and driving and diverse, while not worrying about pristine production quality or structure.