Discover the ninth wonder

Asphalt 9: Legends is the winner of a 2019 Apple Design Award, which recognises the artistry and technical achievements of developers who reflect the best in design, innovation and technology on Apple platforms.

When it came time to start planning Asphalt 9: Legends, the ninth instalment of the successful racing franchise, Gameloft’s developers started with a simple idea: not thinking about it as a mobile game at all.

“The biggest problem we had was this prejudice about what is possible on a phone,” says Gameloft’s technical director Catalin Vasile. “We want to reinvent our own expectations, to get over these preconceived ideas and feedback like ‘That’s not possible, make it smaller, make it more lightweight.’”

Gameloft’s Asphalt series is certainly no stranger to acclaim. For more than a decade, it has offered console-grade arcade racing with all the trimmings: incredible graphics, blazing speed, exceptional production values and gameplay that pushes the boundaries of hardware performance.

Like previous editions, Asphalt 9 is deep enough for advanced players but easy enough that anyone can get behind the wheel. And although you might think the game is produced by a bunch of car nerds, that’s not the case. “Personally, I don't drive that much,” says Vasile. “I’d call myself more of a cruiser.”

From his Barcelona office, Vasile shares how Gameloft keeps the Asphalt motor running.

We’ve seen lots of racing games, as you can imagine. There are simulators, which focus on accuracy and the precision of driving. There are games that focus on the graphics experience, just a way from getting from point A to point B in the narrative. And then you have arcade games.

We wanted Asphalt 9 to be an arcade game, not because we necessarily like those best but because we wanted players to get that cinematic experience – the control, the feeling that they couldn’t believe what they were doing. We wanted to see the grins on people’s faces.

The first thing was to figure out what made Asphalt 8 work. What’s the core experience? How simple of a game can you make that’s still an Asphalt game? Once you know that, you can keep the core mechanics untouched but improve on everything else.

From the beginning we acknowledged that cars are the main characters, so most of the freedom and processing resources go into rendering and simulating. This allowed us to include new details in Asphalt titles: animated spoilers and air brakes that react to the player’s control, convertibles with working soft tops, car interiors re-created in much higher detail.

The in-house Jet Engine was rewritten from scratch to allow console-quality graphics on a battery-powered device. All game assets were created around the new freedom that Jet allowed: huge numbers of polygons, big detailed textures and lots of physics.

Of course, none of this matters if the loading times suffer, so Jet comes with cutting-edge compression techniques that achieve sub-second loading times and a tiny install size by today’s standards.

We have such a dedicated community. We just received a letter from a 5-year-old who sent us his own car design. You can imagine the illustration from a 5-year-old who’s making his first supercar – it was amazing!

Our lead artist took that drawing, redrew it in 3D onto a screenshot of the game, and sent it back to him with a thank-you note. Having that kind of community is a huge achievement for us.

Asphalt 9: Legends

Car Simulator: Drive & Drift

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