Please, for the love of all that can be side-swiped into oncoming traffic, make a new Burnout game. This has been one of the five thoughts that fill my head on a daily basis for years at this point, and thanks to a website that’s letting people draw pixel art all over Google Maps, I’ve been given yet another outlet via which to let it out.
That site is wplace, and it’ll look familiar if you’ve been partial to the now defunct Reddit thread r/place at any point. Basically, anyone can hop into its map and colour in pixels to doodle over the top of any place on Earth, creating vast canvases of cool art and scrawled messages to whomever might be watching.
So, naturally, I’ve joined in. First, I had to find a place to write. Enter Paradise City, a swanky resort just next to the airport in Incheon, South Korea. I had to fit my work in next to someone who seems keen to go and see My Chemical Romance in 2026, which is fitting, because we’re united by our lust for things that were good in the 2000s. There are also some pretty creepy looking gingerbread people nearby, but I’m sure my unhinged wonky writing will put them off from messing with my demand: ‘NEw Burnout PlS!’.
I wasn’t done there, though. A resort felt a bit too hopeful for the situation this series has ended up in. So, I found the stretch of Oregon river named Shitten Creek, and have neatly written another ‘New BurnouT! PlS’ up it, for all to see. There’s no other art in this remote bit of the beaver state as of writing, so if you head southwest of Eugene you get a lovely clear look at my struggle to spell out each word while sticking to wplace’s 64-pixels-at-a-time limit.
You do get more than that paltry sum, but you’ve got to wait for a cooldown timer to replenish your stock before you can start drawing again. Will my efforts directly result in current rights holders Electronic Arts seeing and going ‘oh bollocks, we’d better finally greenlight a sequel to Paradise or sell up to someone who will’? Look, anything’s better than just a single cryptic tease from Paradise Remastered co-devs Stellar Entertainment last year that the unnamed arcade racer they’ve got in the works might, possibly, be Burnouty.
Anyway, I’m far from the only one who’s scrawled something game-related across wplace’s Earth. There are Dragon Age fans in Scotland, Hollow Knight: Silksongers everywhere (including near Team Cherry’s HQ in Adelaide), and I’m glad to report someone’s written “It just works” in Bethesda’s hometown of Rockville, Maryland.
Naturally, I also looked at my local area and was glad to find someone had penned the logo of defunct local shop chain Grainger Games, with a number of nearby messages saying they still miss it.
I might come back and write a bunch of other dormant racing series that I’d love to see revived and brought straight to PC in some other places. Los Angeles might be gridlocked with graffiti, but I’ll stay up til the small hours finding room for Midnight Club.
