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Exploring the history of Juiced through prototypes and PC demos

October 21, 2023

21 min. to read

Introduction

Usually, when I dissect games on this blog, I don’t give much attention to demos. However, due to its troubled development cycle, Juiced is an exceptional case. Because of the game changing publishers right before the original release date, the game has changed considerably – and thanks to PC demos and leaked PS2/Xbox prototypes, we have a unique opportunity to experience the game in its original form.

This post is the first in the series of Research-style posts. I intend to keep updating posts in this category as new information comes in instead of publishing new posts about the same game, so keep an eye on this category from time to time 😉 In this post, instead of focusing on modifying Juiced, I want to showcase the game and its history through the evolution of all 6 PC demos that are available online. They all have minor compatibility issues, so for that, I’m releasing the first strictly demo-oriented SilentPatch with two clear goals:

  1. Fix the demos just enough for them to be playable without compatibility issues. I wish to preserve those demos in their original state, so I focused solely on critical bugs. This means that separate Quit and Quit Game options present in the Acclaim demos are here to stay for the sake of history 😉 Despite the limited scope of this SilentPatch, it should still make for an entertaining read – since the bugs I fixed range from incorrect math behind the field of view calculations, compatibility bugs, through (for the first time) a possible compiler/optimizer bug breaking the game’s code!
  2. (Optionally) unlock the demos as much as possible. Early demos had widescreen support from the console versions left unused, and they all ship more content than was made available officially. Since I want to use those PC demos as a showcase of “the game that never came to be”, I want everyone to enjoy them to the fullest.

Not interested in demos and you’d rather experience the full prototype builds? I have something for you too. As part of my research, I was playtesting those builds too, and later I created several small patches for the PS2 versions – including a 60 FPS hack and a patch to make those prototypes playable online via PS2Online! The latest builds to surface online are developed so far that you can even play them through the Internet.

Chapter 1: Who was Juice Games? What is Juiced?

The history of Juiced and Juice Games isn’t told in full without mentioning Rage Software. This British studio was responsible (among other games) for racing games like E-racer or Off-Road Redneck Racing, however, they were also working on Lamborghini – a racing game announced in May 2002 that promised to feature every single car model from this Italian automaker.1

Unfortunately, Rage Software went bankrupt in January 2003, just before they could release the game. Lamborghini became a lost media, with only an Xbox Demo surviving, at least until May 2022, when a nearly finished beta build has been published on HiddenPalace.

Not long after, part of the Rage Software staff founded Juice Games. Even on their official website, they were always upfront about their Rage Software roots:

With a back catalogue that includes TFX, EF2000 and the critically acclaimed but unreleased Lamborghini, Juice Games developed the multi-million unit selling Juiced franchise.

Sometime in 2003, the team secured funding from Fund4Games and a publishing deal with Acclaim Entertainment (who needed a new racing title after losing the publishing rights for Burnout) for their new game, Juice. While the game was never officially referred to by this name, thanks to a very early prototype we know this name was in use at least until November 2003.

By the time Juice Games officially announced the game in January 2004, it was already known by its final name and set for a Fall 2004 release. The development process under Acclaim was relatively well documented, with multiple websites showcasing the game in its early state2 3 4, and with demos on all platforms releasing around July 2004. In fact, you could say that they released one demo too many – on June 9, 2004, a PC demo was released early by the German division of Acclaim, then promptly delisted on June 11, 2004. and scrubbed from the internet thoroughly:

Juiced Demo

The Juiced demo was taken from the server because it does not show the final status of the game. A new demo will be available as soon as possible. Thank you for your interest!

A “final” Acclaim demo was eventually released on July 14, 2004, in a much better state than the first one. While Acclaim has done a good job replacing the early demo with a proper build, some downloads survived thanks to Wayback Machine and we can experience this early demo with all its issues – but more on that later 😉

Thanks to many prototypes surfacing online, we know that by August 2004 the game was nearly complete, and reviews stated the game was to be released in September 2004.

We’ll bring you more on Juiced as its early September release date approaches.

An Amazon listing attributed to Acclaim Entertainment exists and lists the release date as September 7, 2004, although this listing doesn’t use Acclaim’s cover art. Interestingly, THQ listings also exist and they have a different ASIN, but that may just be an US vs. EU Amazon.

Even the original box art was revealed.

September release never happened, though – instead, Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in October 2004 and the game’s future became unknown. This has all happened so late so some boxed copies of the game ended up turning up online years later, although there is no evidence of the game reaching the store shelves.

Before long, THQ and Take-Two both bid to acquire rights to Juiced; Electronics Arts also attempted to join the bid but failed to meet the deadline (and, honestly, it’s good that they didn’t manage to buy a direct competitor to their own Need for Speed: Underground). THQ eventually won and moved the release date to Summer 2005, giving Juice Games 5 more months to make changes to the game. If the reviews were to be trusted, that new iteration was received better than the Acclaim’s version. The public was also able to see the changes themselves first through a round of demos released in January 2005, then in May 2005, just before the game’s release. The game was eventually released on June 13, 2005 in North America and June 17, 2005 in Europe.

This brief recap of the game’s history brings me to the clue of this article. Even though Acclaim’s Juiced and THQ’s Juiced are not entirely different games, the game went through some significant design changes. With no known full PC builds surviving, demos is all we have on this platform. In my analysis, I’ll go through all 6 known PC demos and compare them one by one in the order of their internal timestamps.

Chapter 2: Acclaim Demos

All 3 Acclaim demos have content parity, at least when it comes to officially unlocked content:

When it comes to locked content shipped with the files, there are a few differences. In SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo, all exclusive content is “ported” to the latest Acclaim Demo.

SilentPatch includes identical fixes for all 3 demos, and therefore I’ll be only highlighting them on the latest, most polished demo. Screenshots included in this chapter are all taken with SilentPatch installed, as otherwise I would have to take them in 4:3. However, this is the only modified visual aspect of those demos.

May 2004 Demo

As mentioned previously, this demo was accidentally released online early, and it shows. Acclaim’s attempts to scrub this version off the internet were mostly successful, as the above download link is virtually the only source I could find online. This build has a range of issues, ranging from regular crashes, graphical artifacts, and missing PC features, to an unimplemented Quit (Alt + F4 doesn’t work either!). Even ignoring all those, as far as I can tell, a Nitrous button is completely unmapped in this build, and unlike later builds, this one doesn’t give the player an option to redefine controls.

It doesn’t even have a game icon.

Although this demo has 3 cars available by default, it also ships a 4th car – Toyota MR2. In SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo, this car has been made selectable. Since I included this car in the mod package, it’s now also available in later demos.

Fonts don’t scale either.

Unlike later demos, a Videos menu entry is available, with 3 small game teasers available – although their appearance is slightly glitchy.

SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo unlocks all shipped content in this demo, but there is a twist – in this build, the Sprint races work differently. Rather than taking place on the straight section of the road, much like drag races in other games (or Sprints in the final version of the game), these Sprints take place on small sections of regular tracks. Considering that the game mode works identically to the final game (including forced manual shifting), I initially thought it was a bug. However, as found by Eagle, the final game includes unused minimaps for the Sprint races, and one of those minimaps closely resembles a playable track in this build. It’s just speculation, but it is possible that this demo represents a work-in-progress redesign of this game mode, or it was just not finalized yet and used sections of the existing tracks as placeholders.

Credits: Eagle

I also have not fixed the crashes exclusive to this demo, so it is barely playable even patched. IMO this demo is not worth the effort, except for its rarity.

June 2004 Demo

This build is a prototype demo retrieved from Duffy’s Dreamcast Collection – a bunch of prototypes from an ex-Acclaim beta tester Duffy, who passed away recently. Compared to the May demo, it’s much more polished – all issues I mentioned (except for the texts not scaling to resolution) have been fixed. Comparison screenshots show several obvious differences.

May 2004June 2004
May 2004June 2004
May 2004June 2004

Based on my observations, I could identify the following differences between May and June builds:

Aside from the compatibility issues of the configurator app, this build also introduced a peculiar issue where the HUD flickers randomly. Since the July build was also affected, I will explain this bug in detail below.

July 2004 Demo

This demo is similar to the June build, but with a few additional fixes:

May 2004July 2004
June 2004July 2004
June 2004July 2004

Fixes included in SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo

Since I want those Acclaim demos (especially the latest one) to be enjoyable to their fullest, SilentPatch includes several fixes for the most severe issues present in those builds. As they are demos, they are inherently a work-in-progress product and so most of those issues shouldn’t come as a surprise, for that reason I also have not fixed any gameplay shortcomings. I want those demos to be playable, but I don’t want to distort their “history” by “completing” them. Here are the highlights of this release:

Demo installer issues

By default, June and July demos’ installers don’t include an option to change the installation directory and instead, they always install the game to C:\Program Files (x86)\Acclaim Entertainment\JuicedDemo. Since these installers use InstallShield, I created a Transform file to re-enable the Destination Folder screen.

I strongly recommend downloading it from Downloads and running the installer via run.bat, instead of installing them to Program Files – it’s not a good idea, especially with such older, UAC-unaware games and with SilentPatch redirecting settings to the INI file.

Chapter 3: THQ Demos

Just like with Acclaim, all 3 demos from THQ have content parity. However, this content has been entirely refocused and instead of a free custom race form of the earlier demos, THQ demos are linear:

It’s clear that this demo showcases the game better, as the player gets a taste of what the career mode looks like, and they can experiment with the game’s tuning system on their own, instead of relying on auto-mod from the Acclaim demo.

January 2005 Demo

Out of the box, this demo will refuse to boot on PCs with more than 4 logical CPU cores (fixed in SilentPatch). However, this demo does not exhibit the compatibility issues present in the final game – that is, Alt + Tab does not crash the game and the Juiced requires virtual memory to be enabled is not present.

This demo is also the only one to feature more than one executable – Juiced.exe is compiled with SSE2 instructions, but there is also Juiced_NOSSE2.exe. The final game doesn’t ship multiple executables.

There isn’t much to talk about in this version otherwise, as it’s mostly identical to the final game. However, while working on unlocking its content, I accidentally reached a semi-broken Career screen – despite its brokenness, its layout is distinctly different from the final game, more resembling a career screen from the Acclaim prototypes!

April 2005 Demo (v2.0)

Content-wise, this demo is fleshed out further, but on the technical side it only gets worse – unlike the January demo, this one includes all the incompatibilities of the final game 😕

January 2005April 2005
January 2005April 2005
January 2005April 2005

Generally, this demo appears to be identical to the final game, with all design locked in place. Based on my observations, I could identify the following content differences between January and April builds:

May 2005 Demo (v2.1)

Officially, this patch exclusive for the demo version is supposed to only improve performance:

Juiced by Juice Games - demo v2.0 → v2.1 patch

It has come to our attention that some people may have experienced performance problems with Version 2 of the Juiced PC Demo.

THQ are pleased to announce that a patch to update Version 2 of the demo to Version 2.1.

PLEASE NOTE THIS PATCH WILL UPDATE VERSION 2 OF THE PC DEMO ONLY.

However, there is more to it – the demo patch was compiled 1 month after the initial PC version of the full game, and it also seems to include more changes later seen in the regional releases in Czechia, Poland, and Russia, and possibly also some fixes later rolled out in a v1.01 patch.

mov [esp+34h+var_14], offset aControlsDx9ETx ; "controls_dx9_e.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_10], offset aControlsDx9FTx ; "controls_dx9_f.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_C], offset aControlsDx9GTx ; "controls_dx9_g.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_8], offset aControlsDx9ITx ; "controls_dx9_i.txt"
mov [esp+34h+var_4], offset aControlsDx9STx ; "controls_dx9_s.txt"
April demo only supports EFIGS.
mov [esp+40h+var_20], offset aControlsDx9ETx ; "controls_dx9_e.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_1C], offset aControlsDx9FTx ; "controls_dx9_f.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_18], offset aControlsDx9GTx ; "controls_dx9_g.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_14], offset aControlsDx9ITx ; "controls_dx9_i.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_10], offset aControlsDx9STx ; "controls_dx9_s.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_C], offset aControlsDx9CTx ; "controls_dx9_c.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_8], offset aControlsDx9PTx ; "controls_dx9_p.txt"
mov [esp+40h+var_4], offset aControlsDx9RTx ; "controls_dx9_r.txt"
May demo supports EFIGS, Czech, Polish, and Russian!

But here’s the catch – while the demo’s code supports the additional languages and even attempts to pick them by default based on the user’s system locale, they… don’t ship the language files! The result is that on my OS with a Polish locale selected, I was consistently crashing on startup and couldn’t run this demo at all until I “reverted” support for those 3 languages with SilentPatch 🙃 This almost made me drop support for this patch until a trace with Process Monitor revealed that the game tried to access controls_dx9_p.txt and failed. This, combined with the fact that the game booted fine on Windows Sandbox (that did not use a Polish locale) proved that the issue lies there, and thus is trivially fixable by “cutting” those 3 languages from the demo. Phew.

Fixes included in SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo

Chapter 4: PS2 Prototypes, briefly

As I mentioned earlier, many PS2 and Xbox prototypes of Acclaim’s Juiced have surfaced online. Although they all come from the tail end of the game’s development under the original publisher, they seem to be slightly different from one another. However, comparing all these prototypes in detail would be an enormous task, much bigger than the demo comparisons presented above (that already are quite lengthy). Most of the differences are likely also purely technical and not that entertaining for a casual reader.

That said, during the course of the entirety of this research, I came across a few findings specifically in the PS2 prototypes that warranted some attention, and I’m publishing them in the form of patches for the two prototypes that by the time of writing this are available online – June 11, 2004 and July 28, 2004 builds.

60 FPS

While the Xbox prototypes and the final game (on all platforms) target 60 FPS, both PS2 prototypes are locked to 30 FPS. This patch lifts the FPS cap, allowing the game to hit 60 FPS. When using this cheat in PCSX2, the default configuration tailored for the final version of Juiced prevents these prototypes from maintaining a stable 60 FPS, even with an overclocked emulated CPU. For an optimal experience, several settings should be changed as follows. Please make sure to use Per-Game Settings to change those, as changing those settings globally is guaranteed to cause problems with other games, including the final version of Juiced:

Progressive Scan

The July 28, 2004 build and the final version of Juiced include an option to switch the game to use Progressive Scan by holding X + △, while the June 11, 2004 build doesn’t implement this option yet. With this cheat, Progressive Scan is enabled also on this build.

Fixed Widescreen

Just like I mentioned earlier, all Acclaim’s versions of the game have slightly defective widescreen support and the aspect ratio is “overcorrected”, causing the image to be squashed. With this patch, the widescreen proportions match 4:3 perfectly, the same as I did for PC demos.

4:316:9 (Stock)

DNAS Bypass

On the PlayStation 2, online multiplayer was protected by Dynamic Network Authentication System (DNAS), an authentication protocol that ensured pirated game copies couldn’t access the online functionality. Sony kept this service up for long after the PS2’s end of life, but finally took it offline on April 4, 2016, leaving unmodified games unable to play online. As DNAS was not responsible for the actual online functionality, only for authentication, DNAS Bypass codes have been created for various games to circumvent the authentication entirely. Thanks to the PS2Online project, the final version of Juiced has a DNAS Bypass patch that allows people to play online through OpenSpy, but that patch didn’t work for the prototypes.

With my DNAS Bypass, Acclaim prototypes can connect to OpenSpy and online play is possible just like in the final game! Prototypes and retail games see each other’s lobbies, but they cannot enter them – so it is not possible to accidentally ruin someone else’s fun by joining their game with the wrong version of the game. My tests were also done only on the June build; July build can go online too, but I’ve not had much success creating a lobby.

Downloads

f4mi has created a showcase of SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo and the improvements it makes to Acclaim’s Juiced Demo – check it out if you want to see the new content in action:

All known PC demos of Juiced, as well as SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo can be downloaded from Mods & Patches. Click here to head to the game’s page directly: Download Juiced Demos and SilentPatch & Enhanced PC Demo

For patches targetting the PlayStation 2 prototypes, go to: Juiced (Acclaim, PS2) Downloads

Credits and acknowledgments

  1. RAGE WILL LAUNCH OFFICIAL LAMBORGHINI GAME – LamboCARS.com ↩

  2. Juiced - IGN ↩

  3. Juiced Preview - GameSpot ↩

  4. Juiced | Eurogamer.net ↩

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