Project Gotham 5 rumours hot up, suggest Rare as co-developer

Project Gotham 5 has been scrutinised heavily over on the NeoGAF boards, and collected evidence suggests that Rare has been hiring a lot of talent from top racing studios lately. Assess for yourselves here.

You can check out the entire thread here, courtesy of the NeoGAF community and collator TheOddOne.

The evidence shows that Rare has been hiring from top racing studios such as Codemasters, Ubisoft Reflections and Motorstorm outfit Evolution Studios. Together the new-hires gave experience on games such as DIRT Showdown, DIRT 3, Driver: San Francisco, Motorstorm Apocalypse, Driver: San Francisco and more.

However, this would contradict rumours that suggest new team Lucid Games is working on Project Gotham 5. We reported on some curious teaser art and hiring information here, that also suggested the studio was snapping up racing talent.

The NeoGAF thread adds that Lucid Games has hired talent that has worked on games such as Blur, Sonic All Stars Racing: Transformed, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Project Gotham 2-4 and more.

Could it be that both teams are collaborating on Project Gotham Racing 5?

We also reported that the PGR trademark was recently renewed, suggesting that the series is due for a comeback.

With the Xbox 720 reveal rumoured for April 26, and bearing in mind that PGR 3 helped launch Xbox 360, could we see PGR 5 debut alongside Microsoft's new rig? That's the rumour we reported on here.

Finally, an artist at Rare has posted some race-heavy concept art on his blog. While another forum poster has suggested the game in question has been canned, it still begs questions as to what Rare is up to.

Check out the thread here, it's really superb stuff.