As a follow-up title, Sperry's team, now with Alex Ward on board, developed a racing game that showed off the capabilities of the newest iteration of RenderWare, named Burnout, also published by Acclaim in 2001.

[1] Burnout was aimed to be an arcade-style racer, placing fun over realism as series like Gran Turismo offered.

Electronic Arts (EA) acquired Criterion Games as well as the rights to the Burnout series and RenderWare for an estimated US$48 million that year.

Criterion however could not find a way for that to work and the project was dropped; it is believed by journalists that this would ultimately be released in the 2007 game Skate by EA Black Box.

[11] Around 2008–2009, some of Criterion's staff had jokingly asked if they could work on an installment in the Need for Speed franchise, which put more focus on stunt-type driving than collisions.

EA allowed them to develop a title, 2010's Hot Pursuit which was both critically and financially successful and led to Criterion becoming the lead studio for the Need for Speed franchise.

In 2013, oversight of the Need for Speed series was transferred to EA's newly formed subsidiary, Ghost Games, as well as 80% of the developers at Criterion; the remaining staff served as advisors.

[13] In April of that year, Alex Ward said that Criterion would be steering away from the racing genre, placing the future of the Burnout series into question.

That year's instalment, Need for Speed Heat, would also feature loose elements from the Burnout series, such as billboard destruction, ramps located throughout the game world, and a diverse terrain.

In-race rewards are given to a player if they take risks such as driving towards oncoming traffic or deliberately attempting to make their opponents crash.

It was not the racing element of the game but the slow motion replays of crashes that show the cars being deformed realistically that brought Burnout to the attention of the public.

[44] Point of Impact also introduced a Pursuit mode, where the player drives a special police car and must chase down a speeding racer and stop them before the racecourse ends.

Paradise is also the first Burnout game to designate manufacturers and realistic car model names for its vehicles (such as the "Carson Annihilator" or "Nakamura Ikusa GT").

For the next game, the team began developing a granular playback system, which shipped with the Xbox 360 release of Burnout Revenge.