In 1996, Haiku Studios promised some great CD-i titles during the ECTS in 1996 (both in London in spring and in the summer edition) as well as during the E3 in Los Angeles in 1996. It was the first time the market got to know Haiku Studios. One of their high profile titles was Down in the Dumps, planned on both CD-i and CD-ROM. Another CD-i project was the Digital Video title Demon Driver, which was a point and click adventure combined with racing elements. The game design is very similar to that of Down in the Dumps and according to our source, the game engine was very similar.
Haiku Studios existed for a pretty short time and they released two games on CD-ROM: Down in the Dumps and The Koshan Conspiracy. All their other projects were eventually cancelled when the first two didn't sell well and Haiku Studios invested quite some effort/money in CD-i development. Unfortunately, when CD-i was stopped by Philips, Haiku lost a business potential and they solely relied on the CD-ROM efforts, which was apparently not enough.
The driving elements were planned to be full motion video elements and shot in MPEG1, which made it difficult to convert it to a generic CD-ROM version by Haiku Studios. The game started as a CD-i game but this was changed into CD-ROM, but cancelled soon after.
The images you see here popped up by an anonymous source at abandonware-france.org - which is how we were able to contact one of the former developers.
The screen above here is not from a racing sequence but from the intro scene, with the logo of Demon Driver coming up.
The racing elements were made in a way that you could scroll a bit to the left and right, so you could avoid certain objects on the road. To do this, the video was in widescreen mode and perhaps zoomed in so parts would fall outside the screen.
[Thanks, abandonware-france.org]