My favorite games of all time, the story of Carmageddon part 1...

I was reminded about one of my favorite games of all time recently, and I decided to do a blog about it. As I started to think about what to say it dawned on me that the game deserved so much more than a single post. A lifetime ago I created a series on 1UP covering my favorite games. Each Friday for 20 weeks I unveiled the most important games to me. The criteria was simple. If I was stuck on a deserted island, and could only play one game for the rest of my days which one would it be? Most of my friends, and family knew what the number one game was. The fun part was guessing what the other nineteen would be. Instead of just reposting the series here, as I had with other classic entries, I decided to review the list. Perhaps it was time to rewrite it, change the order of games, or even replace some entirely. I would be starting in the middle of my list, game #5 to be precise. It was important to do a deep dive, and put this game in context rather than just highlight a few points with some screen shots. I think that is something that is missing with a lot of games journalism. Many are quick to drop a review, or do a making-of series, but they don’t put the game in context. I think it’s important that people know about the market, what their contemporaries were doing, or even what was happening in the world at the time. I plan on doing the same for all the other games that I consider my favorites. So let’s get into it.

Chances are you’ve heard of the game Carmageddon. Maybe you’ve played it, maybe you even have a mobile version on your phone right now. Or maybe you weren’t even born when the series came out. Anything is possible, so let me try to explain why this game was special to me. I have a list of Four Elements that make a great game, if you can hit all four points simultaneously then you have the perfect title. My four rules are: Control is king, Create an Immersive World, Make this an Original Experience, and the Music must be icing on the cake. The first rule is simple, you can have a game with so-so graphics, and art design, but if the control is rock solid then I am in 100%. The visuals aren’t as important to me. Creating an immersive world means just that. Show, and don’t tell me about this world. Can I pick up clues about this world just by looking, and exploring? What shaped it, how long has it been there? If the game can do this without having it explained in lengthy cut scenes then I’ll fall right into it.

Another important question I ask about the title. Is this an original experience? Is the game doing something that has rarely, if ever, been attempted? To put it in other words, does this have original game play? Lots of games try new material, and fail. It’s hard to get publishers to take a risk on a new idea, rather than a sequel. When the studio tries something new, and gets it right however, the whole world pays attention. Lastly, does the music, and does the sound design help with the experience? Having a bunch of songs from pop artists, or celebrity voice actors in a game does nothing for me really. Sometimes original music, or non-mainstream music gets the most effective response. Every game on my favorites list has these four elements, the degree of how much each element comes through helps make a good game become excellent. Carmageddon does a smashing job (no pun intended) of getting all of the elements right.

I would have laughed if you told me while I was growing up that one of my favorite games of all time would be on the PC. It was an impossible idea. Nobody in my family, or extended family owned one. Computers were for rich people. My brothers, and I were mostly console players. Our parents made just enough to afford a small apartment, and get a console every few years, and a handful of games which we all had to share. Like many Gen-Xers we grew up at the literal dawn of the console. Our first system was the Atari 2600. This was followed by the NES, Genesis, SuperNintendo, Nintendo64, Saturn, GameCube, Dreamcast, Playstation, Xbox, Wii… well you get the idea. We had almost all of the major consoles at one point, or another, including several portable systems. We also had a local arcade so we considered ourselves well-rounded game players. The one thing we never had was a PC. Those were for our rich friends. A $1000 PC was simply out of the question for a family of modest means. Thankfully when we visited our friends in middle school, and high school we got a chance to try out the hottest PC games. When we entered college it was the first time that computers were freely accessible to us. That was the moment that everything changed for me as a game player.

I spent a lot of time in the computer lab doing tons of writing for my history, English, journalism, anthropology, and creative writing classes. The lab techs were mostly in the university, and working part-time in the computer lab as well. They showed me how to use the PC, and Mac computers. Each day my head was overflowing with new ideas. My teachers were amazing in class, but I’d learn a lot of new things from the computer techs as well. The lab coordinator was an amazing lady named Alison. She would see me there every day doing homework, and she noticed that I’d help the people that came into the lab that didn’t know how to work a computer. I had such a natural calm disposition that she offered me a job. I thought she was joking, until a few months later when she asked me again to work for her. I couldn’t believe I was being offered a part-time job to essentially do my homework, and help the occasional student with questions. I accepted, and it was a crash course in learning the other programs on the Mac, and PC that I would have to help with. Over time my brothers were also hired in the labs. One of my favorite resources was a magazine called MacAddict. It wasn’t as stuffy as the other Mac magazines. It was definitely written for my demographic. It helped me learn the ins-and-outs of the system. Plus it came with a demo CD. Each month I’d get to check out some tools, and apps. Some were useful for work, most were garbage. Of course the best part were the game demos.

My world of gaming had expanded exponentially thanks to the lab. Mac, and PC demos were now available to my brothers, and I. We learned of new titles months in advance, we got hands-on time with games that helped shape various genres. Including what we thought were smaller studios that would eventually change the world. One of those was a company called Bungie. People were familiar with the first person shooter (FPS) thanks to games by id studio. Titles like Wolfenstein 3D (1992), and Doom (1993) were familiar to us. My brothers, and I got to play the PC versions when we visited our friends in high school. After high school, as the FPS genre evolved we were able to try out demos, and eventually full titles for games like Marathon (1994), and Quake (1996) in the college computer lab. Sometimes we’d get the console version, and sometimes we were content that we got to experience the computer-exclusive. Our friends that were console purists had no idea what they were missing out on. We had friends that swore up, and down that Nintendo was the only company that could make great games. We had Playstation fans that pledged allegiance to Sony, even though they had barely entered the market. My brothers knew that the world of gaming was so much bigger than they could have known, if only they tried out all of these awesome games. Oni, also by Bungi was one of the last demos we played. Most of the lab techs finished university, by 2001 or had transferred. Halo was originally announced for the Mac, which made us happy. When Microsoft bought out Bungie, and made Halo an Xbox exclusive we knew the console wars of our adult years would never be the same.

In the mid ‘90s there wasn’t a Steam Store, the internet was restricted to dial-up modems at home. Rich kids maybe had fiber, or ISDN so their dad could work at home. So there was not really a way to download game demos. Physical media was important, and demos came on CD which were included with most magazines. This was true for console games as well. I remember when the college was connected to the internet, starting with the library, our building. That was another momentous change for my gaming experience. But I digress… One of the MacAddict issues had a demo for something called Carmageddon. I ran it on one of our computers after the lab closed, and I was hooked right away. As a console player the game pad was everything. I was never used to keyboards to control the action. Even games that used a joystick connected to the computer seemed awkward to me. In a matter of moments I got familiar with driving the car in the game, and even moving the camera around without a game pad. The 3D in the game was revolutionary at the time. Yes, the Playstation, N64, and Saturn were already out. They were doing decent 3D games, but the Mac, and PC were on another level. The complexity of the models, the textures, physics, lighting, and effects were well above what home consoles could do at the time. As much fun as I was having it was also maddening playing the demo. Like most demos it was timed. After 4 minutes the game would exit back to the main menu. I reloaded the demo again, and again, hour after hour, day after day. I played the demo more than any other preview we had gotten at the time. I got my brothers, and coworkers hooked on it as well. We all knew that when the game was officially released we would be getting it.

It seemed like forever until the final game did come out. Until then I scoured the internet for anything I could find on the game. Thankfully there was a website, and news on the game. I researched everything I could about the title, about the studios creating it. I had never heard of the developer Stainless Software, or the publisher SCi. I began visiting game forums, and seeing the reaction of other players. It seemed that those lucky enough to get the demo were having a blast as well. There were many countries that hadn’t gotten it yet, because of the violent content. They were eager to see what the fuss was about. One the forums I found showed players how to make an image of the demo off of the CD, and save it to the computer. Even better there was a way to disable the time lock. With this knowledge I ended up making copies of the demo for my coworkers, and they happily installed it on all the systems in the lab. Now we could play on any computer we wanted, as much as we wanted.

The demo gave players just enough time to do a lap on “Blood on the Rooftops.” One of the latter stages in the game. I got to the point where I could run the entire course very quickly, and didn’t have to waste my 4 minutes. Without a time limit I ended up exploring every square inch of the map. Learning where all the streets, and alleys intersected. I learned which ramps could take me to the tops of every skyscraper. I managed to reach the elevated train track, that I had thought was impossible to access before. I memorized every group of pedestrians, every power up on that map. These were important because in the actual game you only started with a minute, or two on the countdown clock. The only way to earn more time was to run over pedestrians, about 15 seconds per person. The old joke between teenagers driving, and saying that running over this person was worth so many points had come true. Wiping out a group earned a bonus multiplier, as did creative ways of splatting pedestrians. Dropping on them from above, smearing them against a wall, scaring them with a horn honk before the kill were all rewarded behavior. It was raucous, and everyone in the lab that tried it loved it despite the dark material.

The control was rock solid, capturing one of the important elements that I had talked about earlier. If I had to describe the actual game play I would say that Carmageddon was the definition of the impossible racer. The physics were groundbreaking. The cars acted as if they had weight, and heft, especially at speed. They all handled realistically, more or less. It was what the cars that were capable of that made the game so much fun. The vehicles were almost indestructible. In any other game a car that hits a wall at 300 mph would explode. In Carmageddon it might just crumple the body a little. The vehicles behaved like Hot Wheel toys being thrown around a freshly mopped kitchen floor. Ram them as hard as you want, and they’ll keep coming back for more. Instead of orange plastic tracks, or a stack of books acting as a ramp the game featured some of the most fantastic levels ever designed. These courses had tunnels, massive jumps, chicanes, and drop offs. The cars could even operate under water, in acid, toxic waste, snow, and lava. Some stages were on raceways, and others were on rooftops of massive skyscrapers. Blind intersections where two cars could collide at high speed, and send one of them flying a few hundred feet straight up in the air was the rule, not the exception. This helped create a breakneck (no pun intended) pace for gameplay. Drivers and opponents were always willing to go full-tilt at each other, or even at the police that patrolled the race, because the cars would mostly survive the wreck.

Carmageddon, many fans shortened it to “Carma,” is something that seems to be universally appreciated by people that tried it. The more people you could get to join the game the better it became. Within a few minutes any person that I introduced the game to was shouting "holy shit" at every crazed jump, and high speed wipeout. People often say that Carma would be perfect if only it had weapons, like the Twisted Metal series by Sony. I say they are missing the point. The cars are the weapons, the diversity of cars you can drive, are akin to the different guns in any first person shooter (FPS). In Twisted Metal the vehicles didn’t behave like cars at all, they acted like FPS characters. They bounced around the screen, automatically flipped themselves over, and did lots of impossible things. The mass and momentum of real cars took a literal back seat, and that was fine. The designers at SingleTrac didn’t want to slow down the game play with the experience they wanted to capture. Carmageddon is more focused on the vehicles. The car destruction is everything, but not the only thing. There is no more rewarding experience than catching up to a race in progress and wiping out the opponents with a runaway plow. Or dropping down on an unsuspecting rival that is hobbling on its last three wheels.

There was much more to Carma than a demolition derby. There were the power ups to learn about. Scattered all over the stage were red, blue, yellow, and black barrels. If you ran over them they rewarded you with a random power up. Some only gave you extra points, or time. Some made pedestrians explode, or go blind temporarily. Other barrels changed the physics, and behavior of your car. For example some made it so your wheels had no traction, as if they were coated in oil. Some made your car as dense as granite so that even the smallest car could send opponents flying. Other power ups changed the physics of the world, so all of the cars floated as if they were on the moon, or they scraped the ground as if they were rolling on the surface of Jupiter. Again, these power ups lasted only a few seconds so that they wouldn’t kill the experience. Even better, they would regenerate after several minutes. Learning the placement of specific barrels would become critical in multiplayer games. The original game did not support online play, like most of its PC predecessors multiplay was achieved via local area network (LAN).

I ended up hosting Carmageddon LAN parties in our computer lab even before the final game was released. I would buy little prizes through the semester, and at the end of the quarter would host a tournament. Using the demo we would  go to one of the available computers, and all start at the same time. We would have a race to complete the required laps. I would run my computer on the projector, so everyone could see where I was at any point. Later on as the technology in the lab changed I could broadcast random players on the screen. The winners would get a gift card, music CD, or Hot Wheels car to celebrate the occasion. This was on top of the soda, and pizza provided by Alison. Did I forget to mention what a great boss she was? It was a great way to let off steam after a season of hard work, as well dealing with rude teachers, and students. I often took myself out of the competition because I was too good at the game. All that extra time I put in with it really paid off. My coworkers said that would change once the final version was released. I looked forward to the challenge.

Our world was about to change when the full version was released. Would our boss, and even department head allow one of the most controversial games of all time continue to be played at school? What would happen when the Dean of the college found out what we were up to? I will talk about all that in the next blog. I hope to see you back for that! If you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!