Carmageddon is a vehicular combat video game released for personal computers in 1997. It was produced by Stainless Games and published by Interplay Productions and Sales Curve Interactive. It was ported to other platforms, and spawned a series.
In 2011, Stainless Games obtained the rights to Carmageddon from Square Enix Europe. iOS and Android ports were released in 2012 and 2013, respectively. THQ Nordic acquired the rights to the Carmageddon series from Stainless Games in December 2018.
Gameplay
The player races a vehicle against several other computers controlled competitors in various settings, including city, mine, and industrial areas. The player has a certain amount of time to complete each race, more time may be gained by collecting bonuses, damaging the competitors' cars, or by running over pedestrians.
Races are completed by either completing the course as one would a normal racing game, "wasting" (wrecking) all other race cars, or killing all pedestrians on the level. The game includes thirty-six racetracks, played across eleven different locations. The game features three instrumental remixes from Fear Factory's album of 1995, Demanufacture.
Development
The game that became Carmageddon started out as 3D Destruction Derby, a banger racing sim prototyped by Stainless Software. This was signed by SCi in 1995, with the condition that it be made into a licensed game to guarantee popularity. Initially, SCi wanted to use the Mad Max license, but was unable to find out who owned the rights to the franchise. It instead secured the Death Race 2000 license, as a sequel to the original film was at that time planned.
According to head programmer Patrick Buckland, the initial concept stemmed from team members getting bored while playing racing games, leading them to ultimately drive in the wrong direction and crash into other cars. They decided it made sense to create a game where this was the objective to begin with. Shortly after, Psygnosis released a game with this same concept, Destruction Derby.
The notion of running over pedestrians was added to distinguish the game from Destruction Derby and arouse controversy. However, there had been a number of recent games which involved running over pedestrians, such as Quarantine and Die Hard Trilogy. Rob Henderson from SCi suggested increasing the potential for controversy by awarding the player points for the pedestrian kills.
The sequel to Death Race 2000 was later cancelled, but by this point SCi were impressed enough by Stainless's work that they felt Stainless could try creating their own intellectual property. The name Carmageddon was coined, and development proceeded with the designers allowed unusually free rein with regard to the content of the game.
The game uses the BRender engine, which Stainless Software were already thoroughly familiar with; one of their previous contracts was to port BRender to Macintosh and build the corresponding tools and demos. The PlayStation conversion was subcontracted to developer Elite, with the plan to release the PC and PlayStation versions simultaneously. Buckland anticipated that Elite would have problems with the conversion due to Carmageddons open environments.
Release
Carmageddon was originally released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS in 1997. It won the "Game of the Year" trophy in the 1997 PC Zone reader awards and "Driving Game of the Year" 1997. An expansion pack, Splat Pack, was released in 1997. It included new tracks, vehicles, environments, network levels, and 3Dfx support.
The Carmageddon Max Pack, released on February 17, 1998, bundled the original game and its expansion pack into one package. As a bonus, it also included a strategy guide, mousepad, and a leather car key chain with Carmageddons logo. During the inaugural Interactive Achievement Awards, the Max Pack received a nomination for "PC Action Game of the Year" by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.