Picture the scene, it’s November 1998 and I’m a 14 year old squeaky-voiced spotty teen flicking through the latest issue of PC Gamer in my bedroom. Posters of Link, Sonic the Hedgehog and other wholesome video game characters festoon every wall around me. Being more of a console gamer back then, I wasn’t really paying much attention to the pages I was skimming through until I had to do a double take on a page headed in yellow and black writing entitled ‘NEW RACING GAME BANNED IN 10 COUNTRIES!’ Holy crap, banned?! I had to read on.
That game was Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now developed and published by SCI (now known as the Final Fantasy stalwarts Square Enix). It’s a racing game, but not as we know it, Jim. The title alone I thought was a perfect blend of nonsense and genius, and judging by the screenshots that madness didn’t end there. The point of the game was not to finish first as normal, but to smash the shit out of your opponent’s cars using anything from your own car to a plethora of crazy power-ups. It all looked very cool, but not worth a ban surely…I mean, I’d seen this mission statement in other racers like Twisted Metal et al, it was brutal but not offensive. Here’s where Carmageddon was different. Another way you could complete a level was to kill all the pedestrians. Yeah, that’s right, kill everyone. The bloodier, the better. And there were hundreds to a level, all just not that fast enough to avoid the spinning blades of death protruding from your vehicle. One screenshot showed an unfortunate individual literally exploding with limbs flying to the four winds as your car tore through him at a squillion miles an hour. I’d never seen brutality like this before, and fuelled with the fact that a ban often has the opposite effect, instead of putting people off the thing that’s being banned, it draws the curious (and one spotty 14 year old) towards them. With that, I went straight out and to buy it.
I believe this bonnet ornament contravenes Regulation 53 of the Road Vehicles Regulations act of 1986
Up to this point in my life, the majority of my gaming life had been about saving the princess or beating the final boss to get the glory. It was moral, wholesome and safe, no surprises…and frankly I was bored. So as I stood in HMV, staring at Carmageddon 2, complete with its devilish mascot and 18 certificate, I was overcome with feelings of excitement and anticipation. Even though I was a full 4 years younger than the game permitted, I looked quite a bit older and so as I handed my hard earned paper round money over, any anxious feelings were replaced with intense relief. I hopped on the bus home with the game box firmly in my sweaty hands.
I got home, booted up the family PC and installed it, turned the speakers up and pressed ‘Go’ on the boot up menu screen. It was time.
Max Damage
The opening cinematic sets the tone for the carnage ahead as your character, the brilliantly named ‘Max Damage’, crashes and smashes his way to victory (if I remember correctly, there was a sheep involved somewhere, too). The idea was a simple one, and it was an idea that hadn’t changed from the first Carmageddon released in the previous year. Wreck your opponents without getting wrecked yourself and how you do that is up to you. The more you smash, the more points you get and the more time is added, enabling you then at the end of the race to buy out your opponent’s vehicles and drive them yourself. There were loads of vehicles to choose from all with their individual stats and abilities, some were light and nimble, others dealt massive amounts of damage but were slow to get away. You could then use any credits that were left over to then upgrade your vehicle’s speed, defensive and offensive capabilities. There were other ways to complete the level, such as completing all the laps (which totally defeated the point of the game entirely) or, as I said before, kill every pedestrian on the map, which in turn is extremely difficult as there are loads of the little buggers. It’s at that point where I realised why Carmageddon received as much criticism as it did. You can literally murder these people, ten to the dozen without a hint of remorse. If I was more impressionable (and a complete friggin’ idiot) I might’ve given that killing lark a go. Alas, I wasn’t…but it was fun, REALLY fun. I mean, you could run over dogs, old people, policemen, the lot. No-one was safe from your death spikes stuck to the bumper of your hot rod. And you got points for it…and what do points win? That’s right, better cars.
The whole Carmageddon series was never one to take itself too seriously, as is evident in the ridiculous named (and performed) power ups that could be picked up along the way. One such power-up was the ‘Electro-Bastard Ray’, and is to this day one of my favourites. Once activated, it sends out huge bolts of lightning from your car electrocuting any people nearby, obliterating them instantly in a hail of guts and red stuff. Such fun! Others would affect your car, or your opponents in turn and it was pot luck as to which one you got so you just went for it not knowing whether you had ‘Moon Gravity’ or the brilliant ‘Acme Damage Magnifier’. No wonder I was hooked on this game from the word go.
Just because Carmageddon doesn’t have its sensible trousers on all the time, doesn’t mean that it’s not a credible game when it comes to graphics and game play. The frame rate is rapid with little slowdown no matter how fast you’re going, and the environments are vast and varied. You can literally drive where you want, and kill what you want…how you want. Unlike in the first game, where the cars were all one polygon, Carmageddon 2 had cars that would take more realistic damage, from bits falling off here and there to a full on car-split-the-fuck-in-two if the you hit it with enough force. It was something that had hardly been seen in racing games up until this point, adding a sprinkling of realism to the madness.
To appease the ever growing criticism of Carmageddon 2, SCI decided that in some releases of the game to replace the pedestrians with zombies and the blood with green ooze. It was a change that I never really understood as I was just as much into zombies as I was racing at the time so making that change would’ve appealed to me equally as much as if it were people you were mercilessly murdering. It was as if the creators were like, ‘let’s put zombies in instead, the censors will be happy that it’s not people and our gamers with love it because it’s zombies.’ Genius. There was a blood patch you could download from the Internet which brought the blood and people back, but I didn’t care in the slightest.
No green ooze here!
I can thank Carmageddon 2 for two things in my life. The first was to show me that violence, blood and gore in a video game didn’t have to be a negative and to anesthetize me to the Resident Evils, Quakes and Gears of Wars that were to come, but also to expand my musical taste. The soundtrack comprises 12 tracks of two artists. The first is a run of the mill drum and bass effort from Sentience (Who?), the other is a little known band called Iron Maiden. I’d never heard of either when I picked up Carmageddon for the first time, and Maiden especially caught my interest. I skipped the Sentience tracks every time in favour of ‘Aces High’ or ‘Man on the Edge’ as they were the perfect accompaniment to the maiming and destruction. I liked those Iron Maiden tracks so much, I took the disc out and about with me in my CD Walkman (I miss the days when you could actually do that) so I could listen to them whenever I wanted. I’d never been into heavy metal up to this point, I was a dance music fan to the death…or so I thought. The next week I went back into the same shop I bought the game from and purchased the entire Iron Maiden back catalogue, Carmageddon opened a whole new musical horizon for me, one that is still with me as I write this. For that it will always have a special place in my mind.
So, there you have it. Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now. It’s a simple concept done very well by the guys at SCI. Yeah, there were sequels but they failed to capture the fun aspect of driving around smashing the fuck out of everyone and everything. A concept you would’ve thought is quite simple, but you’d be surprised at how many games even released today that miss that boat by a mile.
