Revisiting Mad Max (Five Year Anniversary)

Dane revists Mad Max for it’s 5th anniversary.

-  Dane Townsend

There isn’t really a game quite like Mad Max. It’s an outlier and an oddball in so many ways. It’s a movie tie-in game that is decidedly not awful. It’s an open world game that discourages fast travel. It’s also a post-apocalyptic game that manages to not look uglier than sin (sorry, Fallout: New Vegas). So, as the game was also released five years ago this month, I thought it would be worth a look into one of the most underrated open world games of this generation.

Mad Max was developed by Avalanche Studios, a company who had already proved their merit with enjoyable open world games such as Just Cause 2. Truthfully, when I said the game was a movie tie-in, that was only really partly true.

Whilst major aspects of Mad Max: Fury Road and the rest of the series were incorporated into the game’s world, Mad Max had its own story to tell. George Miller (the director of the film series) was consulted during pre-production but Avalanche were mostly free to draw up their own take on Australia’s hazardous wasteland.

The big gamble during development of Mad Max was vehicular combat. After all, having a Mad Max game without cars is like eating a sandwich without bread. Avalanche Studios had no experience in this field, and the bad reputation that movie tie-in games (based purely on initial perception) had meant that the odds were stacked heavily against the game’s success. The game was originally slated for release in 2014, but it was pushed to 2015 to coincide with Mad Max: Fury Road’s release that year (and also because the game’s development went through a heavy retooling during 2014).