Nobody Wants Car Combat Games

Andrew doesn't think anyone is a fan

- Andrew Duncan

Like many people my age, I experienced Carmageddon at a perhaps inappropriate age: my mid-teens. It came out in the L mid-90s when violence in video games was a hot topic, and so developer Stainless Games toned it down by changing the pedestrians into zombies with green blood upon initial release in Europe. The franchise has had a soft spot in my heart ever since, and I've kept it installed on my phones since it was released in 2013, despite having not touched it in several years. Having written that, I did go and check, and yes it still works fine on Android 12, having been released eight Android versions ago!

When online games started launching on the PlayStation 2, I was part of a team of unpaid beta testers who were sent games ahead of release to check how well they coped with the online element. This gave me my first try of the Twisted Metal series, with Twisted Metal: Black. While it was interesting to have guns on the vehicles instead of the crazy power-ups in Carmageddon, it definitely didn't grab my attention the same way.

Twisted Metal had seven main titles and one spinoff, five of which reportedly sold over 1 million copies each in North America; a further three were cancelled. While that was more than Burnout 3: Takedown, it was half of what Gran Turismo 4 sold, and that was the lowest selling of the initial four Gran Turismo titles. Perhaps worth noting that the argument can be made that the Burnout games include car combat.

So, Carmageddon and Twisted Metal were both huge titles, the behemoths of the genre with multiple titles to their names. But have you ever heard of WWE Crush Hour? Vigilante 8? Renegade Ops? Published by THQ, Activision, and Sega respectively, three big publishers in their prime, and all focused on cars destroying cars. I actually played Vigilante 8 and even I keep forgetting about it!