My Carmageddon Obsession - A Love Letter to 1997's Most Controversial Racer
I must've been 12 when I first booted up Carmageddon on our family PC. That intro with Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" MIDI version blasting through our tinny speakers - man, I knew I was in for something special. This wasn't your dad's racing game.
1997 was a different time. While everyone else was playing sanitized racers with invisible walls and time penalties, Carmageddon let you do EVERYTHING wrong. Forget the checkpoints - I'd spend hours just exploring the massive open maps, launching my car off ramps, and yes, mowing down those hilariously pixelated pedestrians that exploded into red polygons. The way they'd dive out of the way screaming "I was in the war!" in that ridiculous voice - it was so over-the-top cartoonish that even my parents couldn't help but laugh.
The freedom was intoxicating. No game had given us this kind of sandbox destruction before GTA even existed. remember how we all tried to go backward to track crashing into oncoming cars in every other racing games ? !
Want to ignore the race and hunt down opponents? Go for it. Feel like climbing that seemingly impossible cliff face? The physics engine would let you try. Every session turned into its own emergent story.
Then 2016 rolled around with Max Damage, and... oof. What a gut punch. They had all the ingredients - better graphics, modern physics, the original team - but somehow forgot what made Carmageddon special. The cars handled like wet bars of soap sliding on ice. Zero weight, zero impact, zero satisfaction. Every collision felt like bumping marshmallows together.
Where was the crunchy metal-on-metal impacts? The satisfying THUNK when you T-boned someone at 100mph? Instead we got floaty, weightless vehicles that seemed allergic to the ground. It felt like an early access game that never got finished - probably because it basically was.