The Cursed Development of Carmageddon – The Stuff of Legends

Off the southern coast of England there’s an island called the Island of Wight. It is quaint. It is serene. It is…boring. You know how in movies sometimes they try to dump all of their criminals onto one island as a sort of supermax prison and accidentally create a chaotic hellscape that threatens to break out of its borders and destroy the world? Imagine that, but a supermax retirement home island thing instead. The Beatles made a song about it once called “When I’m Sixty Four.” It’s that slow and easy-going.

One day the island organizers must’ve accidentally swapped out their annual Bingo Bonanza for a racing event. Taken in by the sudden surge of adrenaline beyond legally-designated levels, Peter Buckland and Neil Barnden decided to make a demolition derby video game. But this game must’ve been programmed on desecrated burial grounds. It had to have been haunted. Every step forward was a step back.

Stainless Games, as they were known, searched high and low for a publisher that was willing to pay for the development of a racing game where the goal was to crash on purpose. Sales Curve Interactive was the devil that made the deal with them on the crossroads…on one condition. SCI liked publishing games with licenses, so the crew waited in limbo as they appealed for a Mad Max license. The Mad Max owners weren’t biting, so Stainless Games pivoted towards Death Race. No, not Death Race 2000, the retro dystopian death sport film starring Sylvester Stallone from 1975. The game was meant to be a tie-in with the sequel, Death Race 2020. The game’s development was inching towards the finish line as the license was being settled. Unfortunately, the movie died in pre-production and there went all hopes of acquiring the license. But when one door closes, another one is broken down by a souped up C3 Corvette. Because the team thought they were making a Death Race video game until they weren’t, Stainless Games cranked up the arcade violence to an 11, now featuring the point system for destroying the environment and knocking out civilians. Impressed by the carmageddon on display, SCI allowed the game to be published as its own thing instead of haggling motor sport films for licenses.

Glad that was all sorted out because everything else was on fire. The team was also trying to create their own 3D rendering engine, but it took so long to get the contract signed that their 3D rendering engineer took a job elsewhere. The physics engine they ended up using was unruly and difficult to work with, but in came Dr. Kev Martin, Peter Buckland’s math teacher and an absolute fiend of a programming wizard. He molded the engine to his command, stabilized the frame rate, programmed the collisions with pinpoint precision, and created 3D destructibility beyond the scope of anything in 1996. He also introduced a bevy of unintended consequences. Kev’s physics engine riddled Carmageddon with bugs. The bodies of pedestrians would get stuck to the surface of the car. The car would eliminate passerbys without touching them. One bug caused objects to gain momentum upon collision and sent everything ricocheting in all directions. The crew were a pragmatic bunch with a twisted sense of humor about their failures, so they kept the bugs and slapped some extra sound and effects on them. Potato, potato. You say bugs, I say death ray and pinball mode. These are now the defining power ups of Carmageddon.

The team’s energy was through the roof. Every bump in the road was seen as an opportunity to catch some air, and nobody embodied this mentality quite like amateur stuntman and professional madman Tony Taylor. A friend of the studio, Tony was initially brought in for recording in the PratCam. The PratCam is a little box in the game that shows your character reacting to your reckless driving. If you hit a pedestrian the PratCam hoots and hollers, egging you on to find another to continue your combo. If you crash, the man in the PratCam gets tossed around. Tony Taylor was committed to the bit. Reportedly, he had Stainless Games employees beating him with pool sticks to capture his very real reactions to quick and sudden hits of pain. Be wary of a man with two first names that does his own stunts. For his next trick, Tony Taylor wanted to help amp up Carmageddon’s pedestrian animations, so he stuffed his clothes with cardboard and demanded the developers record him getting hit by a car. They hit him once with gusto and once more with glee, but he had higher aspirations. Tony Taylor wanted to be sent over the car. And on the third hit he miscalculated the angle and obliterated the windshield. And would you believe that’s right when the cops showed up? As Tony Taylor’s mock screams while being consensually assaulted by a vehicle drew the attention of the neighbors who called the police thinking someone was running over homeless men in the parking lot. And here’s the kicker, the camera footage was on the wrong setting so it couldn’t really be used for anything.

Carmageddon giveth and Carmageddon taketh away. In one hand, a potential criminal record. In the other hand, free marketing for your small development studio– and Stainless Games were in for a lot of free marketing. They applied for a rating from the British Board of Film Classification for their video game so they could publish it. The BBFC found the game’s vehicular manslaughter premise to be so vulgar and offensive that not only did they reject the application immediately but the studio was raided and the CEO was threatened with jail time. Germany banned the game. Australia banned the game. The United Kingdom banned the game. In 1997 governments around the world didn’t understand that censorship only served to market games. A sticker from the United Nation of Prudes only made people more curious to see what was inside. Still, it does make it harder to sell your game to the people within the country that doesn’t approve, so Stainless Games changed the human pedestrians out for zombie pedestrians with green not blood instead of red blood. It seemed a shame to create a game with so much edge only to blunt it at the finish line. As one last middle finger to fate, destiny, and the British Board of Film Classification, the developers released an online patch that would detect an empty file within Carmageddon that restored it to its original intended state.

Carmageddon had no business existing. Somehow, every problem added more life and identity to the game as it raced past the licensing issues, swerved around the software and hardware bugs, and left the British courts in their dust before eventually crossing the finish line as one of the games that defined racing games, open world games, and physics engines. When life gives you lemons, make Carmageddon.