By Alec Meer on October 25th, 2010 at 10:25 pm.
Have we ever polled the RPS omni-opinion about Carmageddon? It appears not. The discovery that the ‘Carmageddon’ tag did not exist on this humble website before now is startling. It’s not a game I’d ever hold up as essential, classic, important, with lessons unlearned by those that followed… but it’s formative. It’s a game that occurred at the right time, when technology was crude and gaming awareness cruder: a quiet little thrill of transgression, noisy at the time but not ultimately beaten down enough by tabloid terror or by popularism enough to stop feeling, well, a little bit special. Our secret. The game about driving over people, – far more unashamedly than GTA ever has been. Points for pedestrians, in the guise of competitive racing. Ours.
I can’t imagine playing it now, and I’m fairly sure I don’t retain any real respect for it. But I remember what it once meant, or at least seemed to. Protest. Naughtiness. Contained, cartoon viciousness. Late-night laughter with friends. It was ours. It perhaps can’t happen again – the pressure to be either commercial or outlandishly peer-impressive is now far too high to allow something so boorishly ordinary to become a sensation anew. I admire this modder-man for trying to bring it back, but I suspect he doesn’t know how lucky he was to be slapped down by Square-Enix.
I lost track of the paper trail, but with the Eidos acquisition came rights to Carmageddon too. Apparently, that must be protected, despite the license slumbering for over a decade. Whether it’s because some executive still earnestly believes this is a salable property or it’s just the mad legal stipulation that any possible unlicensed use of an IP must be protected in order to help ensure ongoing ownership doesn’t matter. Thanks to the sinister flexing of lawyer robo-muscle, a planned open-source remake is only able to happen under a different came: C1.
Says the wannabe re-animator, “Obviously this is all a bit silly given we’re talking about a game thats 13 years old and you can’t buy anymore, but still, its a cease-and-desist letter.”
He’s right, on both counts. His plan is to release it under a different name entirely, Square Enix having improbably even laid claim to code they perceive as infringing their calcified trademark.
I hope he doesn’t attempt to do only that. Carmageddon is done: it was a milestone in its strange way, a light that burns brighter because some nations tried to replace its pedestrians’ red blood with green vagueness, not because of what the game itself actually had. It happened. We fought the censorious fools and we won. We did it. We don’t need it anymore. This guy doesn’t have to spend his time making a remake for an audience with a fixed expectancy. If he has the wherewithal, the time, the energy to make a game off his own back, he can do anything. I hope he seizes this obstacle to an antique to go somewhere different, somewhere new and amazing.
This was Carmageddon:
This was Carmageddon 2:
25/10/2010 at 22:31 BobJustBob says:
Carmageddon 2 is one of the finest driving games ever made. The deformable cars, the dismembering pedestrians, the ridiculous array of weapons and power-ups and power-downs, the races that could be won by racing or elimination (always the best choice) or wholesale slaughter of the innocent, the vehicle selection, the replays, the mods… it was glorious.
25/10/2010 at 23:32 Fede says:
I completely agree, Carmageddon 2 it was a grat arcade driving game. Lots of variety kept it interesting and fresh.
25/10/2010 at 23:48 The Pink Ninja says:
Me too, it was lots of silly fun.
Perhaps the first “Sandbox” game I ever played.
26/10/2010 at 00:24 Bhazor says:
Finally got around to buying it a few months back but of course it doesn’t work on modern systems. So watching those videos and remembering the time I spent on the original is making me a sad bunny.
Lazy programmers not taking 13 years of OS advancement into account. Makes me sick.
26/10/2010 at 00:29 Thiefsie says:
the repair sound is still burnt into my head from C2 – absolutely one of the best and most fun, early emergent games I have played – perhaps because I was still at school when this beast of a game hit… Definitely part of my formative years of gaming.
26/10/2010 at 02:18 outoffeelinsobad says:
Somebody needs to email GoG about this game stat.
26/10/2010 at 06:57 Tom OBedlam says:
You and me are on the level, matey. I spent hundreds of hours with carmageddon 2.
26/10/2010 at 07:42 sfury says:
Indeed, that post actually reminded me that apart of its outrageousness, this was a very GOOD and SOLID game. Sure noone will be able to get away with that pedestrian mowing today, but hey there’s always the zombies option…
26/10/2010 at 09:17 MaxDamage says:
Completely agree with OP.
It is no wonder that Alec Tits-And-Fun-Hater Meer would be the first to decry no moar when it comes to this power pack of pedestrian exploding, penguin smashing, moose mashing awesomeness.
Carma 1+2 were epic endeavours, and they have made every non-killing / crushing racing game rather boring ever since.
Also: Boo on IP naziship, and boo on hating tits.
26/10/2010 at 13:54 JohnH says:
I have to admit I spent hundreds of hours with Carmageddon 1-3 back in the days. Like it’s been said before me; the combination of great (fun/arcade) physics, deformable/destructible cars, general destruction and mayhem, running over pedestrians by the hundreds and getting points for all of this is just awesome!
26/10/2010 at 14:03 spacesubmarine says:
Agree – it was the best game that featured cars and… zoo with all sorts of animals.
Loved that game.
26/10/2010 at 21:29 Lucky Main Street says:
I never really appreciated or cared for the gore and supposed naughtiness. The best part of Carmageddon was the open sandbox and the physics. I can’t even tell you how much time I spent just trying to see if there was a way to launch myself on that rooftop over there or if I could get on top of the train tracks. So much fun!
25/10/2010 at 22:32 Dominic White says:
Something for fans of Carmageddon to keep an eye out for might be Motorstorm: Apocalypse on the PS3. Car combat-racing in the middle of an enormous natural disaster-turned-warzone. Civillian and military pedestrians on the track to be splattered.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_pykpGZQc
The previous two Motorstorm games were pretty good. This one looks to be something else.
25/10/2010 at 22:40 Lambchops says:
Actually the second Motorstorm was a bit pish. Yes it added the split screen the first so sorely lacked but in my mind it ruined the racing experience with its (for the most part) sprawling, ill defined tracks. Yes the whole alternate routes thing from the first game was pretty cool but they jjust went too far with it in the second, trading fun racing tracks for gimmicks and confusion. At least that;’s the way I found it. I didn’t think it was awful but it was much less enjoyable than the first game.
26/10/2010 at 04:27 Dys says:
Many, many games have claimed to be like Carmageddon, but none of them have been, or ever likely will.
Modern games take themselves way too seriously, those that aren’t going out of their way to be self consciously ‘wacky’. The real glory of Carma was the humour, the bonus points for ‘artistic impression’ when mowing down innocents, the gloriously spooneriffic cunning stunt bonus, the little old ladies who scream ‘I was in the war!’ as you plough through them.
Jelly suspension! Lunar Gravity! Wall Climbing!
All in the context of a very solid driving game, still a decent system even now. Carmageddon was one of those rare things which spawned at a confluence of forces and will never be repeated.
Though if it were, it would be utterly gleeful, especially if you added dozens of lunatic weapons, decent object deformation, solid pedestrians with proper ragdolls! /sigh
25/10/2010 at 22:40 Tei says:
I played the demo a million times, trying lots of crazy things, I even cracked the encryption of the data files (a lot of people did that), to create tank-like cars. It was a amazing game, the sound effects give me some nostalgia goosebumps.
Cease and desist letters are unsavoury. More wen a dude is trying to revitalize a old game, then is idiotic. Probably we have now new versions of Monkey Island, because all these ScummVM emulators…
http://www.scummvm.org/
These Square-Enix dudes are a bunch of control freak jerks.
26/10/2010 at 00:15 Collic says:
Same. I think I might I have owned Carmageddon 2, but I just played the demo of the first again, and again, and again. Cackling wildly as I ran over old ladies. Good times. GTA was much the same story.
You could really get a lot of life out of a demo back then, or maybe just I could back then.
28/10/2010 at 00:05 Rrrrraaaaasssssmmmmmuuuuusssss says:
Carmageddon may be my favourite game of all time! I also played the life-shit out of the demo. There was a time limit of 10 minutes per session, and my pentium 100mhz spent 7 minutes loading the level, but that didn’t stop me.
25/10/2010 at 22:43 Easydog says:
I loved Carmageddon. It was the first PC game that I would invite friends round to play. I don’t have very specific memories but I can remember lazy and incredibly fun school afternoons. It was ridiculously fun at the time.
25/10/2010 at 22:44 The Walker says:
I think every racing game should have a little FMV man in the corner.
26/10/2010 at 15:33 blainemono says:
If I remember correctly, the little FMV man was a full-time stainless employee, apparently not good for anything else but getting hit by heavy blunt objects
Also this same guy was used to get a more realistic, life-like pedestrian splatter animations. Yes, they were literally driving over the guy with real slow(ish)-moving cars.
25/10/2010 at 22:45 mlaskus says:
Carmageddon not special? Mister Meer, you must be delusional! I enjoyed every minute spent with the game, it was ridiculously fun.
26/10/2010 at 08:55 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
THIS! The graphics, the sound, the music, the gameplay…the cows, the wicked opponents. LOVE IT, it’s Doom with Wacky Wheels, what can we ask for more? I’ve never finished it, tho…this game had the STUPID idea of removing the savegames after uninstall (and even when you backed them up, they didn’t work) – just like Broken Sword 1&2: what were they thinking?
25/10/2010 at 22:46 Taverius says:
Ah, memories!
The dude’s face in the first one!
The yellow monster truck with the drill!
The Electro-bastard ray! :D
That goddamn purple car with the wingy bit in the rear that you couldn’t front end cause it was built like a worn bar of soap :|
The purple “wide boy” car with the British flag on top and thumping bass system …
26/10/2010 at 04:30 Dys says:
Yes! The Electro Bastard ray!
How could I forget…
How many games have you seen lately which include an Electro Bastard ray?
26/10/2010 at 15:23 Fumarole says:
Don’t forget Otis P. Jivefunk and Bad Mothertrucker!
The original was the best, simply for the newness of it; though the second gets points for making me smile every time I recall the first time I ran over a dog and winced at the sad sound it made as it went splat on my bumper.
No other game has made me consciously tell myself I’m not in a game while doing another activity; had I not done so I am sure I would have crashed my real car many a time while driving after long sessions of this game.
25/10/2010 at 22:46 edosan says:
…so who’s going to sue Eidos for a owning couple of games that rip off Death Race 2000?
I kid, I kid.
Actually, I don’t kid. Who are they to think they own the concept of hitting people with a car?
25/10/2010 at 22:49 Dexemplu says:
Hmpf. I really miss this game. When I was a kid I used to play this in internet cafes. Fox and Hounds mode was absolutely priceless and the most fun I ever remember having in a multiplayer driving game.
25/10/2010 at 22:49 BrettW says:
One of the things I always marvelled at and many people forget is that Carmageddon II had an awesome vehicle damage simulation. You could tear cars in half (in many ways), bend axles, bend the chassis and otherwise crush, crumple and shred the rest of the car… I remember many a race where I got nudged off the road and wrapped around a pole. I could still limp to the finish line even though my L-shaped car had a wicked time going straight.
26/10/2010 at 00:08 MarkN says:
This!
The damage system was graphically crude by today’s standards, but far better than anything that has come since that I’ve seen. You could fold a car vertically across the middle in a v-shape so that neither set of wheels would touch the ground. You could fold it the other way and limp along with a hump-backed car with a broken axle but both sets of wheels down. You could slice your car apart to varying degrees lengthwise like in the old Herbie film. And you could bend it so it drove in circles. There were also shedloads of states inbetween.
At work we used to play over LAN with a no-repair house rule. It was far less fun if people repaired. Mangled car action (in a very small arena) was stupidly fun. A modern day remake with lessons learned could be absolutely sublime IMO.
25/10/2010 at 22:50 day says:
The Christmas special demo was on a cover disk back in tha’ day. I remember my dad chuckling as I ran a red tyre track through a Santa hat wearing reindeer.
I’m perfectly well adjusted now though..
..Ta for the retrospective,
from the Mordesley Mental Hospital.
25/10/2010 at 22:53 vors345 says:
Carmageddon never clicked with me; I preferred the darker, more structured gameplay of Quarantine. Loved that game even if I was rubbish at it.
25/10/2010 at 23:10 Jambo says:
I was going to say the same thing. I miss quarantine!
26/10/2010 at 05:11 Alez says:
wow, someone else knows about Quarantine. Loved that game but carma was better. Still, it was interesting playing a cab driver in a post apocalyptic kinda setting. A taxi with guns, fun fun. Took me AGES to realise i was driving a taxi and that i shouldn’t run over those people signaling me.
26/10/2010 at 09:15 Harlander says:
I can’t tell you how sad I was to find that the film Quarantine wasn’t based on the game of the same name.
25/10/2010 at 22:58 Jimbo says:
All I remember about the first game is the face cam, but Carmageddon 2 was ace. Being able to control the car doors so you could open them in a pedestrian’s face as you drove by was genius, and made for surprisingly fun impromptu co-op.
25/10/2010 at 23:08 Flint says:
Both the first and second are fun in their core but the gameplay’s simple nature eventually becomes monotonously repetetive. Best enjoyed in small doses.
26/10/2010 at 11:45 Urael says:
Agreed. Keep it down to small does and the games shined. Anything longer and it rapidly became monotonous.
25/10/2010 at 23:10 somnolentsurfer says:
Maybe I was just deluding myself ’cause my mother would never have had this in the house but, playing this at a friend’s house, I was never able to see the attraction. I think it’s a combination of how utterly unlike a real city it looked, and how utterly unlike real physics it felt. Especially when compared against GTA, which I somehow got away with and loved. Look at that stupid bouncing thing in the first video. What’s that all about?
25/10/2010 at 23:18 mlaskus says:
You could collect a lot of cool power ups that made your life easier, and sometimes you collected that thing and you bounced around almost uncontrollably for a while. It was hilarious, especially that usually, other drivers were trying to kill you at the same time. :)
Fun times.
25/10/2010 at 23:21 Spacewalk says:
Carmageddon has physics that are geared for hilarity. Or annoyance depending on the amount of times you want to use the ‘restart’ key.
26/10/2010 at 15:32 Fumarole says:
The physics were especially great when you collected the pinball power-up.
26/10/2010 at 19:11 Moses2k says:
I used to have a gig of movies made in-game of pinball mode mixed with the train, elephants, and penguins, mainly. All sorts of excellence was possible. If you hit an elephant and gently knocked it on it’s ass, it would sometimes sit for a second, then spin around wildly on the vertical axis, then sit for another second and its skin would hemorrhage like it’d been hit.
The train plus pinball was the old classic, though. I was very disappointed to no movies of the stuff I’ve seen on Youtube. Maybe I’ll have to go back and create some. :).
25/10/2010 at 23:13 itsallcrap says:
The installer for C2 has been lovingly moved on from PC to PC right up to my current laptop, even though it hasn’t worked on Win2K onwards.
I seem to remember the demo being better than the full game. Ten minutes of play to smash up as many opponents as you could on a brilliant map that didn’t seem to make it into the final release.
Happy days.
25/10/2010 at 23:13 Diziet says:
Carmageddon 2 was one of those games I upgraded my PC for, like Unreal when it came out. I had a lot of fun just trying silly stunts and trashing cars. Fond memories, especially the first time I hit the sort of sharply angled barrier on an exit road and split the car in half.
25/10/2010 at 23:13 chokoladenudlen says:
I had the tons of fun with Carmageddon. I still remember the first time I split my car in half longitudinally in Carma2, as I missed the entry to a pipe/ramp. That blew my f*cking mind!
The worst part was the countdown timer which was a major bummer when driving around to explore, but the lightning powerup (electro-bastard thingy?) made gathering time by killing pedestrians a lot easier. And once you got the car that had this powerup all the time (a bluish car that looked like a Vector, if I recall correctly), everything was easy runnings :)
25/10/2010 at 23:13 Inglourious Badger says:
Carmaggedon was ace! I too have fond memories, and none are to do with the gore or running over pedestrians. It was the multiple ways you could ‘win’ a race, my favourite being to track down and destroy each and every other racer (occasionally allowing you to keep their cars for future races! Sweet!). It was one of the first racing game I remember that didn’t have the track on rails with barriers either side, but a full area with checkpoints that you could attempt to find shortcuts between or just get lost in. And the physics was immense for the time.
Midtown Madness is stored in the same place in my memory, which felt like a clean version of Carmageddon. The closest thing now would be Burnout:Paradise but the Burnout games have stripped the openness, instead telling you: in this race you must drive fastest, in this race you must smash the other cars off the road, etc
No racing game has really felt as free or as mental as Carmageddon did, so a remake makes sense. Hope it can happen one way or another.
25/10/2010 at 23:15 golden_worm says:
This game was always a poor relative of Quarantine for me. Completely different style of game but the violent driving theme really works better in a taxi game in my opinion.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/quarantine
26/10/2010 at 00:05 JuJuCam says:
Having never actually played Carmageddon, Quarantine is what springs to my mind too in terms of 3d vehicular mayhem (the 2d prize will always belong to Death Rally, despite GTA being technically better in every way).
I demand a remake of Quarantine!
26/10/2010 at 07:09 Tom OBedlam says:
Thank god at least one other person remembers Death Rally, I found a copy of it again recently and sat down and played for 5 hours straight. Give me a Deliverator and a spiked bumper!
25/10/2010 at 23:16 RedFred says:
The hours I spent playing both of these games. So many memories.
25/10/2010 at 23:16 Alabaster Crippens says:
The Carmageddon demo taught me, at the age of eleven (or thereabouts), everything I know now about emergent gameplay.
Okay, not quite everything, but when I started reading about emergent gameplay (when Bioshock was just a little twinkle in Ken Levine’s eye) all I could think about was hours around Paul Cassidy’s house playing the 2 minute time restricted demo.
We spent hours upon hours trying to find new and exciting ways to extract fun out of those painfully constrained 2 minutes. We found new ways to catapult cars into the air. We explored a limited radius of the track. We even occasionally tried to win.
But there was no winning in two minutes. You could never kill the bulldozer AND everyone else in such a time. So we found straights to build speed on and tiny ledges to bounce around in.
A year later, having fallen out with Paul, I was excited to acquire a full copy of the game. It was dreadful, boring and tedious. All the fun was gone. Never to be recaptured.
It was our inventiveness that made it fun. It was the cat calls and jeers that made it fun. It was the ridiculous self appointed tasks and random coincidences.
That was emergent. And it was wonderful.
25/10/2010 at 23:17 Spacewalk says:
I was absolutely obsessed with Carmageddon for two whole years. There would be times when I would sit for hours at a time just using the replay function, going over the same minute of footage from different angles and I just couldn’t get tired of it. I haven’t the foggiest why I stopped playing it but when I dug out the disc last year I was back into it for another six months. That doesn’t happen to me with a lot of games.
25/10/2010 at 23:32 Bhazor says:
It boggles my tiny mind that there aren’t more games, outside football sims, that use an action cam replay system.
25/10/2010 at 23:44 sinister agent says:
@Bhazor Consider me a fellow bogglee. It is an absurd omission, and yet it is omnipresent. Which is probably a nonsensical statement, but what the hell, I’m committed to it now.
25/10/2010 at 23:19 kwyjibo says:
I bought Carmageddon 2 on pirate after reading Brooker’s review. Got to the second (I think) challenge stage before I spotted a quiet FPS game sitting on the warez disk – Half-Life.
Never looked back, who gives a crap about shitting mines when you have fucking men to crowbar.
25/10/2010 at 23:19 Navagon says:
Carmageddon, the Splat Pack and Carmageddon 2 were all insanely fun. But yes, I’m sure he can come up with something else. Even if it’s another vehicular rampage.
25/10/2010 at 23:20 Dominic White says:
Here’s something to put the madness of the C&D letter into perspective:
http://www.mfgg.net/ – Mario fan-games. There are hundreds of them. They even have a shared core community site. They have never, ever had any legal threats from Nintendo.
Last time I checked, Nintendo still own the Mario license/trademark/copyright/etc/whatever. It is not diminished or legally weakened at all because fans have produced derivative works.
The same applies to Sonic, Megaman, and countless other huge franchises, which have spawned a multitude of derivative works.
Square-Enix just have a company policy of intimidating fans, which serves no logical purpose whatsoever.
25/10/2010 at 23:22 EthZee says:
Good on this man. Don’t be such a spoilsport, Alec; if you’re looking to lecture indie developers, try to change the minds of all the people constantly making bloody platformers and match-three games.
I’d be interested to know how this game will go down with today’s generation of gamers. Will it still be… naughty? I wonder how demographics have changed.
26/10/2010 at 00:33 Bhazor says:
…. very nawwwty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uopJ7FvrJTg
26/10/2010 at 07:19 Tei says:
“try to change the minds of all the people constantly making bloody platformers and match-three games.”
Nah, thats ok. Coders and graphics artist must learn, and a good way is creating well know simple games. A lot of simple games. Is like weightlifting for game devs.
25/10/2010 at 23:31 Snargelfargen says:
I played Carmageddon 2 endlessly as a kid. There will be other “hit stuff with cars” games, but none of them will have the same charm. The needlessly large and complex levels took forever to explore, so I would discover new areas several months later. The power-ups were also cheerfully insane. The “electro-bastard ray”, the suicidal/giant/mini pedestrians, the pinball power-up… (it applied pinball physics to your car, usually making you ricochet faster and faster until you blew up or your twisted wreck of a car landed in a completely new part of the level).
There was also a pretty big modding community, which for whatever reason devoted much of it’s efforts to making painstakingly detailed car replicas which would kill the framerate of that time’s computers. Nothing like ramming a ’78 camaro with your ford pinto, watching it’s muffler, bumpers and other bits slough off until you impaled it on a lamp post!
25/10/2010 at 23:32 Bassism says:
I played many, many, many many hours of Carmageddon. As other said, it was the first time I’d seen an open world in a racing game. A game where you could race, hunt down your opponents singlemindedly, wantonly murder every pedestrian you see, or just fuck about taking jumps and looking for secrets. It’s one of the games from my earlier years of game playing that embodies the openness that I cherish so much nowadays.
Carmageddon 2 wouldn’t run on my computer when I came out, and though I had some fun playing with it at a buddy’s place and eventually got it myself, it never quite captured me the same way. Though the damage modelling was absolutely brilliant and made for hours of fun on its own, it just didn’t seem to shine as bright as the first one.
Quarantine was fun, but the physics didn’t quite feel as good as Carmageddon. The latter just suited itself to hours of whimsical craziness.
25/10/2010 at 23:41 HexagonalBolts says:
Anyone remember Big Red Racing?
26/10/2010 at 00:32 Spacewalk says:
Or 1nsane for that matter.
26/10/2010 at 00:39 Thiefsie says:
My mohawk was epically purple…
26/10/2010 at 07:13 Tom OBedlam says:
Hell yeah i do, my mohawk was astonishingly pink
26/10/2010 at 14:40 EJ says:
I have played 1nsane within the past week. It’s still my favorite offroad driving/racing game, and nothing has stacked up to it since. Luckily, it still plays on Windows 7 with modern hardware! The vehicles worked like vehicles in a game should, bending twisting and eventually becoming hilarious if you kept going without a repair. Physics was well balanced between realism and fun. Many a LAN party ended with hours of “how badly can you smash a vehicle off the big ramp in the motocross track and still drive it back up and smash it again”.
Big Red was also a lan party favorite for a while.
Does anybody here also remember “Powerslide”? It was a fairly simple game well executed. Spent lots of hours in that as well.
25/10/2010 at 23:47 Rei Onryou says:
I still look lovingly at my big boxy Carmageddon, Splat Pack and C2 boxes. I was never any good at C2 and didn’t get into it like C1, but boy, did I have some fun times with them. They weren’t amazing as racers. The fun came from the messing about. Even watching the C1 video, you can see just how many different and inventive ideas they had thrown in there. Pinball mode was brilliant. It could screw you up, but it was worth it to see how much you could fool with the other cars.
There probably isn’t a place for such a game now, but surely we can still go back and explore it for unique ideas that shouldn’t die along with the game?
25/10/2010 at 23:50 BobbleHat says:
Wow, thanks for the nostalgia. Carmageddon was the only game that my mother wouldn’t allow me to have, despite me playing the Grand Theft Auto demo to death and subsequently borrowing Carmageddon off a friend.
I can’t imagine any studio being prepared to make another Carmageddon in this day and ag, plus I reckon it’d cause just as much fuss as the original did. There’s still Blood Drive and Motorstorm 3 to satisfy any pedestrian killing cravings anyone might have, providing they own consoleboxes.
25/10/2010 at 23:53 Søren V. Welling says:
I don’t get the disdain. I still believe Carmageddon 2 to have the best destructive driving engine of any game on the pc ever. When I clicked play on the videos I was prepared for disappointment, but no – it still looks as fresh and freaky as when I was a kid. I remember driving on the street in my dads car with my cousin and we were like: “Old lady – 500 points” “Take her with the door” “ooo combo if you slide onto the walk” :D
That game was for certain one of the most entertaining games of its decade in my mind.
25/10/2010 at 23:54 Søren V. Welling says:
Err, to clarify, my dad was driving the car – we were in the backseat ^^
25/10/2010 at 23:53 Bhazor says:
So it was a game about nothing but driving over people then, Alec? So it wasn’t a staggeringly vast collection of 3D sandboxes a full five months before the first GTA (in 2D)? It didn’t have aggressive AI that would gang up and chase you? That would bear a grudge and abandon the race to chase you down? There were no invincible police cars that would ambush you leading to frantic chases as you raced blindly through back alleys as you tried to shake them? There wasn’t a single unlockable/powerup that fundamentally changed the game such as the ability to drive up walls or turn off gravity? It didn’t take a refreshing approach of simply letting you play how you wanted wether that was racing or thrashing? There was no eclectic selection of vehicles that all demanded different styles to both drive and to destroy? No flimsy drag cars that traveled at 300mph and explode in one collision compared to a monster truck a full three times taller that would drive over smaller cars? No procedural damage on cars that would hamper performance in ways rarely seen at the time? No interesting replay functions that have yet to be bettered in the intervening 13 years? It was absolutely no fun at all?
Nope. It was just driving a single car in a straight line with green or red splodges appearing on the windscreen every now and then.
Thanks for clearing that up Meer.
26/10/2010 at 00:05 ntw says:
/signed
we demand more respect for this classic!
26/10/2010 at 00:08 Collic says:
I liked Carmageddon, too. Should we hug? :)
26/10/2010 at 00:14 Nethlem says:
Agreed, the article doesn’t really do the games any favour.
They had far more to offer for their time then just driving people over…
The physics and car damage alone had been something pretty “new” back then.
26/10/2010 at 01:06 Javier-de-Ass says:
nice post
26/10/2010 at 03:22 Strand says:
Wow. Spot on. And stated much more eloquently than I could have in the mental and physical state I’m in, having quit Minecraft cold-turkey three weeks ago.
Of course, I’m only off Minecraft ’til the Halloween update, on-time or not. I didn’t want to put any more time into my current world in the event the new content 1) borked all my work or 2) required rolling a new world in order to access the new features (e.g. biomes). I’m still suffering, though.
Maybe I’ll fire up some version of Carmageddon in the meantime. I even have TDR2000 (not included in video form in the post, nor mentioned at all for that matter). It might even run on a modern PC.
Nuts, now I want to play Rocket Jockey, another gem of a game that’s never received anything close to the respect it deserves. Pretty sure that won’t run on anything higher than Win ’95, though, and its acceleration was Glide-only, if memory serves.
But I can still listen to its surf guitar soundtrack!
26/10/2010 at 08:27 Huggster says:
Yes I agree, very solid games.
There was a level called “Beef Curtains”.
I still remember that name to this day. Twas the first time I was aware the slang as well!
26/10/2010 at 15:43 Fumarole says:
Beef Curtains was the best. An island map with nothing but cows on it. It wasn’t until long after I stopped playing the game that I knew what it meant.
26/10/2010 at 21:35 Quiet there in front! says:
You’re expecting the kind of someone that protests tits in a videogame to recognize a chance for fun when it jumps up and bites him.
I think you have yet to grasp the true nature of Alec’s utter Meerness.
25/10/2010 at 23:57 Collic says:
‘I was in the war!’ *squish*
26/10/2010 at 00:37 gou says:
Collic, this is the exact post I was going to make. So instead, I am going to mention that carmageddon was such a brazen experience of pure fun that I took many of the wav files and used them to replace the default windows sounds, I would always be reminded that the old lady was in a war whenever I minimised a window.
26/10/2010 at 02:04 Collic says:
That’s easily the best thing I’ve heard all week. Bravo :D
26/10/2010 at 02:49 vic says:
YAY someone posted it. :)
26/10/2010 at 00:04 ntw says:
i’ve also got a lot of love for the carma games – quite simply the BEST fun at a LAN party
26/10/2010 at 00:08 Richie Shoemakakakaka says:
The Carma Splat Pack was my first PC Zone assignment: I was sent down to the Isle of Wight to see the game, interview the devs, then a bunch of us climbed in a load of stock cars and drove them around a muddy field. I’d never driven a car before and probably should have died. Still, I totalled three vehicles. One of them an Allegro.
Game wasn’t bad either.
26/10/2010 at 00:54 DrGonzo says:
I can remember that issue. So it was you who started the corruption of my childhood huh?
26/10/2010 at 08:22 Huggster says:
Yeah I remember that too.
I think at the time I thought it sounded dangerous?
26/10/2010 at 00:14 Kieron Gillen says:
“Pornography For Anarchists” – Charlie Brooker.
People hated him for that line. People, eh?
KG
26/10/2010 at 01:36 MadMatty says:
why? atleast now i know some interesting search terms for google.
26/10/2010 at 02:50 mlaskus says:
Uh, I searched only for the quote, without the author… bad idea. :)
26/10/2010 at 04:38 Dys says:
God bless Charlie Brooker
26/10/2010 at 00:17 Bhazor says:
On a happy note the original developers (Stainless) are still going and recently struck big with the Magic: The Gathering Xbox Port and the lovely Risk: Factions.
So thats nice.
http://www.stainlessgames.com/news/go/
26/10/2010 at 00:22 Collic says:
I think some of you are missing the point when Meer says it was a game about running people over. It did have a lot more than that going on, but to us, to kids – like I’m assuming most of you were – it was precisely a game about running people over. And that what was made it such immature, naughty, awesome fun.
26/10/2010 at 00:31 Spacewalk says:
My favourite method of running people over was ramming into opponents who drove the lighter cars so that they would be knocked several metres backwards into groups of fleshbags. They tended to run away less when that happened.
26/10/2010 at 01:02 Javier-de-Ass says:
meh bullshit. I distinctly remember admiring the ai, the physics and the polygon deformation, even at the time. like in the old 2d mario platformers I would spend a lot of time just searching for hidden stuff and see if I could get on top of all the different buildings and objects aswell, not even racing or wrecking shit but just exploring the levels. and yeah the replay thing was mentioned, spent a lot of time with that. and even just listening to the music tracks on the cd, not really the instrumental fearfactory tracks but the original ones. carmageddon was so much more than just some slightly controversial game about running over people
28/10/2010 at 00:12 Rrrrraaaaasssssmmmmmuuuuusssss says:
What Javier-de-Ass said. Even though we were 13 at the time, we weren’t tasteless.
26/10/2010 at 00:44 _Jackalope_ says:
I’d say his project is about more than just trying to revive a game we may not “need” anymore and that it’s more about preserving a bit of gaming history. If he added to it and tried to do something different and new, that isn’t preserving the game. The consoles get their games ported, emulated and put on virtual console or xbox arcade etc, but there are many beloved PC games that are not playable any more and are in danger of being completely forgotten about unless a dedicated bunch of gamers do work like this. It doesn’t matter that they may not be relevant now, what is important is that at some point we all enjoyed them and it’s that which is worth saving.
26/10/2010 at 00:55 Bioptic says:
“Pornography For Anarchists” – here’s Brooker’s original review:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=2805
Feels a grim picking over the corpse of PC Zone, but most of their reviews are still there, especially the older ones. For my part, I was another one of the “played the demo for Carma II for hours and hours and never got around to buying the full thing”, even though those 10 minute chunks of murder were probably the best way to experience the game.
26/10/2010 at 01:05 Javier-de-Ass says:
the point of what the openc1 guy is doing seem to more be to make an engine for the old carmageddon/splatpak rather than making a new game off the carmageddon name, like openttd or zdoom.
26/10/2010 at 01:23 drewski says:
I thought Carmageddon was a stupid idea when I was 15, let alone now.
Just let it die. What next, fan remake of Postal?
26/10/2010 at 09:20 GoPostal says:
Oooooh Postal.
A game with an “execute” button, that was. Lovely.
Sometimes wished I could press that button on people that went and uploaded fake torrents to TPB.
26/10/2010 at 13:53 Casimir's Blake says:
I would argue that Carmageddon’s violence was somewhat in the vein of “cartoon hilarity”. Cars, peds, splat, turbo-nutter-bastard NITROUS! Running people over was never meant to be the “main point” of the game, ultimately it was a sandbox racer with violent but silly overtones. I think there might have even been some sort of “bonus” for completing a race without touching a pedestrian. That and the British slants to the humour, the totally unrealistic scenario, meant you couldn’t possibly take it seriously and the devs were aware of that too.
Postal = Sticking a shotgun up a cats arse, with sound-effects, because supposedly it’s even funnier when you’re shooting someone that way. A game for juvenile, low-IQ spods?
Each to their own, sure, but I believe there comes a point where you can draw a line at gratuity and utter tastelessness.
26/10/2010 at 01:23 Nick says:
I never played either of them back in the day, though the uproar and green zombie blood german version and all that chatter was on my radar via PC Gamer, they just never interested me much. There was a vaguely similar game, Quarantine (similar in that you could run people over and fit guns to your cab) that I recall quite enjoying the demo of, but it was that long ago it may well be a bit awful.
26/10/2010 at 01:43 Javier-de-Ass says:
I love quarantine, but those games are nothing like carmageddon
26/10/2010 at 13:02 Nethlem says:
Actually the german version had robots instead of people, the UK version had zombies with green blood instead of people.
Yup even violence against zombies is a big no-no in germany, you can actually go to jail if you sell Dead Rising over here :D
26/10/2010 at 01:33 MadMatty says:
Carma II was spot on- great game. Notice the car in 1 is the exact same as in the 1975 flic “deathrace 2000″
26/10/2010 at 02:12 Spacegirl says:
Alec Meer is underselling Carmegeddon. I remember it being a pretty fun and hilarious driving game!!
I don’t think it’s some all-time great classic, but I do think it has PLENTY of worth outside of its tabloid-baiting nature.
26/10/2010 at 02:13 Robin says:
It’s fashionable to be sniffy about Carmageddon, clearly. It was an open-world racer that does some tech and gameplay things that were innovative at the time (pre-win32, pre-3D acceleration). It was fun. It is as crass and exploitative as most other action games of the time, including Doom, Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem, et al, which aren’t haughtily dismissed in this way. What’s really sad is that developers like Epic, men in their late 30s and 40s with all the resources and creative flexibility they could ask for, are still making games creatively rooted in the Games Workshop BO-stinking basement.
26/10/2010 at 02:15 Theoban says:
I adored the first Carmageddon, the amount of time I put into try to push the Police car off the top of the building so I could then buy it after the race was ridiculous.
Carmegeddon 2 didn’t appeal to me on the same level for some reason, even though almost everything was better about it, I just didn’t enjoy it as much.
Maybe it was because I could just buy Carmageddon 2, whereas the first one I had to lie about my age in Electronics Boutique to get it. Fun Theoban fact there.
26/10/2010 at 02:20 Samuel Bass says:
I loved both Carma 1 and 2 – I think I played the demo for the second one more than I have some games. It was my first experience with three-dimensional free roaming play, and it was full of goodness.
26/10/2010 at 02:28 Random Stranger #46 says:
Meh, can’t read everything before me, and this assures me i will not be read, but…
THERE ARE A LOT OF MISSING TAGS IN THIS SITE.
Like rFactor, you cunts! DAMMIT!!!!!
26/10/2010 at 04:03 The Dude says:
You disappoint me, Alec.
26/10/2010 at 04:50 Dude says:
I’m the Dude, dude!
Also, the first issue of PC Zone I bought had the Carmageddon review. The thought of running over a bunch of old women with a cow stuck to your bumper was the height of hilarity for me back then. Actually, I don’t think it’s any less funny now.
26/10/2010 at 04:35 tikey says:
@Everyone who had problems with carma2 in new OS.
If I remember correctly the problem was actually in the copy protection. So by using a crack to remove it you could actually play the game on new machines. It was true the last time I tried on a win XP machine, don’t know if it’ll work on Vista/7/modern hardware.
26/10/2010 at 05:11 Redd says:
This used to be a LAN night staple. It was one of the few games that was competitive and fun at the same time. Fun as in fun for everyone in attendance, not just the dominant players. I also remember it having a distinctly ‘British’ feel to it. Good times.
26/10/2010 at 06:04 bill says:
I got the impression that carmageddon was a much bigger deal in the UK than the US? Was that true?
It’s weird how some landmark games become the source of a million copies, and some are abandoned. Some become a huge name and a huge franchise, and some are forgotten.
I remember UK mags raving about carmageddon, hidden and dangerous, and wargasm – all of which are abandoned or forgotten these days. Though i guess H&D might have been the source of all the WW2 games…
And all the fuss about carmageddon in the UK press!!!
Personally I read a preview of Interstate76 a few months before it was released, and from that point could only dream of i76…. so i skipped all the Carmaggeddon stuff. (though in hindsight they were totally different games – but i was annoyed that Carma took all of i76′s press. )
26/10/2010 at 06:34 JayT says:
I played the first back when the iMac were new, so did the second, The newsroom i worked in used to host Lan parties after closing edition, they were wild.
The problem i see about OpenC1, along with many open-source remakes, is that they want to REPEAT the game, instead of making something similar, but better. I mean, it was fun the past decade, but now its blocky, pixelated and a bit dumb :P
26/10/2010 at 06:52 killmachine says:
yes. carmageddon was one of the first games i played when i got my first pc. first i found it a bit hard and slow. but i kept playing and enjoyed it very much. like a few already mentioned, the deformable cars were revolutionary at the time.
and it was a hell lot of fun driving over pedestrians in a creative way. you know the combo points and all that stuff. you got extra points for all sorts of stuff. i remember the insane stunt boni. not to forget all the powerups and the HUGE tracks. they were not only racing tracks, no, you could actually choose different tracks in each race.
it wasnt important to get the the finsishing line, it was more important to destroy all the other opponents. and thats what i did after a while. crash all the other guys to win the race. it was a lot easier to just race.
i played that game so much my hands hurt. you know the default key layout on the num block. painfull after a while but i didnt think about changing it for some reason i cant remember. :)
great game. carma2 was still ok but didnt had the feeling of part 1. part3 was a desaster.
26/10/2010 at 07:20 c-Row says:
As with so many other games, the German version didn’t have the pedestrians in it, instead replacing it with small bots that somewhat resembled parking meters. However, I actually preferred that version, as it was more about racing and crushing your opponents into small cubes of scrap metal rather than collecting points by running over crudely animated bystanders.
26/10/2010 at 07:21 inferno says:
Nothing like watching your bumper tear loose during a high speed collision, only to tragically spin through a crowd of pedestrians in a whirlwind of dismembered body parts.
It brings a tear to my eye…
26/10/2010 at 08:30 Komus says:
I still have the Carmageddon box! It’s used for holding special party cigarettes. Every time I see Max staring out at me from behind the wheel it reminds me of the electro-bastard ray, and I smile.
26/10/2010 at 09:19 Dodgy says:
I was trying to remember “that other game with the cab” and it was Quarantine yes! :)
I’d LOVE a new game like Carmageddon or Quarantine and would buy it. And I thorougly hate racing games normally.
Actually, come to think of it, we need Flatout in a city with humans on the sidewalk!
26/10/2010 at 09:23 Redo says:
I do believe that just like the non-original company produced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmageddon_TDR_2000 there is now also a russian Armageddon Riders aka Clutch
http://carmageddon.wikia.com/wiki/Clutch
Also, did you know: http://carmageddon.wikia.com/wiki/Carmageddon_4
Such a promising series, so little long term followthrough :(
If only we would still have as much / such combine-fun-with-gore-and-awesome games today.
26/10/2010 at 09:32 Monchberter says:
I still have the original Carma and it lives on to this day installed on my netbook. Apart from a few slight graphical glitches and my gripes about no support for widescreen (really, i should be less stupid) it runs perfectly and really is fun.
Like many others, until the release of Half-Life this is the one game that just ate my free time in huge fleshy chunks. The Splat Pak was even more insane, anyone remember the ‘Duel’-esque semi truck driven by ‘Mother Trucker’? If you even won that or the digger truck you could say bye bye to almost all your visibility as they were literally so big as to make seeing where you were going next to impossible.
As others have said, this was the one game that made emergent gameplay its own. The replay cam (although buggy and game crash inducing) was tons of fun, and the huge variety of view options and actual ways to mess with the world was just so refreshing!
As for Carma 2, hm, It was fun, but it lost the sprites based charm of the original for pre millennial crap full 3D. That said, it really did push the emergent envelope even more.
More love for Carmageddon!
26/10/2010 at 10:12 Quine says:
A quiet post-apocalyptic street. Some zombies are harmlessly shuffling across the road and generally minding their own business. There is a faint roar in the distance.
Suddenly a red car covered in dents and spikes comes flying over a rise and lands solidly on the poor unfortunates in the middle of the road while blasting nearby pedestrians with electric death. The face in the corner of the screen looks amused as the car ploughs towards the stadium.
Yes, the replay mode actually did that sort of thing, It was great. One of those early proper 3D games (cf. Total Annihilation, Interstate ’76) that actually felt like a proper world, and it was big too. Mastering the driving physics was rewarding, and then you got the Harvest Mode pickup…
26/10/2010 at 11:43 Monchberter says:
This, this and more this!
Every single part of this game was fun, but the ‘action cam’ in the replay was pure gleeful insane cackle inducing mirth of the highest order.
26/10/2010 at 10:14 Quine says:
One guy set up some custom races and dicked around with things like the gravity.
Imagine our surprise when the race started and all our cars floated straight up into the air.
Longest race ever…
26/10/2010 at 11:37 Schmung says:
Loved both Carma games. Utterly, utterly loved them. Completely bonkers and somewhat broekn though they were. Multiplayer was a hoot, the maps were MASSIVE, imaginative and stuffed full of easter eggs. It was joyous, silly, unscripted fun. Best of all, you could mod Carma 2 and I ended up with heaps of custom cars in it.
26/10/2010 at 11:51 groovychainsaw says:
Both games were amazing for me, partly because of my youth at the time, and partly because they were so ambitious (or so I thought, at least!). They had huge maps, large numbers of secrets and rewarded exploration long before the modern ‘sandbox’ games appeared. You could win the races in any number of ways too, not just by racing, but by destroying all your opponents (and buying their cars afterwards) or by killing every zombie on the level (If i recall?). I still think there is the possibility to do a great modern version of the this, but the last game (TDR2000) lost some of the spark, so maybe games have moved beyond the simple premise? I’m not sure, but like many people here, one lan game of fox and hounds in this still stands as probably my favourite racing experience in gaming.
26/10/2010 at 12:06 EBass says:
Carmageddon deserves way more respect than it gets, the damage was simply amazing. Not only in how much you could bend and deform the dozens of vehicles, but how it actually effected handling within the excellent physics engine. If you warped the car so the right front didn’t touch the ground you’d feel that that wheel wasn’t touching, you wouldn’t merely get -20% acceleration -40% grip or something.
Total 3d sandbox enviroments that were absolutely glorius to kill in, particularly with the powerups. Remember the power up that attrcted hoards of pedestrians to you? Sit on the train tracks with that on and just as the train comes use the jump powerup to fly to safety as all the pedestrians get splattered.
Wonderful wonderful game, AND (and this is often forgotten) and damn fun racing title.
26/10/2010 at 12:30 Chaz says:
I’m sure I read an interview with a Carmagedon dev back in the day, where he said that they originally planned to put pregnant lady pedestrians in it, so that when you ran them over the foetuses would splat on the windscreen and then snap back on the umbilical cord like elastic. Unsurprisingly they thought that might just be a bit too offensive though.
26/10/2010 at 13:15 Songbearer says:
Both games made my childhood. I recall playing the Carmageddon demo very clearly, my dad not entirely realising what the game was about until I mentioned offhand that the silly man on the camera said naughty words from time to time.
The demo was uninstalled and I was crushed. For its time it had some absolutely mindblowing physics and the infamously shaky control scheme only seemed to add to the carnage. Then, Carmageddon 2 came out and my parents bought it me for christmas after I had played the demo (From PC Zone, which was notable because it put a giant PC Zone bumper sticker on the Eagle) to death.
With Euphoria physics I can only imagine how amazing a next gen Carmageddon game could have been. Hell, GTA 4 is close enough with its heavy cars, incredible pedestrian impacts and crazy stunts. Unfortunately, I don’t think such a game would fly these days. It’s a great pity.
26/10/2010 at 13:22 Clovis says:
Wait, so why can’t we have a modern version of this? Why is ok to have super gorey horror films, but you can’t make a modern gorey game? I’d like to play a early Peter Jackson Horror Comedy version of this right now. Go crazy with the gore and make it funny. I can’t imagine that wouldn’t sell. I know EA\Activision couldn’t release it. Oh, and you couldn’t release it on a console. Hmm….
::sad::
26/10/2010 at 13:33 oceanclub says:
““Pornography For Anarchists” – here’s Brooker’s original review:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=2805”
Oh, is there any way to find links to _all_ of Mr Brooker’s old PCZ rreviews?
P.
26/10/2010 at 13:48 Dusk says:
I used to work for the guy who invented Carma, he is a very cool and crazy guy. You should check out the Edge magazine retrospective on it, very informative.
26/10/2010 at 13:50 Dusk says:
Oh and also to stop magazines printing their cheat codes one of them was ” ibetyoucantprintthiscunt”
Genius!!!
26/10/2010 at 14:19 Casimir's Blake says:
If someone attempts to build a “Carma 3″ – forget all the 2000 nonsense, they were poor sequels from then on – they should simply take Carma2 and do the following:
- Set it in multiple sandbox cities. Linked by driving, but you can teleport to safe-garages once you know where they are.
- NO quests or missions, it should just be an emergent sandbox a-la Minecraft but with some possible goals e.g. enter championships to get gold medals etc.
- Also on the Minecraft tip, find parts from other cars / drivers to upgrade with or to combine to make better parts.
- NO on-foot action. This would change the spirit of the game too drastically, this isn’t GTA!
Carmageddon was limited by technology but it was able to push some boundaries, and it probably introduced many people to the idea of an open world. The simplicity of the game ultimately means that it’s probably not much more than a historically-important novelty for many nowadays, but taking the core gameplay and merging it with some sympathetic modern updates could have potential for some fun emergent gameplay.
26/10/2010 at 14:46 Dhatz says:
I realised that with certain type of zombies, carmageddon would be perfect for this age tired of classic zombies vs cars inferior to carmageddon 2(i remember some games with such thematics, but none was a hit) and with extremely varied game quality.
26/10/2010 at 14:50 Dhatz says:
also must not forget the Road of the dead (on newgrounds last week) was a giniormous hit.
26/10/2010 at 15:18 WFL says:
I’m 27, have a regular respectable position at my day job, have hobbies that don’t include violence, and a social life.
I also played Carmageddon. Often.
The mechanics of the game were amazing, and the amount of polish put into it is unheard of in this day and age, in my opinion. You had so much freedom in that game to do whatever you wanted, essentially; want to win by exercising your frustrations on some hapless pedestrians? Go for it. Want to just speed (w)recklessly down the road in an attempt to get to the finish first? Sure. Want to just plow into your opponents and turn the race into a demo derby? All the better (and my preferred method of winning, although pedestrians were almost equally enjoyable).
At least once a year I think, “It would be fantastic to have another version of Carmageddon for modern machines with the same gameplay”.
Of course, I think the same thing about Interstate 76 (except usually once every 3 or 4 months :)). Classic cars, guns, and great music (not to mention an interesting storyline for the genre).
26/10/2010 at 15:28 Dhatz says:
I only had interstate demo and carmageddon 2 demo, those 2 are the most demanded games due for sequel(threequel). Carma 1 was so unfinished and obsolete the day I played carma 2. One big problem emmerging, if there was modern Carma or Interstate in the making, would the fucks developing it forget that hybrids and electricity happend?
26/10/2010 at 17:18 Lucas says:
Still classics. I thought of them recently while driving through zombie hordes in Dead Rising 2 (series spin-off please!). This summer I bought and played 8 PS2 vehicle games to get my fix. It’s one of my favorite genres and has largely fallen by the wayside with the popularity of GTA-alikes. Their now-lost popularity was probably due to the ease of rendering vehicles & environments vs well animated characters.
Carmageddon was the reason I did NOT want to get a drivers license as a kid.
26/10/2010 at 17:24 Ace-High says:
More than anything I miss the unadulterated fun of these physics engines…reminds me of Tie Fighter on the fun level.
26/10/2010 at 18:05 Jake says:
Absolutely loved Carmageddon, especially 2. Quarantine was decent too, but guns make a different sort of game, like Twisted Metal – fun but not Carma. My favourite sandbox racer, along with the San Fransico Rush series (which had similar crazy stunts but no violence) – and definitely the best selection of vehicles in any racing game – like the bus that was also a rocket. My top tactic was to start in reverse, and just take out as many vehicles on the starting grid as possible – this worked especially well in the enormous dump truck that was ten times the size of the other cars. I’d love to see an update of Carma 2.
26/10/2010 at 18:14 Jim Reaper says:
Me and my friends played waaaay too much Carma. T’was a thing of endless joy. Never got on with the sequel, not sure why.
One of our inside jokes stems from this game. Whenever you launched your car, rolled it and managed to land it, you got a “Cunning Stunt Bonus.” My friend launched his car from the top of a pyramid (I think it was on one of the mine levels), landed it and exclaimed “YES, I got a Stunning Cunt Bonus!” From that day on, whenever any of us does something outlandish or foolish and somehow manages to pull it off, we call it a “Stunning Cunt!”
26/10/2010 at 18:28 ron says:
the physics in carma were groundbreaking, especially for a game that was so gimmicky. multiplayer on a lan with the hack to unlock the npc cars was some of the most fun i ever had in my old college computer lab. sometimes we would just let one fucker be the nigh-invulnerable police car and smash everyone else to bits…. hilarious times. carma 2 was pretty fun too.
26/10/2010 at 18:53 scharmers says:
Folks putting down Carma 1 and Carma 2 as Postal-level chunks of violent idiocy are way off the mark. The Postal games were sloppily-executed pieces of garbage. The Carmas may have been off-the-scale violent, but they were technical marvels — nobody had a driving physics engine and damage model anywhere close to Carma 1 at the time, including all the “serious” racers. They were jam-packed with ultraviolet British humor (humour?) And there was no other game that could match the sheer amount of bloody-minded anarchy Carmageddon provided, all in a polished, mesmerizing presentation. I mean, what other game are you going to be speeding down a straightaway at 100mph, plowing over pedestrians, with an A.I. driver sailing over and past you 50 feet above? Wonderful stuff, easily one of my top 5 games EVARS.
27/10/2010 at 08:57 DukeBG says:
word.
26/10/2010 at 19:09 mwoody says:
‘Gotta say, this article seems surprisingly dismissive of an absolutely fantastic ‘couple of games (I recall the third being sort of meh). They weren’t always perfect or polished, but what they were is unmatched in their silliness and just pure fun. Burnout owes much to this series, but has, for my money, not topped it.
26/10/2010 at 19:28 Carra says:
Ah, carma. Still one of the best games I ever played.
27/10/2010 at 08:56 DukeBG says:
oh, i totally love Carmageddon 1 and also TDR2000 (why people hate it? ), but Carmageddon 2 never really ringed by mell. Cars all too rubberry and plastic.
30/10/2010 at 20:46 anduin1 says:
I loved #2 and it was still one of those games I had to run through DOS to get working properly on my PC, I can’t play it anymore though, I’ve tried and the game is just archaic now unlike other classics like TIE fighter.
18/11/2010 at 10:20 Watch movies online says:
I just added your site to my favorites. I enjoy reading your posts. Thank you!
23/05/2011 at 18:06 Sinnorfin says:
“I have played 1nsane within the past week.”
Have you played ‘Terep 2′ ?:D It’s predecessor, probably one of or not the first of its kind,It was great hotseat fun in win95 times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_MTKDjnEDk