LudoScience

Carmageddon. A video game known by people even if they never played it, thanks to its scandalous reputation. However, this game is far from solely being the "nasty racing game where you have to crush pedestrians" that many media and politicians wanted to ban. Carmageddon is first and foremost an excellent game, featuring many technological and gameplay innovations that deeply influenced the racing game genre.

We interviewed Neil Barnden, co-founder of Stainless Software game studio, who told us in great details the birth of this unique video game. Influenced by their passion for "Banger Racing", the studio designed a game where the main goal isn't to finish the race, but to crush the opponent cars. An attempt from their editor to get the rights from the movie "Death Race 2000" lead the studio to add pedestrians that can be run over into the game, and they will stay even after the movie adaption cancellation. The young studio then pursues the creation of the game following a philosophy of "if it sounds like fun, let's try and do it." Therefore, they will, among others ideas, ask one of their friends to film him while being hit by a car to "get some reference material", hire a genius programmer who don't have a driver license to program vehicle physics, or get "inspired" by some famous celebrities to create the wild game characters. We have even found the first game created by the studio, BRoom, a 3D shoot'em up inspired by Descent (1994), that shows how much Stainless Software is passionate about cars.

All these stories, and much more (how did Carmageddon manage to fight censorship after release?), can be found in an 18-pages long article published inside the 26th issue of Pix'n Love magazine, a French magazine dedicated to the history of videogames.