Carmageddon (series)

Did you ever watch a movie called "Death Race 2000"? No? That's ok, it was a 70's flick that revolved around the future of motorsport where you can earn points by killing people unfortunate enough to get in your way. Kind of like rally racers getting points for hitting those idiots standing in the road.

Anyway, that's what Carmageddon is. A racing combat game that puts you on a loosely regulated track, often in the middle of a populated area like a city or a chemical plant, and lets you loose. There are three ways to win an event. The most boring is to complete your laps. The most amusing is killing off the competition. And finally the most frusterating is killing off every pedestrian in the level which depending on the game you pick can range from a couple hundred in Carmageddon 1, to well over a thousand in Carmageddon 2. Carmageddon 3 falls somewhere in the middle.

How many games?

Carmageddon encompasses 3 standalone games, and one expansion on the PC.


Carmageddon 1 intro

The first one was released in 1997 with the "Splat Pack" expansion coming out not long after. It featured no nonsense carnage across many different areas, but not a lot of real variation. It also had its share of problems. Some problems that make the game exceedingly annoying to play at times.

Take for instance the physics model. Sure, when it came out it had a pretty advanced physics system where every object in the world had a descreet mass, and interacted with the other objects in a (for the time) realistic manner. If you ran into a tree at 100 mph you were unlikely to disturb it at all if you hit the base. On the other hand if you hit that same tree at the same speed, but at the top you would stand a better chance of knocking it over.

So what's the problem with the physics then? Well, it's a combination of acceleration, and no sense of speed. There appears to be a large disconnect between the number on the speedometer, and the speed that you appear to be accelerating. It's hard to get any solid data because you can't accurately measure things in game. If you play it though, It's very easy to see that the cars don't seem to be going nearly as fast as the speedometer claims. In the span of a single intersection, from a standing start, with base car power, it's possible to accelerate to around 40 mph. But it doesn't feel like you're going that fast. This leads to the cars being very hard to control at what appears to be only moderate speed as well as jumps giving you heaps of air time. The cars just seem to float through the air. This problem is fixed by the second game as that uses an entirely new physics model.

Another big problem is the AI. I've dubbed it Schrödinger's AI (explanatory video at the end of this page). Unless you are observing the computer controlled cars it is impossible to be certain of their condition. When you stop observing a computer car for even a moment it has the opportunity to change everything about its location and velocity. This is the primary reason I refuse to race on any of the mines tracks. The mines are just that, a series of twisty mine shafts. In most levels it's fairly trivial to go from one point on the map to most any other point. In the mines levels they have barricaded any areas not part of the immediate track. This is no problem for the computer controlled cars as once they are out of your sight they are free to leave the area and hide where you have almost zero chance of reaching them. There are times when I look at the map for a moment, close it, and then look at it again only to find that in the span of about 2 seconds one or more computer cars has traveled to the opposite end of the map. This problem sadly persists through all the games, though not as bad.

Map of the mines

Humans are frail, but quadruply so in Carmageddon 1. If you so much as touch a pedestrian, they die. I'm not kidding. You don't even have to be moving. There is a powerup called "Pedestrians Attack" or "Suicidal Pedestrians" depending on the version. This makes all the pedestrians in the area run at your car. If you're standing still they'll still die on impact. It's not really a problem, but I find it annoying.

All the problems aside though, it's a rip roaring fun game.

Second verse, same as the first, but better!

Carmageddon 2 was released in 1999 and featured many improvements over the original.


Carmageddon 2 intro

Now pedestrians had to be hit with a reasonable amount of force, parts could be knocked off cars, and you could actually lose a race by getting destroyed. Gives you a reason to actually be a little more careful.

Another good change was that they completely redid the car acquisition system. Carmageddon 1 let you steal a small selection of cars by destroying them in a race. It was completely by chanse. Carmageddon 2 let you buy any car that you destroy. Even the gigantic super dumptruck that you have to destroy in one mission. Of course, you have to save up first, and the better the car, the more dough you have to pony up.

The game was also more complex, featuring actual missions that had to be completed before progressing. Many of the missions were fairly simple tasks with no real connection to anything. Overall though, a vast improvement over everything Carmageddon brought to the table.

Unfortunately, it was programmed into a sort of a strange position. It was originally Windows 95/98 compatible, and probably still is if you have a proper 95/98 machine around. Sadly it's not supposed to be NT compatible which means that it's not going to run on a modern system. Of course, Carmageddon 1 wasn't NT compatible either so I have been playing it in a virtual machine powered by Virtual PC. The case with Carmageddon 2 isn't so simple. For some reason it won't run in my virtual machine. It also won't run in XP as it's based off of NT. SCI did release a patch that makes it able to run on NT (and by extension XP), but that isn't working for me either. This all makes me sad because in my opinion it's the best in the series.

Forget licensing, let's be honest here.


Carmageddon 3 intro with narration

There's a reason I brought up the Death Race 2000 at the top of this page. An observant person can draw at least a few parallels between the Carmageddon series and The Death Race 2000. And there's a good reason for it. Carmageddon was originally supposed to use the Mad Max license, but that didn't work out. So they tried to do it using the license to another game, Death Race. Death Race was itself inspired by the Death Race 2000 movie, although being made in 1975 it had all the graphical trappings of Pong, so the inspiration was really all there was. Again the licening agreements fall apart, but this time they didn't change anything but the name. When the third game came out they basically just came out and said "here's our inspiration!" and called the game Carmageddon 3: TDR 2000. As with Doom and the BFG, they never officially say what TDR means, but everyone knows.

Sadly though, this game does not continue the upward quality trend of the previous game. The pedestrians generally take an extreme degree of force (in excess of 80 mph) to kill, or even just maim. Then there's the damage model. Carmageddon 1 had the problem that you couldn't die in a race. 2 fixed that by making it possible to have your car wrecked. 3 unfortunately made your car much more fragile. So fragile in fact that the mutant tail powerup that appears in 2 as mostly an amusement returns as tactical suicide in 3. On top of that the time limits, especially on missions, are absurdly strict even on missions where you have to destroy a set of vehicles. I was able to get all the way to the last level, but once there could barely scratch the final boss. The difficulty curve is all over the place.

In spite of the bad, it was amusing to have an actual story linking things together. However, I still have to put Carmageddon 2 over 3.

Closing thoughts from the winner circle?

I'm going to leave off with a series of videos from the Carmageddon games. Mostly the ending videos for each game.


Here I explain the AI


Carmageddon 1 victory video


The elusive Carmageddon 1 game over video


Carmageddon 2 victory


Carmageddon 3 victory. Is that a scream of triumph, or of anguish?