The Second Coming

Today I had a retro flashback while sitting at work. I saw an article on some news story or other, and in the comments someone had used the not-a-spoonerism-honest-guv expression ‘cunning stunt’.

I paused. I thought. Where had I seen that expression before? And then it hit me: it came up when you did a stunt in the Carmageddon games.

For those of you too young to have played it, Carmageddon was, at the time, a pretty unique game. At its heart, it was a racing game. Except you didn’t have to stay on the track. Or go through the checkpoints. You could win either by destroying all of your computer controlled opponents, or even by killing every single pedestrian on the level (n.b. not all of Carmageddon’s “pedestrians” were even people — many of them were cows, or on the snowy levels, penguins). It was, effectively, a sandbox game, where actually participating in or winning races always came second to dossing about around the open environments or splattering people and penguins in the most comedic ways you could find. It also featured a video making mode, where you could reshow and save replays from various camera angles. One of those videos I made stays with me to this day, which was one of me jumping a car through a glass-sided bandstand in a hail of broken glass, and neatly decapitating a penguin on landing. If YouTube had existed back then, I’d have a hundred million hits by now.

So in my moment of nostalgia I idly posted this to Twitter: “Remember Carmageddon? Do you think anyone will pick up and dust off this old classic for modern consoles? Maybe with a car builder mode?”. Imagine my surprise, then, to get a couple of replies back in quick succession. It seems I’m not alone in remembering Carmageddon, and someone is indeed remaking it. And not just any old someone, but the makers of the original game, at least if Carmageddon.com is to be believed. I was excited. A new Carmageddon! It’ll be every bit as fun as I remember it being!

A bit later, a lone voice of reason floated through the Twitter noise. Jocky, one of our forum members, replied to me with: “What would the point be in Carmageddon now?”. I dismissed his concerns, but like a maggot in a rotten apple, his comment dug in. He had a point. Almost every single retro remake I’ve ever played has been disappointing. Will it still be fun to run over penguins on a snowy mountain, when we can already drive and fly around an incredibly realistic living breathing city in GTA IV? Carmageddon certainly had more over-the-top powerups and pickups than GTA IV, and the vehicles were absolutely bonkers, but is it enough these days?

So I’m left with many doubts. I still think it could work… or it could be another Duke Nukem Forever, in which case it is probably better left where it came from — the past.