If there’s a single constant in the videogame industry, it’s that one game gets mentioned during any argument about censorship. Or tastelessness. Or violence. Perhaps Britain’s most notorious gaming son, Carmageddon is a game that – 11 years since its launch – has gained quite the reputation. Everyone remembers the headlines. But Carmageddon warrants remembering for something more than just selling newspapers.

“Carmageddon came from playing racing games for years and getting fed up with racing,” begins Stainless Games co-founder and lead programmer Patrick Buckland. “And we always ended up just turning the car around and ramming the other cars out of the way. So why not make a game about that?”

This became a rough banger-racing demo that Buckland and Neil Barnden (co-founder of Stainless and lead artist on Carmageddon) touted around various publishers – but in early 1994 there wasn’t another racer where the idea was to hit other cars. The proposal found little support, with established companies proving unwilling to back the concept. It took SCi, then a recently founded company with few big titles, to see the potential. “They were quite forward-looking, and desperate,” continues Buckland. “We were a great combination.”

Barnden and Buckland began hiring, eventually ending up with a team of eight. They wouldn’t be making Banger Car Game, though – SCi, understandably, wanted a license to guarantee some return on its investment.

“That license was originally Mad Max,” says Buckland. “But they couldn’t find who actually owned the rights to Mad Max. Then they found that Deathrace 2020 was going to come out, a sequel to the original that never happened – right up until Carmageddon shipped the actual .exe file was called Deathrace.”

The initial idea morphed into a game that was about both destruction and pedestrians.

“Originally,” says Buckland, “the idea was that you would lose points for running people over, because we were worried about the controversy. Once the game was up and running, Rob Henderson from SCi made the decision: “Let’s just go for it” – and so we gave you points for hitting people. Deathrace fell through and SCi could have canned the project, but they thought it looked good and we could try to create our own brand.”

“We didn’t know the conventional way to make a game like this,” recalls Terry Lane, an artist on Carmageddon, “so we made it up as we went along – or Patrick and Neil did mostly. We found novel solutions to problems that we came across and tried to do things that other games would not really repeat or enhance for five or ten years – the world physics, in-level action replay, the true dynamic mesh deformation.” The common attitude among the team, whose experience levels and abilities varied wildly – Buckland’s background was in Apple II and Mac, Barnden’s in graphic design – seems to have been simply trying things to see if they worked. “Patrick had an amazing attitude of ‘if it sounds like fun, let’s try and do it’,” says Lane.

Because of this, the game had physics based on first principles, introduced destructible elements into its environments and, above all else, it proved you could make a racing game that wasn’t simply about driving fastest.

“In terms of physics I think our guys did a lot of great work, so it would only start to process things when necessary,” says Buckland. “So with lampposts, the game would only consider them when you got really close and just at the last millisecond it would turn into a physics object before collision. So you don’t have an environment of physics objects just sitting there, because you couldn’t process that.”

There is a quality about Carmageddon, however, which is nothing to do with technological accomplishments. You can see it in things like the Pratcam; or the 40-odd powerups with increasingly bizarre effects; the constant swearwords, cringeworthy level names and profane cheat codes; creeping up behind pedestrians and honking to scare them; or simply ramming your car into a cow for the hell of it.

Carmageddon’s origins are in the development environment as much as the development concept. It was an impressionable young team being lead by people with a very particular outlook. “Patrick and Neil were in their early 30s, the older gentlemen,” says Russell Hughes, another Carmageddon artist. “I think I was the youngest at the time – I was 22 or 23. There were eight of us for a while and we ramped up to nine. It’s amazing, looking back, the teams we’re on now compared to then.” This led to a great deal of experimentation, specifically with regard to blowing things up in the name of research, and taking a practical approach to reference material.

This is best seen in the story of Tony, the model for Max Damage and a willing victim of Stainless Games’ research. He’s the subject of an anecdote that deserves reproduction in its entirety.

“Tony was a kind of general handyman around, but also a nutter,” begins Buckland, before Hughes helpfully adds: “Absolutely mental.” Buckland continues: “We needed a reference for what someone getting run over looked like, so of course he was the volunteer nutcase and I was driving a half-ton Chevy station wagon at the time. There was a car park outside the office, so we went out there and drove into him repeatedly: he had a piece of cardboard stuck up his shirt, as if that would help. At one stage, Neil was driving, and Tony asked if he could floor it and hit him harder so he could clear the roof. Neil hit him at about 35mph and he went clear through the windscreen! The police turned up because they’d had reports that someone was being run over in a car park, but when they saw the camera and stuff they headed off.”

Lane was the man in the passenger seat that day, filming: “It was awesome, but the exposure was set wrong and it was unusable footage. We didn’t ask him to do it again.” Mr Tony was obviously a hardy type. “The Max Damage footage as well, that was him,” continues Buckland. “There’s a whiplash action where his head jumped forward – that’s because we smashed him across the back of the head with a pool cue. He had a crash helmet on, and said, ‘Hit me as hard as you can!’”

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