We remember the first hit of David Jaffe, who later gave us God of War.
The James Bond films and the iconic Mad Max have shown how cool chases can be in cars equipped with machine guns, rockets and other firearms. And with the videogame industry trying hard to be like the movies at the dawn of the industry, racing and shooters were not long in coming. The first samples appeared already in the 80s – the famous Spy hunter, clearly designed with an eye on Agent 007, or the same Mach rider from Nintendo, which is probably well known to Russian gamers thanks to pirated compilations for Dendy… True, all these games were exactly what races: you had to get to the right place in the allotted time or cross the finish line before your opponents. The weapon was only an auxiliary element.
This went on for a long time, until one game changed the genre beyond recognition, forcing it to turn off the knurled straight line. It was Twisted metal… In connection with new details about the series based on, about which nothing has been heard since the announcement in 2019, we decided to recall the history of the creation of the game and its further fate.
Lucky case
After a scandalous breakup with Nintendo, few in Sony believed in the success of the future Playstation… If not for the nepotism of Ken Kutaragi and then-president of the company, Norio Ogi, the console would hardly have seen the light of day. However, production issues are only half the battle, followed by an urgent need to resolve the issue of games. For the masters of the industry, Sony, despite its background in the field of multimedia technology, was a newcomer, so experienced developers were not that actively eager to cooperate. Therefore, the creation of one of the first projects capable of showing the full power of the new platform was entrusted to the company Sony Imagesoftwith the most enthusiastic tester David Jaffe. In fact, the order was only for a three-dimensional game without any specifics, so the employee was required not only to come up with a concept, but also to find worthy partners who could implement everything at the proper level.
Since Jaffe was not a docile character and hardly made concessions, it took a long time to skid in anticipation of the desired deal. Sony was already ready to remove the arrogant employee from business, when suddenly negotiations with the company Evans & sutherland (a pioneer in 3D graphics) ended on a positive note. True, only at the level of the signed contract – there was still no clear vision of what the game should become. However, the necessary thought occurred to Jaffe a few hours later, when he, together with representatives of Sony, got stuck in a traffic jam on the famous California highway 405. machines and will become the leitmotif of the future project, although initially the programmers insisted on a game about a pizza delivery man with action elements. In addition, a year before Twisted Metal, a racing action game about a taxi driver in a post-apocalyptic world was released, delivering customers and shooting enemies – it was Quarantine for MS-DOSlater ported to consoles.
To create an exclusive Sony (or rather two – the second was the aviation action WarHawk) a studio was formed SingleTrac, mostly composed of Evans & Sutherland employees. The deadlines were very tight – about a year, and this despite the fact that only a concept was on hand. The engine had to be developed in parallel with the game, so the team worked hard. The plot of Twisted Metal told about the racing tournament of the same name, organized by Calypso – a man with the appearance of the front of a gothic metal band and the owner of supernatural powers, ready to fulfill any desire of the winner. The single player campaign was a sequence of battles on various maps, where it was required to kill all opponents with the help of an impressive arsenal of weapons, which included a machine gun, several types of missiles (including freezing ones), mines and abilities unique for each hero. The result is a grotesque analogue of survival races, only, no matter how ridiculous it may sound, without races – in fact, a shooter on wheels.
Not all of the authors’ ideas have been implemented. For example, already in the development process, they refused to combine several maps into a single whole. Since the PS1’s capabilities did not allow for a massacre involving several dozen cars, the creators rightly thought that driving around half-empty levels would be boring. The final videos with live actors, stylized as cheap slashers of the era of video salons, went under the knife: their content seemed too offensive to Sony. Which is rather strange, given the deliberately trashy mood of the game.
However, thanks to an innovative concept and impressive graphics by the standards of 1995, Twisted Metal instantly fell in love with the audience and achieved commercial success. By the way, there is also a PC version of the game in nature: it was used to demonstrate the capabilities of a graphics accelerator Nvidia NV1 and came out only in Japan in a tiny print run. In 2019, one of the users Reddit even boasted a sealed copy, and a full walkthrough can be found on YouTube.
Triumph
The question of creating a sequel arose immediately. If Jaffe worked on the first part as a designer, then Twisted metal 2, which was released a year later, was actually his personal brainchild – here he already acted as the head of development, combining this with the positions of screenwriter, designer and producer. And with all this, David coped just brilliantly, washing all those in whose eyes he had previously been only a narcissistic upstart.
The sequel to Twisted Metal was not just a large-scale work on errors, which were enough in the original even with a discount on the release date, but also a qualitative development of old ideas. The controls have become much more responsive, the maps and their structure are more inventive, and the arsenal of riders has been replenished with a scale of special moves that recovers over time. An unpleasant moment is connected with this, however – the AI rivals possessed an infinite supply of special energy and infinite special attacks, which is why sometimes the player simply could not fight off the onslaught of enemies. Whether this was a consequence of the negligent work of the testers or the author’s idea is not clear. Another thing is that after completing each level, the player was given a password for the next one. Therefore, in case of death, it was possible to start with him, but already with a full set of lives – that’s why the passage did not cause any special problems, if you did not set yourself the task of doing everything in one go.
Stylish cartoon screensavers, designed in the form of sketches, should also be highlighted. A rather elegant solution made it possible to save on the production of expensive (at that time) CGI videos and not get involved in an adventure like the videos from the first part. Although questions of morality, the studio, inspired by the success of the original game, did not seem to care anymore – hence, for example, the extras-pedestrians that appeared in the arenas, whom you could crush or shoot for fun.
The second part has perfectly passed the test of time and still remains the most favorite of the audience. Russia is no exception – the release of the game coincided with the release of the first chips and pirated discs for the PS1. For the same reason, the original Twisted Metal practically did not receive the due demand: it was found mainly on compilations and predictably passed against the background of the sequel. As in the case of the original, the second part was also released on PC in limited edition only in one region – this time, in North America. This version was different from the console online multiplayer and support for 3D accelerators.
From scratch
The even greater success of the second part turned the head of SingleTrac in earnest: perhaps this was the reason for the breakup with Sony, after which the studio went in search of new partners. The team planned to combine game development with publishing, for which they entered into a contract with Microsoft, but it, like the partnership with Nintendo, turned out to be nothing. In 1997, the developers who were left without strong financial support were sheltered by GT Interactive, with the assistance of which SingleTrac has released two great games: Critical Depth and Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012 – the underwater counterpart of Twisted Metal and its spiritual successor, respectively. Jaffe was not involved in their creation, and the games themselves did not become particularly successful commercially. In a word, after parting with the first partner, it only got worse.
Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012
There was a problem with Twisted Metal itself – the rights to the series remained with Sony, and the engine was the property of SingleTrac, so the third part had to be developed from scratch. This difficult task was laid on the shoulders Sony Interactive Studios America, which helped create in the first two games – later it was renamed to 989 Studios… Conceptually Twisted metal 3 almost completely followed the precepts of its predecessor, but technically it was a different game. The graphics almost completely lost sprites, there was support for DualShock and a splitter for four players, and CGI came to replace the hand-drawn sketches, albeit of dubious quality. Another major innovation was licensed tracks from popular industrial musicians: Rob Zombie and Pitchshifter.
But, alas, all technological sophistication instantly crashed against the cornerstone of the new engine – an insane physics model. Most of the time, you had to fight your opponents upside down – the vehicles were trying to roll over for any reason. AI was also annoying: cheating spam with abilities was a thing of the past, giving way to a manic devouring of all healers at the level. Because of this, the timing of the battles was greatly stretched. It was required first to memorize the map, then “destroy” all the first-aid kits and only then join the battle, hoping that you will not be destroyed before the healing remedies respawn. Or at least they did not take all the lives, since the password system now took them into account.
As a result, critics smashed the game to smithereens, which, however, did not affect sales – more than a million sold copies were quite enough to entrust 989 Studios with another part. Like Jaffe, the developers did a competent work on the mistakes: the AI was brought to life, the behavior of the cars became more obedient, the locations were spoiled with variety, and it was even possible to create your own car. It’s no joke, but the authors showed creativity in the script work – they dealt quite funny with the former owner of the tournament, Calypso. And cooperation with Rob Zombie resulted in the appearance of his character in the game. And let Twisted metal 4 did not become the same cult phenomenon as the second part, it definitely deserved more.
Back to daddy
Since the next generation of consoles from Sony was on the way, and the fourth part of Twisted Metal, despite the low ratings, still paid off, the need for a sequel was obvious. By that time, the SingleTrac was not doing well. The studio was practically living out its last days, and most of the state, together with Jaffe, founded a new office called Incognito Entertainment and agreed to become a developer of a new Twisted Metal: Black for PS2.
It was a difficult time to reimagine the series. The action began to rapidly penetrate into other games with driving elements, like Gta and Driver, and they offered much more opportunities than the trivial shots in a small arena. Projects with a strong emphasis on storytelling also gained weight. Therefore, it was much more difficult to impress the audience than in the days of total fishlessness in the field of 3D games.
Jaffe understood this perfectly, and therefore made the narrative more intense, greatly expanding the storylines of the characters due to the increased number of cut-scenes. He also decided on a bold experiment with the setting: Black, of course, still remained true to the canons of trash b-movie, but felt much more depressing due to the post-apocalyptic surroundings. The changes also affected the gameplay – the arenas were quite large in size, which sometimes took several minutes to look for opponents. This strange decision was abandoned during the development of the first part, but, apparently, in an attempt to develop the gameplay, Jaffe forgot what was so good about Twisted Metal 2 – an adrenaline action game in which rivals almost always drive around under each other’s noses.
However, neither the audience nor the critics were very embarrassed by this – Twisted Metal: Black was received with delight thanks to the high-quality gameplay and excellent technical performance at that time. A year later, the game received a multiplayer version, which, however, did not enjoy much success: among PS2 owners, online gaming was poorly distributed.
In the same 2001, Incognito released Twisted Metal: Small Brawl for the outdated PS1, turning the once brutal carnage into fights on toy cars. It turned out mediocre
This was followed by a pause of three years, atypical for the series (at this time, Jaffe was engaged God of war), after which Incognito fired Twisted Metal: Head-On, having managed to release the game for the American release of the console PSP… Despite the hype surrounding the launch of the incredibly powerful handheld, critics have been slow to rate it highly. The main (and well-deserved) object of attacks was the inconvenient controls and physics straight from the third part, which is strange: in everything related to the gameplay, the game relied almost entirely on the mechanics of Black. Perhaps the gloomy aesthetics were replaced by cheerful bright visuals in the spirit of the second part. Nevertheless, the start of any console always predicts a shortage of games, not to mention hits, so the audience swallowed such a TM with a bang.
Twisted Metal: Head-On Extra Twisted Edition
In 2008, Twisted Metal: Head-On was ported to the still showing signs of life on the PS2. Updated version with subtitle Extra Twisted Edition, not only improved the graphics, but also presented the fans of the series with two invaluable bonuses – a documentary about the development and the very videos from the first part that were not included in the game due to the publisher’s adherence to principles.
Minor chord
It took seven whole years to wait for the new (and last) part. And the reason for this is the two canceled games that were planned for release in the second half of the 2000s. At first, Jaffe offered Sony a project about battles on the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world, but another part of successful races was already in development. MotorStorm, kept in a similar setting, so David was not given the green light. Likewise sweep aside the idea Twisted Metal: Revolution, which was supposed to rely on the street subculture – the creator compared it with Midnight Club: Los Angeles from Rockstar…
Only on the third attempt did Jaffe get the go-ahead for a new game – restarting the series. I have already dealt with it Eat Sleep Play, which David founded in 2007 after leaving Incognito Entertainment. Script in new Twisted metal began to play an even more important role – perhaps more important than ever; even trashy videos with live actors returned, as a reference to the first part. But the game itself was full of minor flaws that greatly spoiled the impression. The single player campaign turned out to be a lengthy one, poorly debugged network code devalued the multiplayer component, and in general, times have changed. In 2012, the industry was ruled by multiplayer shooters on the one hand and expensive story games on the other. Twisted Metal turned out to be very few people after so many years, as evidenced by modest sales.
The studio’s attempt to radically change its profile, switching to mobile game development, also did not lead to anything good: Eat Sleep Play closed in 2017. In the same year, Jaffe released a multiplayer action game Drawn to death, received devastating press reviews. Apparently, this fiasco was the last straw for David: he decided to leave the industry and retrain as a streamer.
In 2023, we can safely say that the vehicular combat genre has almost no chance of regaining its former glory. But what is really there – even simple races come out extremely rarely, and only masterpieces from the times Forza horizon 4 and it was not at all. The only correct option to honor the memory of the cult Twisted Metal and at the same time stir up interest in the series would be to release a remaster, or even a full-fledged remake of the second part. Fortunately, the experience of numerous reprints of the classics has long shown the success of the venture.
What are your memories of the games in the series? Do you agree that Twisted Metal 2 is still the best game in the lineup?
