There has always been a lot of talk about the gratuitous violence of video games for as long as I can remember, since they too, as cultural products, are subject to careful and rigid censorship. In 2003 the Pan European Game Information commonly known as PEGI was founded , a classification system that indicates the age groups appropriate to the use of a videogame and any explicit contents present in it.
PEGI today operates in 32 European countries plus South Africa and Israel . It hasn’t always been this way though. There was a time when each game was subjected to a commission that established its suitability and, when this did not happen, the titles in question were literally manipulated and distorted in some cases. Too bloody movies were cut as happened for some Resident Evil sequences, blood taps were closed as happened for Wolfestein 3D for Super Nintendo. Even longer is the list of titles that have aroused the indignation and dismay of political figures who in turn have conducted real campaigns against the publication of these games, inevitably delaying their release.
However, no one had ever given to discuss enough to end up in parliament as happened to the legendary Carmageddon , which saw the immediate withdrawal of all its copies from the market. But can you imagine 900 parliamentarians in suits and ties discussing the events of the distinguished Mr. Max Damage ? I confess that I wanted to be there.
We come now to the title in question, of which we can speak little but only well in my opinion. Carmageddon was a simple yet innovative game. Developed by Stainless Game and published by Interplay and Sales Curve Interactive in the distant 1997 for PC MS-DOS, it is a destrucion derby with a significant note of gore. The aim of the game was simple: to win all available races. To do this, you could act in 3 different ways: you could destroy all the enemy vehicles, complete the path by passing through all the Check-Points or simply investing all the civilians on the map before time ran out.
However, it was not only the violence that made this title great, it was also the game physics and the possibility of damaging the cars in the race as never seen before, yes because in Carmageddon the collisions were going to really modify the structure of the vehicle, respecting the position of where the car was hit and varying the size of the crack based on the intensity of the impact, something we now take for granted and see almost everywhere. But that wasn’t the case at the time. But above all Carmageddon had a strong ironic component that made the slaughterhouses in which we transformed the circuits, really funny and pleasant. I still remember how the three levels of difficulty were stated: Easy “like killing a bunny with an ax”, Medium “like a daily carnage” and Hard “like kissing a cobra in the mouth”.
To season everything a sweet soundtrack by the Fear Factory. As for the withdrawal from the market I was talking about, the game was reintroduced in Italy by replacing civilians with zombies and the blood from red became green, while in Germany a version with robots instead of people and total absence of blood was distributed .
This restriction saw its end with the advent of the Splat Pack, official expansion of the title that contained a patch for the reintroduction of the violent version of the game regardless of which territory it was played in (made the law found the deception). A decidedly quality product considering the historical context in which it presented to us. Carmageddon also had a sequel, 1998’s Carpocalyps Now and a recent PS3 and PS4 remake.
