DOS

Carmageddon

Trivia

On October 31, 1997, the English version of Carmageddon was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS.

Note: Indexed products by the BPjS/BPjM are illegal to sell or make available to minors in Germany and it is illegal to advertise for it in any form. But there is absolutely no law forbidding any adult to buy such a product. The only exception is when a game was in addition also confiscated (or put on the so-called "List B" for BPjM games), but this is rather seldom the case.

In this particularly case here, Carmageddon was just indexed, but not confiscated.

However, due to the fact that advertisement also means the presence of a product on the shelves of a store, the product will disappear from the public. But it can be bought in supporting stores "under the desk" (per request).

BPjS/BPjM = German Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften/Medien = Federal Examination Office for Youth-Endangering Publications/Media.

"The engine noises came from a variety of places. One was my '67 Buick. Another was a guy who happened to come and check my hard drive. He had a rally car replica, so we strapped a minidisc to the back and he drove it around the Isle of Wight at highly illegal speeds! The pedestrian squelching noises were made by my partner Bill, the design director. He refuses to admit how. We think they're some dubious bodily function."

--Patrick Buckland, interviewed in PC Review May 97

The soundtrack to Carmageddon consisted partially of music by the band Fear Factory, with the songs Body Hammer, Demanufacture, and Zero Signal. These tracks were off their album Demanufacture, but had the vocals removed for the game.

The 'robots' in the German version of Carmageddon are also hidden in the standard releases. Calling CARMA.EXE with the "-ROBOTS" parameter will replace pedestrians with robots.

In the level "Roswell that ends well" it is possible to find a UFO. Go to the top of the big pyramid, and jump into it. After your fall, you will be able to see it!!

I have come across two instances of a kind of joke, popular in Finland, in the English language. The method of exchanging the first two letters (in the case of English, the first two phonemes) of adjacent words to produce amusing (and very often naughty) new word pairs is used in the "picket to Titsburgh" joke (aka the Freudian slip joke), but the "cunning stunt bonus" in Carmageddon I assume to be a coincidence.

As previously mentioned, the game's spiritual movie was Roger Corman's Z-Movie "Death Race 2000". Exidy's late 70's arcade game Death Race was another descendant of this movie.

The whole game is remincent of the 1975 'so bad its good' Classic Death Race 2000. The movie's premise is identical to that of Carmageddon. It featured David Carradine and a naive pre-Rocky Sly Stallone. And if you look at the main character's car, it is exactly like the main car in Carmageddon with a diffrent paint job.

Carmageddon is listed in the "thanks" section of the Starship Titanic end credits.

The game was only given a release in the UK after a palette change, converting the humans into 'zombies' with green blood (There were also 'zombie' cows, etc). Later, a patch was released, restoring the original palette.

Contributed by Sam Jeffreys (3330) on Feb 07, 2000.

The German version had robots, not people. This was due to Germany's strict legistlation regarding violence in computer games.

The cows in Carmageddon were removed from the Indian release.