What is Carmageddon?

Carmageddon is a vehicular combat video game released for personal computers in 1997. It was produced by Stainless Games and published by Interplay Productions and Sales Curve Interactive. It was later ported to other platforms and spawned a series.

-From Wikipedia

Here's a fun fact: the name is a portmanteau of Cars and Armageddon 

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Carmageddon is a car-racing game — one where you get a thousand points for plowing down the guy waving the starting flag and you don’t have to actually finish the race to win. Killing your opponents will suffice. You leave bloody tire tracks behind your screeching hot rod, fresh from the old woman who couldn’t maneuver her walker fast enough to get out of the way. You plow a field of riot gear-laden cops. You detour through a crowded stadium or race in a mall.

The gore starts right from the get-go. The cursor you use to choose your driver, select options, and start the race appears as a blood-drip- ping, disembodied hand. And while Carmageddon relies on the time-honored drive-through-checkpoints-before-time-expires model, it awards you more time when you run down pedestrians, slam into other drivers, run over bonus barrels, or pull especially cunning moves (usually airborne, rotating flips off a makeshift jump) .

You make repairs or recover from an overturn on the fly — other cars can’t do that. Ram an opponent enough times and he’s dead (thus out of the race). Kill all opponents and you win the race. Just watch out for the armored cop car; it’s a beast, and very hard to damage.

As you cause carnage and complete tracks, you rise in rank, earn money to upgrade car parts, and encounter new tracks. Rise enough ranks and you can steal new cars from dead opponents. Carmageddon also features multiplayer games. Choose pure smash-each-other fun, see who can kill pedestrians first, or race through checkpoints.

As for longevity, Carmageddon is a quick high. It swallows you for a couple of weeks, plunging you into obsession, and then lets go. At a certain point the game becomes extremely repetitive. Kill, kill, kill. All work and no play... Another problem is the game’s load speed. It’s damn slow. Even after copying the entire game off the CD (347MB), loading tracks took way too long.

It goes without saying that Carmageddon is not a game for everyone. Small kids probably shouldn’t even read this. And those fed up with the level of violence on TV will be offended. In truth, even after hours of solid play, we weren’t tempted to actually kill anyone while driving, but the game definitely wouldn’t make it past a V-chip.

However, Carmageddon is a well-designed game. We don’t give marks for sheer gruesomeness alone. The game is plain fun to play. It’s a port from the PC so there are a few bugs, and half the world has already played the game, grown tired of it, bought add-on packs, and grown tired of those. But it’s a good port and brand new to us. To make it better, by the time you read this, Carmageddon should be supported by 3Dfx 3D cards (namely TechWorks’ Power 3D). Those plasma-spurting Vesuvian corpses will be quite a sight.

Capps, Robert. (April 1998). Carmageddon. MacAddict. (pg. 52).

Download Carmageddon for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes