Let's share our experiences with this masterpiece which was misunderstood by media. I have some of the fondest gaming memories of playing this game while listening to U2, Depeche Mode and Simple Minds. U2 tracks like 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', 'Where the Streets Have no Name' and 'I will Follow' fit and complemented the game so much, it was perfect.

In 1998 I had a Pentium 200, 32MB RAM and Voodoo 2, it was a capable machine for the time but had already started showing its age in the most demanding games. In one autumn evening my dad unexpectedly brought me 3 game cds - Commandos which became one of my fav also, Redneck Rampage Route 66 which I never managed to run, and a cd in Russian that said '300 best games' LOL I will get back to it later.

The Redneck game had a few demos in it and one of them was Carmageddon. When I launched it I was put off by the interface with the cut off and bleeding palm for coursor. As I launched the race I was ughed by the graphics which were bad even by 1998 standards. When race began I could not move the car with direction keys, turned out that you had to use the numpad direction keys which was very inconvenient. As I started driving I noticed the first pedestrians and when I realized that I was supposed to run them over I was so disgusted that I immediately quit the demo and uninstalled it.

A few months passed and I needed something new to play. You have to remember that back in 90s games were not available in boatloads like today, it was the opposite. There was no internet, no digital. If I wanted new games, I had to go 50km to our capital city and buy pirated games in the central station and nearby market. Before you judge me I am almost 100% certain that you could not get legal games locally even if you wanted. And the other way how to get games was by exchanging with neighbours and their friends and acquintances but it was not easy because very few people had PCs back then cos they were expensive like shiz.

In scarsity of games I decided to give Carmageddon another shot. Maybe I had read good responses in gaming magazines, I don't remember. The cd with 300 games mostly contained old platformers and fighting games but there were a few rips of bigger games and one of them was Carmageddon. It had no music and no videos. So I started playing and forced myself to run over the first ped. Then I ran over the second, then the third and realized that it wasn't that bad, it's just a game after all. And that's how one of my biggest loves in gaming started.

Carmageddon is a unique game about doing car tricks in high speed all while trying to hit opponents and peds. The main strength of this game is the car physics and handling. You can do dizzling tricks, it is amazing. The maps are HUUUGE and give amazing sense of freedom.

For example you can drive inside a football stadium in the metro city and run over all athletes. When you enter the stadium they are in position of kickoff so if you line your car correctly you can hit tens of athletes in a row.

You can finish each and every  of the 100 race in 3 different ways - 1) finishing first which you only do if/when you get bored and want to stop playing 2) wasting all opponents which is a lot of fun 3) or killing all peds which takes a lot of time and patience but is also a lot of fun.

All races take place in 4 different locations - metro city, hilly countryside with coastline/beach, industrial area, winter town and some kind of underground science complex. My fav are city and countryside.

One time my sister saw me playing and was in shock - she walked to our parents and said 'HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT HE IS PLAYING?'.

Most fans of the series prefer Carmageddon 2. I never got to playing it back then. When I finally tried it sometime in mid 2000s I did not like it at all - the problem is that it's all clunky wooden 3D and it has 'missions' unlike the complete freedom of the original. The original has a lot of sprite graphics which work very well.

Around year 2000 came Carmageddon TDR or something and it was bashed by everyone. I never even tried it.

In the rise of Kickstarter when everyone started doing it, Carmageddon reboot was announced - it was the first and only game that I backed. It was released 2 or more years later than promised and was complete dogbeep - some of the worst handling, badly optimized, visually like a game from 2005. Later they released an improved version together with the console version but it was still a galaxy far far away from the greatness of the original.

Sadly, I never got to try it when I was younger, and I don't think it would appeal to me too much anymore. It did look fun when I was young, though.

Dem 90s physics.

Carmaggedon was average then, and atrocious now. As far from a best game ever as Croc and Bubsy 3D were.

You are wrong. If it was average, the reboot could never be kickstarted almost two decades later. There were a few backers who donated 10k to it. How many people would back Croc and Bubsy today even with 1 usd?

I always wanted to try it once I saw the ads and previews in magazines. Knew a family with a gaming PC and exactly none of them were interested in it. Then I made this post. That's my Carmageddon timeline.

For those who doubt that Carmageddon is a cult classic, I can tell that I had a sealed big box and I sold it this year on ebay for a lot more than full priced game - you could never do that with an average game that is 20 years old.