I was a little apprehensive watching the TV series Twisted Metal on Peacock, starring Anthony Mackie (Falcon in the Marvel movies). Emotionally, I feel a little bit of ownership of Twisted Metal. Legally, of course, I have none. I was hired to help create the original game back in 1993-1994. It was my first real job out of college–creating a pair of games for Sony’s then-upcoming Playstation. Yeah, the first one. Twisted Metal was a launch title, and while it wasn’t the prettiest game, it was enough of a hit to spawn an entire series of games across multiple Sony (and PC) platforms.
And, now, a television show.
I planned to watch the entire TV series regardless of whether it was a dog or not. And, to my surprise, it was pretty good. Good enough that they are making a second season, and I’m looking forward to it. Yes, it’s over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, and violent. So were the games. I make no apologies. 🙂
In some cases, they made fun of our original characters / situations, like the original driver of Roadkill. Ya know what? I’m fine with that. We were just having fun, and while we fleshed out the characters, we weren’t the original designers. Mike Giam and Dave Jaffe had the original concepts, and whatever evolved was a combination of ideas from them and the SingleTrac design team, and whatever evolved during development.
I was really only involved in the first two, and I transitioned from the Twisted Metal 2 team to work full-time on another game pretty early in its development. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure how many Twisted Metal sequels and spin-offs there were from there. I’m familiar with Twisted Metal 3 (which was not done by my studio, but instead by Sony internal, if I remember correctly), and Twisted Metal: Black and Twisted Metal Small Brawl, which were done by Incognito, a studio made up of a lot of my former coworkers.
Anyway, there will always be a place in my heart for Twisted Metal. And I’m not at all disappointed seeing the TV show. I consider myself lucky to have something I worked on turned into a TV show. I doubt I’ll ever have that happen again.