The Carmageddon Franchise Is Making An Unexpected Return

We appear to be in a golden age for semi-forgotten racing game franchises getting rebooted. Tokyo Xtreme Racer has been one of our favourite racers of recent times, and we’re rather intrigued by next year’s revival of the Screamer franchise, even if it seems to be related to the original in name only.

There’s now another one to add to the list: Carmageddon. Originally a series of three games launched between 1997 and 2000, these destruction- and contact-heavy racers also gave you the option of making progress by running over the unfortunate low-poly pedestrians that inhabited their various tracks. For reasons we can’t even begin to fathom, this saw the series met with a fair amount of controversy.

The series then lay largely dormant save for a couple of primitive mobile entries in the mid noughties, until a reboot entitled Carmageddon: Reincarnation – later re-released in expanded form as Carmageddon: Max Damage – arrived in 2015. It came and went without making much of a splash, and the series once again went quiet.

In 2018, though, the IP was picked up by publisher THQ Nordic – no stranger to destruction-based racing games, given that it's also responsible for the Wreckfest series and Wreckreation. It appears to finally be ready to do something with Carmageddon too, because Italian developer 34BigThings – responsible for Wipeout-style zero-gravity racer Redout – is teasing a new entry entitled Carmageddon: Rogue Shift.

The title’s Steam page is full of redacted information – including the name of the franchise – but as spotted by Gematsu, its SteamDB history rather gives the game away. That steam page plus a short teaser trailer giving us some very brief glimpses at some automotive destruction are all we have right now.

The one car we get a clear look at, though, is very clearly based on the Hyundai N Vision 74 concept. Yes, a car drawing inspiration from retro video games is now itself inspiring cars in reboots of retro video games. We’ve come full circle.

More info on Rogue Shift is coming on 4 December, so we don’t have long to wait to see what form this rebooted cult classic will take.