DESTRUCTION DEEBY

DESTRUCTION DERBY WAS A DRAMATIC SHOWCASE FOR THE POWER OF SONY’S PLAYSTATION AT ITS EUROPEAN LAUNCH, AND THE CRASHES ONLY GOT MORE SPECTACULAR AS THE SERIES WENT ON

“We certainly stuck around on Amiga for one game too many,” muses Martin Edmondson, former head of Newcastle-based studio Reflections. He’s talking, of course, about Reflections’ ill-fated platformer Brian The Lion, which launched in 1994 just as the Amiga market was entering a death spiral. Mike Troughton, who joined the studio fresh out of university to work on Brian, recalls the team was wondering whether to make something for the SNES or Mega Drive when Psygnosis, their publisher, got in touch. “They said, ‘Come up to our office in Liverpool and have a look at this,’” recalls Mike – and ‘this’ turned out to be the as-yet-unreleased

Sony Playstation.

Sony had bought Psygnosis in 1993, and the publisher was busy commissioning games to fill out the Playstation’s European launch line-up. “They asked us to pitch a project,” says Mike, and he mentions that the Amiga games Stunt

Car Racer and Indianapolis 500 were big influences on what became Destruction Derby.

The team used to enjoy causing massive pile-ups in office games of Indy 500, which Mike says led to the thought: “Could we just make that into a game, just smashing cars up?”

But Martin says that the idea for a game about destroying cars goes right back to his childhood. “When I was very young, my dad used to take me to real destruction derbies – they call it banger racing in the UK. I was fascinated with smashing cars from a very early age, so when the race was over, I used to jump over the wire and then just run up to all these cars, and I’d be underneath them and looking at all the damage and all the twisted metal. I was probably only seven or eight or something like that.”

Not everyone at Psygnosis was on board with the idea to start with, however. “One or two people looked at it and said, ‘Meh, it’s just a racing game with crashing,’” remembers Martin. The initial pitch was simply a design document, so Martin says the team went back and made a demo to “win over the doubters”, which ended up being a kind of firing range for cars. “So you’d sort of line up a bunch of cars and then fire this car into them and it would go smash, and all the physics

were going off, all the bits were flying everywhere, and I was so addicted to it I went right through the night doing that, for no reason other than the pure pleasure of it. And that was the moment at which I thought this really, really works.”

The demo sealed the deal, and the race was on to produce a game in time for the European Playstation launch in September 1995 – only around nine months away. And not only was time in short supply, the Reflections team was working on a brand-new and unfamiliar platform. “It was quite a big leap to go from the Amiga to the Playstation,” Martin chuckles.

“We’d never written a 3D game before,” recalls Mike. “I had some experience with doing 3D on the Amiga, but it was purely for demos, and it was all self-taught. I’d never read anything about 3D graphics, it was all just trying to figure out the maths.” As development began, Mike feverishly began to read up on how to use things like matrices and vectors to create 3D. Martin is full of praise for Mike for implementing the complex 3D physics of Destruction

Derby: “Mike was a complete

“ONE OR TWO PEOPLE LOOKED AT ‘MEH, IT AND IT’S SAID, JUST A RACING GAME WITH CRASHING” MARTIN EDMONDSON

» [Playstation] Martin Edmondson says that Reflection had a lot of help from Sony in the lead up to the launch of the Playstation. “We had lots of meetings with Sony: Sony’s technical guys would come and see us, we went to see them.”

» [Playstation] A giant 3D ‘GO!’ spins over your car at the start of a race in Destruction Derby. This was the dawn of the 3D era, and the spinny letters are an advert for the power of the Playstation.

» Martin Edmondson cofounded Reflections in 1984, and the studio was behind a string of classic home computer titles, including Shadow Of The Beast. Reflections was bought by GT Interactive in 1998, and Martin left the studio in 2004, a couple of years before it was acquired by Ubisoft.

» Mike Troughton joined Reflections in the early Nineties, but left after Destruction Derby 2 to co‑establish Pitbull Syndicate, the studio behind Test Drive 4, Test Drive 5 and Test Drive 6.

» [Playstation] Martin Edmondson says that piracy partly influenced Reflections’ move away from the Amiga: “Piracy was a massive issue on the Amiga at the end, so it was just very difficult to justify continuing on the Amiga.”

» Robert Troughton left Reflections after Destruction Derby for a short stint at Scavenger in Liverpool, but returned to the northeast to cofound Pitbull Syndicate with his brother, Mike.