It's new to me: Mad Max
The first Mad Max game released on the NES back in 1990, and it's kind of a mashup of everything the movies were to that point.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
It’s difficult to overstate the influence of George Miller’s Mad Max movies. The first two essentially created the entire look for post-apocalyptic, dystopian media. You know the one: lots of leather, lots of spikes, cages, masks, chains, exposed skin, rubber, gasoline, improvised weapons, sci-fi mechanics. Borderlands’ entire deal is lifted right out of the Mad Max universe — well, aside from the fact that the game never stops talking, that was Gearbox’s doing — and Miller’s work influenced or inspired creators in a number of other fields. The pro wrestling tag team, The Road Warriors, took their look from some of the world’s more violent elements, while naming themselves after the subtitle (and international title) of the second film. Mad Max 2 is a favorite of acclaimed directors Guillermo del Toro, David Fincher, and Robert Rodriguez, while Hideo Kojima… well, calling Miller’s work some of his favorite might be underselling how he feels about it.
Mad Max’s whole vibe was so on point in the 80s that it still works when used in the present, such as in Fury Road and its spin-off prequel, Furiosa. And with multiple nominations for Best Costume Design for the former, as well as multiple wins in that category, to boot. Oh, and the word “Thunderdome” comes from Mad Max as well. Sure, Miller and Co. did accidentally unleash Mel Gibson on us in the process of all of this, but that’s just how monkey’s paws work.
While Mad Max has inspired directors, writers, artists, and so on throughout media, including a number of video games, actual Mad Max games only barely exist. In 2015, a Mad Max game released for the PS4, Xbox One, and Windows, but there hasn’t been anything since, and there wasn’t anything for decades before then, either. It’s just not a franchise that has truly branched out and made itself a staple of licensed products, which is not a complaint, mind you. Just an observation of how self-contained this has all been, as far as official works go, but the influence of the films has created plenty of Mad Max-esque experiences in the world of video games, at least.
There is one other game based on the Mad Max movies, which released in 1990, five years after Beyond Thunderdome came to theaters. Gray Matter developed and Mindscape published Mad Max for the NES, a game that’s not based on any specific Mad Max movie, but is instead just taking parts of everything for itself as needed. The cover of the game is taken from a shot in the second movie, The Road Warrior, as it features Max’s well-trained blue heeler companion walking behind him. There are some more open driving sections, ones where Max has to go indoors to scavenge and fight people with guns rather than his car, and arena battles, as well. Though, rather than two men enter, one man leaves, Thunderdome style, this is more like “Max enters but can’t leave until the dozens of cars trying to crash into his V8 Interceptor until it explodes are themselves exploded.” That’s not as catchy, but it gets the job done.
And that’s the whole game, really. You start out driving that Interceptor — the Pursuit Special — and have to make your way to the caves full of supplies before you run out of fuel or armor or dynamite. Obviously, if your car blows up before you reach the end, you lose, but you can also run out of fuel and have to restart, and if you run out of dynamite, you might find that you’re not able to progress when you need to, thanks to obstructions that have to be blown up if you’re to pass by them. Inside the caves are more dynamite, more fuel, keys to open doors with more supplies behind them, food, and water — the latter two aren’t used for actually eating and drinking, but instead are currency for you to trade in at shops scattered around the map. You can get fuel there or repair your Pursuit Special, but most importantly, you use the food and water to acquire arena pass in each stage. Once you’ve got that, you can head to the arena, and clearing that ends the level for you. Rinse and repeat a few times, throw in a final boss fight, and that’s been Mad Max for the NES.
It can be a little difficult to get your bearings at first given everything looks pretty same-y and you can only see so much map at a time, but once you get a sense of what the game expects of you, and how you can’t just go around throwing dynamite at everything trying to kill you because you’ll run out of it, you’ll start to make progress. There are guard towers built on stacks of tires that’ll throw dynamite at you, but, like with the cars giving chase, you might be better off trying to avoid engaging rather than using up your limited supply of dynamite. At least, at first, before you build up a real stash through exploring the caves. Avoiding taking damage from these cars and towers is actually pretty rewarding despite the simplicity of the controls: if you apply the brake at the right time, their throw will miss, or they’ll drive right by you, as the dynamite throws and crash attempts work on where they expect you to be. So, if you brake late enough, you won’t be where they’ve already committed to. This lets you stay engaged while avoiding damage, instead of just outright running away until you find a cave.
You’ll need to watch out for what are either oil slicks or potholes in the road, as they make you spin out, which can send you offroad and slow you down — that more than anything will make you a target for dynamite throws or getting t-boned by a car whose only goal is to crash into you. Walls you can blow up are found at various points, as well as rock walls you can’t bypass, or ramps that let you jump. The maps are also big enough that you can get lost long enough to run out of fuel, in which case, you would need to start over. The good news is that enemies you’ve killed do stay dead when you die, and you have unlimited lives in this more open-world setup, but the bad news is that any supplies you did pick up are reset to the default.
Inside the caves, there are enemies coming at you pretty much constantly, but unlike with Max in the movies, you don’t have to worry so much about running out of ammo. It’s not that you have unlimited ammunition for your gun, so much as that you can find stores of it to refill so long as you bother heading inside of caves in the first place. Whereas in say, The Road Warrior, Max is at one point handed a wrap that is basically a treasure trove because there were half-a-dozen shells inside there. As for the arenas, they’re no more complicated than what was already said here: you enter, there are between 30 and 50 cars, and you need to destroy them then escape. Your car’s damage will be healed before you enter, so find the exit so you know where to go once the cars are all blown up, then get to blowing them up. Quite a few of these enemy vehicles will be exploded by other enemy vehicles, so you don’t have to take out every one of them on your own, but you do need to be the last car standing to progress.
There are just three sets of these stages — open-world with caves, followed by arena — then the last boss fight, which is a one-on-one encounter. It’s not a very long game, no, but it does have its fun, and it does take a bit of time to master given the resource constraints placed upon you. Your food and water resets after every level, so use it all up before you head to the arena to try to acquire as much of the other stuff as you can for the next stage. Oh, and make sure not to ignore the crossbows in the caves of the third world: you’re going to need at least two of them to defeat the final boss, as a single crossbow doesn’t have enough ammo in it to manage that.
That it was Gray Matter developing Mad Max for the NES certainly wasn’t an accident. Partially because Gray Matter ended up with a reputation for making licensed games based on popular properties — Dirty Harry, James Bond, Jr., Wayne’s World, The Terminator, The Incredible Crash Dummies, The Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots! — but also because their adoration for Mad Max was already clear before they even got to the point of making a game of it. Gray Matter began as Chris Gray Enterprises in the mid-80s, but as the decade rolled on it changed its name — the second game after the name change was Motor Massacre for the Atari ST and ZX Spectrum. When it released in North America for the Commodore 64, Motor Massacre was known as Road Raider. Take a look at the covers for the two different versions of the game, and tell me where the ideas for these came from:
Arena-based vehicle fighting? Crowds looking for blood to spill? Explosions? Spiked shoulder pads on a leather jacket? Shotgun? Cars outrating explosions? Baby this is Mad Mad all the way down.
The gameplay itself is similar, as well. The look is a bit different, given these computers had different strengths and weaknesses compared to the NES, but the setup was the same. Explore the roads in your car, find caves and explore those on foot, rinse, repeat. Take a look at the Atari ST version of Road Raider to see for yourself:
Not a remake of Gray Matter’s past work, necessarily, but certainly the same exact style of game only with Mad Max branding on it. And hey, that’s fine. Licensed games don’t need to be original, they just need to be well-made and worth checking out. And maybe more people would spring for actual Mad Max instead of implied Mad Max. Though, maybe not, considering how few Mad Max games have been made and how many borrowing from that universe’s style, look, and overall vibe do exist.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Mad Max (2015) also released on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. That version was canceled.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.
Just a nerd tidbit: Mad Max popularised the post-apocalyptic style, but credit for its creation belongs to A Boy and His Dog.