the cutting room mirror

Carmageddon (DOS, Windows, Mac OS Classic)

Carmageddon has you behind the wheel of a variety of eccentric vehicles in a race through the bleak near-future...but who wants to race when there are pedestrians to kill and opponents to waste?

Powerups, physics, violence...this game was revolutionary and controversial, kicking off a much-loved series.

To do:

  • More unused stuff, including sounds. See the X-Cult page and the Carmageddon Wiki for more. Also, get clean PNG rips rather than just uploading JPEGs from X-Cult.
  • A cut-down version was released as Carmageddon: High Octane by budget software label Softkey. It removes a lot of stuff--only six tracks, two drivable cars, no music, so on--and may warrant exploration.

Early Ed 101#

Originally, Ed 101 was supposed to drive a hovercraft of sorts. This idea was scrapped, but the hovercraft's 3D models and textures still remain in the game. The textures for the hovercraft are located inside the Devil's Canyon Mining Town's texture files, as opposed to each car having its own texture file. It is unknown how they ended up being located there.

Unused Powerups#

Pedestrians from Hades#

This powerup, which can be accessed with cheats and sometimes picked up in-game, doesn't do a thing. But interestingly, Carmageddon II uses the same index number and position for Immortal pedestrians.

Timer frozen#

Stops time completely. Activating it again will resume the timer's functionality.

Got 'im in the bollocks#

This powerup is only present in the Splat Pack. It just shows that message, and grants 20000 credits. It also appears in Carmageddon II.

8-bit mine#

This one is also only present in the Splat Pack. It acts exactly like a regular mine, albeit slightly weaker. Presumably unused.

Unused Music#

The directory \DATA\SOUND contains several pieces of MIDI music in HMI and in normal MID format. Because the game doesn't actually use MIDI music, all of them are unused, except for CARMID03.HMI which is used by the setup program. The archive below contains the files in both HMI and MID formats.

Download Carmageddon (MIDI Files)

File: carmageddon-midis.rar (52.5 KB) (info)

In addition, the Music Volume in the Sound menu (only on DOS, Windows forces using the control panel/adjusting speakers) doesn't do a thing even to CD Audio, since it seemms to be exclusively meant for MIDI.

In a FAQ written by Kevin Podszebka, SCi has explained the absence of MIDI music ingame.1

Unused Text#

Several unused strings are present in TEXT.TXT:

  • Let the carnage continue... (line 25) - Used when leaving Nice and Fluffy mode in uncensored versions by pressing the minus key on the keypad.
  • WRONG TEXT.TXT (lines 130 to 150 and 169)

Oddities#

There is data about the rewards obtained by activating the "rollover bonus". This bonus doesn't exist in the final game, but it required the player to spin around, land on the car's roof, and end by landing on the car's wheels.

Version Differences#

Careful, you'll lose an eye.

This page or section needs more images.
There's a whole lotta words here, but not enough pictures. Please fix this.

Please elaborate.
Having more detail is always a good thing.
Specifically: Which other countries changed the humans to zombies?

Due to the game's violent nature, some countries, such as the United Kingdom, changed the red-blooded humans to green-blooded zombies. In Germany, they were replaced by robots with black oil. Shortly after the game's release, some "blood patches" were released on the internet to restore the game's full violence, and the Max Pack came with fully uncensored versions.

References#


  1. Carmageddon (e) Lösung / Walkthrough - Mogelpower- "Originally Midi was going to be in the game!!! But after hearing FM midi for more than 5 minutes in a row we scrapped it for CD audio instead... Can you imagine playing a game with continuous FM midi and NOT being able to turn it OFF. AAAAARRRGGG enough to drive you insane."↩︎