This is going to be a spoiler filled discussion of the new Twisted Metal television series that just dropped on Peacock.
I don’t really know who the audience of readers for this will be. Whether it’s Twisted Metal fans from the various forums or groups I’m in, or if it will be one of the many friends and acquaintances I’ve managed to make over the years. Regardless, I’m happy you stopped by.
I have been a Twisted Metal fan since I was in grade school. I have loved this franchise for over twenty years, and it has influenced my career path and creative direction in my life in more ways than I could list. The franchise has always been the perfect blend of action, cars, horror/sci-fi, heavy metal, and addicting gameplay. No other franchise has come close to replicating the feeling I get playing these games, aside from maybe Vigilante 8.
At this point in my life, I can’t even say if Twisted Metal influenced my love of cars, heavy metal, and horror, or if my love of those three things influenced my love for Twisted Metal. They are one in the same. Really words in this text box cannot convey the emotional attachment I have for this franchise.
For those joining me here who aren’t familiar with Twisted Metal, the premise is extremely simple from both a story and gameplay perspective. The story consists of a mysterious and powerful man named Calypso who hosts an annual car combat tournament with a wide array of deranged contestants. The winner gets whatever wish they desire. Calypso has some sort of supernatural powers granted to him by demonic forces, and is usually portrayed as a powerful long haired businessman. If you have ever seen the crime lord villain from The Crow who runs Detroit, that is literally Calypso.
Gameplay wise, you fight a various number of opponents with your chosen character in a deathmatch style tournament. Usually you’ll fight on 8 or so levels, with a mid boss and final boss fight. Your character’s car has a special weapon and machine guns, with the rest of the weapons being pickups around the map.
It’s also important to note that Twisted Metal was NOT an apocalyptic Mad Max style game or story. That’s an important note for the discussion.
So we haven’t gotten a Twisted Metal game since 2012, because Sony can’t manage the franchise to save its life, and David Jaffe, the original Game Director of the best Twisted Metal games, is now a middle aged ranting lunatic who has burned all of his bridges in the industry. I know I liked to rant like a lunatic online from time-to-time, but this guy makes me look like a saint.
He also created God of War, which I’m sure even most of my non-gamer friends may have heard of. Jaffe is a can of worms on his own, and he really used to be a personal hero of mine growing up. I wanted to be a game director just like him, and create my own hit gaming franchises. It’s why I went to school for game design, and now have a fuck ton of student debt. I really lost a lot of respect for the man as I’ve gotten older, and I feel like he has lost touch with what TM fans want. He didn’t really understand it back in 2012 either.
Which is actually a perfect segway before we get into discussing the new show itself. Twisted Metal has an extremely complex fanbase, that has fans who enjoy the games for a multitude of reasons. Each of the Twisted Metal games are different, even when it comes to how the core car combat gameplay is constructed. The stories are different. The art styles are different. Some share universes, some are reboots, some are spin-offs, some are sequels, and some even imply a multiverse where all of these are true. Twisted Metal is a diverse fanbase, simply because it’s a diverse franchise, and we’ve all had our own entry points. Our interpretations of the lore and gameplay probably heavily depend on our games we played the most.
My first Twisted Metal game was Small Brawl, which was the RC car spin-off. I accidentally rented it thinking it was a racing game. My introduction to this franchise that influenced my entire life was an accident! Could you believe that? From there I bought Small Brawl and Twisted Metal 3 at my local Toys R Us. After that, I was hooked, bought the rest of the games, and the rest is history.
My point being that making any new Twisted Metal media is a tough act to follow, considering it has so many people who think their own internalized version of the lore and gameplay is THE definitive version. Hell, I’m guilty of the same thing, although I lean towards a lot of the hardcore fans, especially with gameplay.
Let me start by saying my expectations for this show were so ungodly low, that I genuinely enjoyed myself after finishing it. It was well acted, competently put together, and had some good production value. Do I think the jokes and tone all landed all the time? No, but it was a lot less eye rolling than the trailers made it out to be. Do I have a ton of valid criticism? Yes, absolutely, and we’ll get to them.
The trailers for the show were horrible. I have never seen such bad promotional material for a show before, and it’s clear whoever cut the trailer didn’t know the Twisted Metal franchise. Most of us TM fans were really expecting a show in name only, with no correlation to the games.
Let me actually start with the criticism first, because they actually don’t detract from the show too much. My expectations were so ungodly low, I would have taken a car with a gun on it, and would have been mildly amused.
The most glaring issue with this show is that it is set during the post apocalypse, where some of society has rebuilt into their own city-states, while a majority of America is a wasteland.
You remember what I said at the beginning of this when I told you Twisted Metal isn’t Mad Max? Well learning that revelation immediately turned off a lot of fans, and made us extremely hesitant about how loyal any of this show would be to the source material.
The franchise was never about the post apocalypse, and that was always what made it stand out from other generic car combat games that were just Mad Max rip offs. The juxtaposition of an underground deathmatch tournament spilling out into our normal functioning society is half the fun of the lore. That’s what made Calypso as a character so interesting too. Somehow this rich mogul just managed to get away with hosting a contest where drivers would fight to the death in the streets.
Here’s where the spoilers come in, and my criticisms are actually sort of satiated. The franchise heavily explored the idea of having the contest set during the post apocalypse, with David Jaffe talking about the extensive “Twisted Metal: Apocalypse” concepting the team did, and eventually scrapped. So it’s actually hard to tell if the show runners chose the apocalypse theme as a deep cut reference to that unused concept, or because it was simply the lazy generic answer.
I’m trying to put my thoughts into words here. The entire first season of this show just acts as a prequel to the actual tournament, and it isn’t really revealed until the ending of the season. So this entire time you are watching the show, you think THIS is the adaptation of the source material. You think the car combat on screen is all we’re getting, and this is some really loose adaptation the showrunners threw together for mass appeal.
Yet as I was watching this show unfold, the show’s references to the lore just deepened. Every single game in the damn franchise gets referenced, and the showrunners somehow add depth to otherwise very two dimensional characters. It didn’t make sense that the show would reference so many fucking characters, levels, lore, and even the lost TM1 endings, just for the show to not have Calypso or a contest.
By the end of the show, we get it all. We get everything. Even John Doe’s car gets replaced with Roadkill. It was almost a fever dream to watch a Twisted Metal show somehow have characters from Twisted Metal 1, 2, 3, 4, Black and Head-on all mingle in a somewhat competent and cohesive way.
My expectations were completely subverted, to the point that I felt like the showrunners played a joke on us, the fans. You could hear them in a conference room laughing at how we were going to dismiss the show as generic trash, and then by the end of the season, they would deliver the goods, and shut us up. I suppose it is cool that in the end many fans get what we have always wanted, but I must ask openly if this was a wise decision for such a high budget show on a niche streaming platform?
Why waste an entire season building up with misdirection and playing stupid towards the audience, compounded with the marketing that looked just as incompetent, only to actually deliver a solid show stuffed with references based on a niche IP?
It is like they wanted this show to fail, or perhaps they are playing some sort of 4D chess by drawing in casual viewers and delivering to hardcore fans? LIke are the showrunners so stupid they’re genius, or do they think they’re so clever and funny that they are idiots? I suppose if it gets renewed for season 2, those bastards will have the last laugh again.
Having watched the show, they must have at least opened each game, and browsed through the character bios of all of the drivers. So whatever team who wrote, directed, produced, and supervised this production MUST have actually gave the slightest amount of fucks towards it. The more I watched the show, and how it blended together a patchwork of game lore, the more I was convinced someone actually studied the source material enough.
So how good is the series constructed in terms of a television show? Well as a show, it’s certainly serviceable. The characters are well acted, and the main characters do get a level of depth that you’d hope for. The pacing has some issues depending on if you are expecting car combat and action scenes the entire time, but I felt like at the bare minimum, the show kept moving. It’s really easy to keep a show moving when the literal plot is to get from point a to b in an Escape From New York style fetch quest.
The writing and tone actually wasn’t as cringey and eye rolling as I thought it would be. It felt more in tone with Twisted Metal 2, but I do wish the violence was played up a bit more to help contrast it with the characters we grow with along the journey. The fundamental issue with setting this series during the post-apocalypse is that there is no juxtaposition between the average boring world, and the hyper violent lunacy of the Twisted Metal contest, or the lack thereof in this case. The whole appeal of Twisted Metal was battling in a sunny neighborhood or near epic landmarks. Twisted Metal Black was the only game not to really follow that formula, but it crafted the tone SO well, that it worked beautifully.
Despite my criticism, the tone manages to walk that line of fun cartoony violent action show. I’m sure it has to do with the showrunners being from the Deadpool movies.
The writing didn’t fall completely into the Marvel joke-a-minute shit fest that I was anticipating, BUT I do wish that the villain of the series, Agent Stone, was written a bit more seriously. It fell into the trope of “haha cops bad”, but we’re also supposed to hate and fear this guy. He’s written to be pathetic, and so are all of his gang members, which makes them much less threatening.
If there is one thing I’ve observed from Twisted Metal’s writing, even the bad ones, is that we’re usually not supposed to hate a character we play as. We’re supposed to relate to everyone or at least be appealed to some character on some level. Even the murdering psychos in Black had qualities that enthralled us as players. Agent Stone wasn’t enthralling, and his agents they used from other TM drivers weren’t much better.
Also, if the cops were written to be more threatening, I think it would have been much more satisfying to watch Sweet Tooth clean-house with them during various scenes during the series.
I think…oh god I can’t believe I’m saying this…I think The Walking Dead did an excellent job of writing complex evil or bad characters. I still remember watching when the survivors met this villain named The Governer, who was an absolute bastard, but through characterization, you could hate him and relate to him. That sort of development is what we need in a show where technically everyone is “bad” in their own ways.
From a cinematic standpoint, it felt pretty bog standard. I didn’t feel like I was watching any sort of groundbreaking piece of art, and the cgi was pretty bad. The action sequences were shot well, and there was a level of competence in all of the shot composition. It’s not like the show looked like a college film project. Oh, and segwaying off of that, the sound and audio composition wasn’t bad. To my surprise it had really good mixing, where I could actually hear the damn dialogue without having my speakers blow out during action sequences. Is the industry finally learning that most people don’t have surround sound setups at home? I doubt it, but I was very happy to be able to hear everything, and enjoy the action sequences when it counted. The machine guns were meaty as hell, the missiles had some great sounds, and the cars sounded pretty good. Although Roadkill’s engine rev sounded nothing like the carbureted smallblock V8 that is under the hood haha. I thought the composed music for the show was very good, but the entire collection of licensed music choices made no sense to me. It was a mix of 90s hip hop and prog rock. Like the final battle sequence played CAKE for Christ’s sake. I love Cake’s music, but it just doesn’t fit the vibe of Twisted Metal. The show needed more heavy metal, more ripping guitar riffs (If you’ve ever seen the original 90s Beast Wars cartoon, you’ll know), and definitely needed to draw more inspiration from the Twisted Metal 1-4 soundtracks. I genuinely think Twisted Metal 1 and Small Brawl have some of the best music ever composed for a videogame. I’m talking about Ocarina of Time levels of S-tier music.
I also noticed that this show had no mention or display of mysticism or science fiction throughout the show. Twisted Metal has always been a franchise rooted in science fiction, supernatural, and horror. Calypso has magic powers stolen from a demon (in most iterations), the drivers are sometimes ghosts, demons, or supernatural beings. The games have time travel, space travel, curses, multiple dimensions, and just about every cool Twilight Zone or Creepshow plot you can think of.
This first season of the show really didn’t show a single thing that wasn’t rooted in reality. Well, the combat and entire premise of Twisted Metal is cartoony, but as far as establishing the world in the show, we aren’t introduced to anything you wouldn’t see in real life, aside from Mr.Slam’s giant horsecock smashing watermelons.
Yes, I wrote that out. No, I am not making that up, go watch the show.
Despite these criticisms, it really isn’t that bad at all. These are all things that can be improved upon or introduced in a season 2.
Which sort of brings me to my last point of discussion before wrapping this up. The show’s terrible marketing really left a lot of hardcore fans hesitant to even give this a chance. I genuinely thought it would be dogshit, and I’m surprised how well I liked it.
Fans have been giving it a chance, and word of mouth is actually giving it some really solid reviews. I personally think it’s a 7/10 show, with some really awesome moments sprinkled throughout. I must not be the only one who gave it a chance, and enjoyed it. I am extremely wary of what the mainstream audience viewership is for this show. I hope it pulls enough numbers to get to season 2 and the actual tournament, but Peacock has been doing horrible as a platform. To no surprise, streaming services all wanting a piece of the pie has ruined streaming and oversaturated the market.
At the end of the day, I think I can speak for most Twisted Metal fans, when I say we just want a new fucking game already. We want a game that captures the tone of the 1+2, with the break-neck fast gameplay of Black. Twisted Metal is just cars, action, sci-fi, and heavy metal all mixed in a blender. Yet it seems so hard for developers to understand the tone of it. Even the original creators of the game lost touch with what made the originals so fun. I’ve said it on the forums, but Twisted Metal’s best entries were really the zeitgeist of their era, and lightning in a bottle we probably won’t be able to replicate.
I will end my post with a bit of a personal note. Twisted Metal will always be one of my favorite gaming franchises, and it is one of the reasons I went for game design and development as a degree. Twisted Metal got me through some of the toughest moments of my young life, and was a form of escapism I wanted to recreate for a new generation of gamers. I wanted to be a game designer to create the escapism for some kid who needs to drown out the fighting and the abuse. I wanted to make games to close off this world, and cultivate another.
Sadly with the state of late-stage capitalism driving shareholder profits over creativity and worker’s rights, I’ll probably never get to work on a big project like Twisted Metal. I can barely even find time to develop games anymore while juggling two jobs to pay my bills. One of my jobs is being a fucking developer! In 2023 a developer position doesn’t even pay enough for fucking rent and student loan payments.
Dare I say it, but these franchises and various pieces of media keep me from eating the barrel end of a shotgun sometimes. Now that the creative media of today is suffering from corporate meddling and the quest for profits, I barely even have that anymore.
This show though? Seeing this show get made, and actually be pretty good is a feeling I can’t type in words. It’s that last drop of serotonin generating some optimism for the world we have ahead of us. Maybe we can pull through with all of it. Maybe the world and the show’s season 2 will be better.
My name is Calypso, and I thank you for playing Twisted Metal.
