These movies were created by editing the data which determines the crumple behaviour when the cars in the game crash. By inserting ludicrously large figures, and then repeatedly triggering the 'bodywork trashed' powerup via a cheat code, the player car is mutated into a jagged mass of mangled polygons which fill almost the whole screen, and becomes a moving virtual abstract sculpture.

Various other modifications can be seen in the movie clips, including alteration of the weight of objects and arbitary messed-up alternative texture maps for some objects + cars. Nothing was particularly planned, I just messed around with altering various things and recorded some of the results.

The footage was shot on DV off a laptop screen, giving an interesting but somewhat low-quality look.

None of the clips have any sound for now, (i liked the in game sound but alas the camcorder mic recording was too poor) so you'll have to watch them Brakhage-style! :) Or make your own soundtrack - if you do I'd like to hear it!

The files:

• carmabends_abstract.mp4 (6.1mb)
  - Total abstract shape mania. Car textured with random images from my hard drive hence the non-game colours.
• carmabends_constructivist.mp4 (6.8mb)
  - Somewhat communist-looking mobile public art for the downtrodden (downmowed?) people of Carmageddon city! Changed textures here too.
• carmabends_yello.mp4 (12mb)
  - Pleasent sunday drive in the countryside. Edited hilights of random yellow pointiness.

I made these movies a couple of years ago... some day soon I will attempt to pursue this technique further, tho I don't currently have a computer that will run Carmageddon properly... they're all too slow/broken and/or have been upgraded to OS X + won't run the game well in classic. Would be good to try it with some more extensive/planned texture mods, as well as on a faster computer for higher framerate + resolution. Also maybe direct video capture rather than shooting off the screen for sharper image, tho I quite like the slightly more analogue/textured effect of videoed LCD!

Here is the page on archive.org where the movies files are stored. Please visit there if you'd like to leave a comment/review. (you have to be registered to do so tho) - alternatively email me any thoughts, or post comments here on my livejournal. Thanks!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.