Twisted Metal
The PlayStation car-combat game where drivers in armed vehicles hunt each other through Los Angeles for one wish from the mysterious Calypso, and a clown drives an ice cream truck called Sweet Tooth. It was conceived in a traffic jam on the 405.
Twisted Metal was conceived in traffic. Sony had hired Evans & Sutherland, a Salt Lake City company that built computer simulations for commercial and military clients, to make a 3D game for its new PlayStation, and the teams struggled to find an idea for the technology. Coming back from a meeting, Sony designer David Jaffe and his colleagues got stuck in a jam on Interstate 405 and started joking about firing missiles at the other cars. "We had these amazing visions of this Michael Bay or Michael Mann action movie going down the 405 freeway in LA, with car combat out of Mad Max and a potpourri of explosions," Jaffe said. One Utah director suggested a pizza-delivery game instead, and the violent idea won. Evans & Sutherland staff and the designers formed a new studio, SingleTrac, in the spring of 1994, with less than a year to deliver both Twisted Metal and a second game, Warhawk. Twisted Metal was finished for $850,000.
It came out in North America on November 5, 1995, one of the first PlayStation games released outside Japan. Once a year Calypso, a man who lives beneath the streets of Los Angeles, invites drivers by email ("WILL YOU DRIVE?") to a contest on Christmas Eve, and the last one alive gets a single wish, no matter the price or size. Players picked from twelve armed vehicles and fought through six arenas, the last on the rooftops of the city's tallest skyscrapers. IGN found the single-player game short but said the two-player Duel Mode "more than makes up" for it. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it 1995's Game of the Year, and it sold more than a million copies in North America.
The North American box art showed the clown Needles Kane with his ice cream truck, Sweet Tooth. From the second game on, Sweet Tooth became his name too, and he became the series' perennial contestant. Twisted Metal 2 (1996) took the contest to Paris, Hong Kong, Antarctica and New York and sold 1.74 million copies in the U.S. It also got Sony sued by Frosty Treats, a real ice cream truck company that claimed Sweet Tooth copied its safety clown; the federal appeals court ruled against the trademark claims. After SingleTrac fell out with Sony and was sold to GT Interactive, 989 Studios made Twisted Metal III (1998) and 4 (1999), which Jaffe called "good games, they're just not good Twisted Metal games." In 2023 the series became a Peacock TV series starring Anthony Mackie, with the wrestler Samoa Joe playing Sweet Tooth and Will Arnett voicing him.
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