The History of Mad Max Video Games

hello and welcome in this video I will be talking about the history of Mad Max videogames and what the 2015 Mad Max game really is let's begin [Music] [Music] let's start at the very end the end credits of the 2015 Mad Max videogame there's a certain name missing from those credits you know what it is let me tell you that name is George Miller yes the creator of Mad Max himself is not even mentioned once in that video game why is that transferred this question will have to look back at the troubled history of not one not two not three but four cancelled Mad Max videogames and only two official games that came out all over the course of 30 years this is going to be a long journey so strap yourselves in and let's go believe it or not but the very first Mad Max video game was supposed to be released in 1987 just two years after the release of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome the Mad Max craze was still going strong and George Miller was interested in new technologies that would allow him to tell stories in completely new ways the company hasbro would given that opportunity with a prototype consult called project Nemo this console was quite unusual and used VHS tapes to store data which meant that games would have full motion video with 8-bit overlay graphics ken Melville who developed this console was a big fan of Mad Max so he decided to create a crude live-action full motion video to demonstrate how a driving game would look like on this system he filmed all the footage on his ranch in Agua Dulce using a toyota tacoma with a 16 millimeter camera strapped on the back and then he went on to mash the footage to make it work on the Nemo prototype console he showed this demo to George Miller and George really loved it even said that Mel Gibson would love to be part of that game so he hooked Melville up with Elvira Beyond Thunderdome concept and storyboard artists to create the very first Mad Max game Melville would produce the game George Miller would direct it and the entire thing would be a Kennedy Miller production for Hasbro the game was going to be called Mad Max Autorama the production had begun and everyone was excited while Melville was developing the script trying to figure out split points for each interactive video sequence Elvira was storyboarding the entire game in color George Miller's excitement grew each time he received new material however the project was just not meant to last turns out that Hasbro thought Mad Max was aimed the children I mean needless to say they were shocked when they saw the level of violence in Mad Max Autorama once they realized what the Mad Max series really is they immediately shut the whole project down this was the first out of four of cancelled Mad Max games but this failure did not discourage Miller from trying again just three years later in 1990 the hyper wild Mad Max started to fade without any new Mad Max movies on the horizon it seemed only logical to turn Mad Max into a video game but unfortunately the movie license was given to the wrong people Warner Brothers sold the Mad Max license to mindscape a developer studio that was notorious for buying cheap official licenses and creating very mediocre games just to cash in on name recognition to give you an example of how bad it was mine scape created a game called The Last Starfighter except it was just a port of the Commodore 64 game called eridium with The Last Starfighter licensed slapped on it they simply changed the sprites but the game had nothing to do with the movie the fate of the NES Mad Max game was not going to be any better meet Christopher Pico who is a fan of Mad Max movies and who also beta-tested this game from mindscape for about a month when he was a kid here are his impressions of the beta version of the game I'm a huge fan of this trilogy of movies and I hated the game and I told those oh I gave to them right to their face I told them that thought the graphics were [ __ ] there are lazy programmers because they just kept repeating the same levels just with different colors palettes swapped out the controls are some of the worst I've ever had ever played the difficulty was just up there what you needed to do in the game to progress was so vague the instructions didn't even really tell you what you needed to do the thing that really really pissed me off the most was that they didn't even use the license properly I'm like if you're gonna pay the money for Mad Max and put [ __ ] Mel Gibson on the cover you know at least use the the property the only thing that reminded me of the movie was the opening title squirrel which tells you like the story from Rome where I was like why would you put the ringmaster guy from Beyond Thunderdome you know the dying times here why would you put him in the game if you're not gonna have anything from Beyond Thunderdome with the game outside of him I was mad and I was like no you took one of my favorite series of films and just made like this generic game out of it unfortunately the finished game was no different from the beta it was just as me do vague and disjointed as before it was pretty obvious at that point that the official license was only used to trick people into buying this game needless to say George Miller was very disappointed after all this was the very first ever official Mad Max game and it was a disaster meanwhile mindscape being you know mindscape they just didn't care they still had the license so they started working on a sequel to the Mad Max on NES the sequel was virtually finished but Warner Brothers took away the license from them just in time of course that did not stop mindscape from releasing that game only under a different name and with all the license material removed from it they called this game a lander and they released it on Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo in 1992 the failure of the very first officially released Mad Max game is extremely significant because it made George Miller very protective of the Mad Max franchise Miller would simply lock away the license and not allow any game studio to create a Mad Max game of course that didn't stop game developers from trying so let's have a look at the second Mad Max game that was being developed but never came out acquiring a license for a Mad Max game became so difficult that it became something of a legend in the video game industry a legendary task that some developers would tackle head-on developers such as the Australian based Melbourne house studio Melbourne House was a prolific game developer in the 80s but by the late 90s their studio was on the brink of closing in 1999 bruno bonnell the CEO of Infogrames saved melbourne house only for one good reason to create a Mad Max game why because their Australian and they had already created a racing game called death cars immediately everyone at Melbourne House dropped what they were doing and went to work on a Mad Max game there was one problem though they did not have the license but that didn't discourage the new owner at all in fact he ordered to create the game anyway hoping that the final product would be so good that it would convince George Miller to give them the license the game was going to be called mad Asylum it was going to be set years after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome max was once again a broken man with nothing left and nothing to live for he would then rescue a young girl who was roughly the same age as his son who was killed in the original Mad Max and she also had the same name as Max's wife Jessie this was enough for max to start caring for the little girl in this game max would visit familiar places from the movies you would also have his dog another blue heeler that would react when Max was talking to someone the main villain would be a cannibal with a catchphrase the game also had a few high concepts one of them would be about max stumbling upon a kilometer high oil rig in the middle of the desert which would make max realize that he was in fact traveling through a dried-up ocean and of course the game would have the iconic interceptor in it as well as you can see some of those concepts sound familiar if you've watched fury road and played the 2015 Mad Max game but we'll get to that in a minute eventually a meeting with George Miller was secured he was very interested and responsive to the pitch and there was also this distinct feeling that Miller had already done his research on video games prior to meeting with developers after the meeting the spirits were high and everyone was awaiting Miller's decision but unfortunately the game was not given the greenlight effectively making it the second canceled Mad Max video game I haven't found any official reasons why this game was really canceled so I did a little bit of research myself after talking with people involved in the production of fury road it was revealed to me that Mad Max asylum was just accidentally too similar to fury road for example the character of a fat cannibal was very oddly similar to the people leader from the movie but that was just a complete coincidence the idea of a girl saved by Max was also too similar to the story of the girl that was saved by max before fury road it would create a lot of confusion if the game was released along with the movie back then so Miller's simply decided against it however the similarities between this game and fury road were not the only reason why this game was canned remember how I said that Miller seemed oddly familiar with video games when Melbourne House gave him a visit well that is because he was already working on his own fury road tie-in video game at that time and this is how it went one day in the late-1990s George Miller shared a flight with Brian Fargo the founder of interplay who created the Fallout games Fargo was obviously a great fan of Mad Max and you would definitely know this if you played fallout games but it turned out that Miller was also a big fan of fallout so they started talking and eventually they decided that they should work on a Mad Max game together they set up a meeting in Australia where Fargo got himself familiar with the script - fury road which inspired the early stages of development for the game it was going to be a party based RPG combining the style of the developers earlier games with Miller's unique vision the vehicles would obviously be worked in as well unfortunately out of the blue a new player had entered the game ea offered twenty million dollars to buy the game license right on the spot and George Miller obliged leaving interplay high and dry since EA got the license we never really heard about any progress on their Mad Max game and you know what I think that's actually a good thing that they never made it I don't like EA what can I say I have to pay a micro transaction to unlock that's stupid and they probably wouldn't have made it anyway because fury road fell over soon after in 2003 and was indefinitely postponed thus spurring a chance for a Mad Max game for the third time from 2003 to 2009 the world of fury road grew way beyond the movie itself and Miller was just ready to shoot the movie in Australia backstories for everything were written for each character vehicle and weapons they all had their own stories to tell in 2008 George Miller had so much material to go with the movie that he wanted to hit us hard with as much Mad Max as humanly possible suddenly fury road turned into a three-headed beast consisting of Mad Max fury road the live-action movie furiosa a 3d CGI anime and the new Mad Max tie-in video game all of which shared the same world and were deeply interconnected on the story level the game was going to be written by George Miller and Corey Barr log the director of God of War to bar look finished conceptualizing the game with Miller in 2008 and immediately wrote on his personal blog that and I quote I got a say and I know I'm totally biased here but I gotta say that this story as well as this game is pretty badass the game was going to be very closely tied in with the movie and it's something you'd probably never guess but traces of that unreleased game are still in the movie if you look at the Interceptor in fury road you'll notice that it doesn't have the rear spoiler that is because this spoiler was supposed to be a collectible item in that video game Cameron Manuel who built the interceptors for the movie told me that he was specifically asked to remove a part of the iconic interceptor so that it would be later found as an item in that video game so if you've ever wondered why there is no spoiler on the Interceptor in fury road that's your answer so clearly the video game had elements of car building and also was going to have melee and range weapons as well as vehicular combat Corey Borlaug was excited for the game and he was already looking for a publisher in 2008 but unfortunately Mother Nature had other plans fury road fell over for the second time in 2010 when the shooting location of Broken Hill and Australia was flooded with massive rains and turned the Australian red desert into a flower garden at that point Warner Brothers the film studio that partially owned rights to Mad Max and financed the whole thing they got really frustrated because they've sunk so much money into fury road at that point that the sheer thought of moving the film to Namibia just give them multiple aneurysms and that is where things really fell off the wagon for Miller's and bar logs game things that will make you understand why the 2015 Mad Max game is just so strange immediately after the rains and Broken Hill Warner Brothers sideline George Miller and stopped him from having any input into the Mad Max game project Miller was only supposed to focus on filming fury road and that's it the game was now going to be developed in Sweden by Avalanche Studios interestingly Cory bar Logue who worked with Miller on the game went on to work at Avalanche Studios in 2010 which would seem like a ray of hope that maybe he would bring Miller's game along with him to Avalanche Studios but nope turns out that he only worked there as a consultant Cory had later put out a statement saying that he most definitely did not bring Miller's game to Avalanche while avalanches CEO Christopher Sundberg said that Cory bar lock wasn't even working on a Mad Max game and Avalanche at all this means only one thing Warner Brothers and Avalanche were working together on their own version of a Mad Max game and they had pushed everyone away who was involved in Miller's original vision just a year later in 2011 George Miller acquired whatever was left of Team Bondi an Australian game developer that created la noir that was Miller's attempt to bring back the game to Australia and develop it at his own digital media company called dr. D studios unfortunately that plan had failed Cory bar log left Avalanche Studios in January 2012 and with his departure Warner Brothers have effectively cancelled a fourth Mad Max game Warner Brothers were now free to create whatever Mad Max game they wanted because they shared rights to the Mad Max franchise they had access to 15 years of fury road concept art stories developed by Miller and his writers and tons of material that they could pick and choose from without ever consulting the man who created it when I talked to certain key figures responsible for creating fury road they told me that they had no idea what Warner Brothers and Avalanche were up to when I explained the plot of the game to them believe it or not but some of them have not even played that game they straight-up told me that this game is definitely not canon that it just looks like a collection of ideas developed for fury road over the years but with their own twist and I'm pretty sure that ideas from previous cancelled Mad Max games are in this game as well but that is not the most important thing the most important thing is that George Miller did not control what Warner Brothers were putting in this game and in result this game contains spoilers from future Mad Max movies and now I'm not going to tell you what those things are but I can tell you how I know this you see I know just a little bit about the scripts for future Mad Max sequels not a whole lot just very little but the things that I already know have showed up in that game on top of it all Warner Brothers had a very let's say corporate plan for the game after all they're a company so their top priority is to sell a product so the plan was to make this as the most generic Mad Max game possible because that way it would just sell more copies now let's have a look in detail at some of the things that Warner Brothers did with this game when the first version of the game was shown to the public everyone noticed that something was off max was suddenly speaking with an American accent about here a man is nothing without his ride and everyone knows that Max is an Australian icon so turning max into an American was met with a lot of outrage from fans of the franchise especially if you look at the history of the very first Mad Max movie that was also dubbed into American English for its release in the United States Here I am tryna fix a stupid Here I am trying to put sense to it but I know there isn't any the reason for the American dub of Mad Max 1 was purely financial and just as it was for the video game it's funny how history repeats itself huh for the video game however the outrage was so big that Avalanche Studios decided to turn max back into an Australian it was a small victory but in the grand scheme of things and change a whole lot the game was still going to be pretty generic and sometimes with changes in it that were just completely inexplicable for example let's have a look at Max's backstory for whatever reason max in the game had a daughter what in the movies you had a son now I really don't know why they would change such a thing and it's not because I'm a big fan of Mad Max but because this change just doesn't do anything for the story of the game so I guess they did it because they could or maybe they didn't bother to check I don't know this approach to make the game generic was also reflected in the setting of the game which doesn't look very Australian at all mind you I'm not talking about the bottom of the seed that you're driving on half of the game but if you look at the rest of the map most of it just doesn't look Australian in fact a lot of the regions of the map look American with canyons and wide empty highways the rest looks nondescript and there's only one area with red dirt that kind of looks like Australia now let's have a look at the central story of the game the plot of glory and her mother was simply lifted from Miller's notebook and it was modified for the game you can find the full and official version of that story in the mad max number one and number two comic books released by vertigo but for now I'll briefly explain the differences between the video game version and the official version that's in the comic books in the game max loses the scrotus and is saved by hope in the comic book Max is attacked by the buzzards and is saved by Glory's mother who does not have a name in the game max goes to the Buried Airport to save glory from the buzzards and the comic book max goes to the sunken city to save glory from the buzzards but mostly just to get his car back from the buzzards finally glory and hope are killed by scrotus in a pretty gruesome way in the comic book glory and her mother are ran over by the buzzers I think it's pretty clear by now that Warner Brothers just took that story modified it and wrote the whole game around it now let's have a look at the cars from the game because we might learn something pretty interesting you see most of the cars in this game are based on fury road cars but from around 2010 that is before they were shipped to Namibia where they were modified even further that year 2010 is when Horner brothers took the game from Miller along with fury road assets which explains why the cars in the game look like old versions of fury road cars and have not been updated even the war rig in the game is based on an early version which was built in 2009 with a Datsun on a tanker which was later replaced this sort of approach isn't limited to cars Oh Warner Brothers used early designs and concept art from fury road all over in the game for example some locations look like they've been lifted from very early fury road storyboards the buzzards jump out from the ground just like in the early fury road storyboards and concept art another example is the character of blast cap who is based on fury road concept art that was developed in 2009 by waita a design studio from New Zealand wadar were briefly hired to create concept art for fury road George Miller was fascinated by their work and wanted to see what they could come up with thankfully only a tiny portion of their designs were used because what the hell interestingly one of their knucks card designs created by Aaron back from waita actually ended up in another game Need for Speed 2015 that car is the bet customs f 132 so I guess you can say that Need for Speed has a little bit of fury road in it now and while we're on the subject of waita miller created dr. d studios as australia's answer to waita and what does that have to do with the Mad Max game at all well the property of dr. Dean in that time game after many battles dr. Dee's hordes were bested now I'm only scratching the surface showing you the things that Warner Brothers took from early stages of fury roads production the game is literally filled to the brim with them locations characters weapon designs and you know that is not to say that Avalanche did not come up with anything I mean it's their game they developed it there it's full of have launches ideas however because of Boerner brothers reckless approach towards this game there are some things in it that I don't think they should be there and that is why I find this game so fascinating in a way it gives you a look behind the scenes of fury road and also its future now I fully understand that because this game is such a mishmash of ideas that it could be simply explained you know in the standard Mad Max fashion that you know it's just another Mad Max myth that it doesn't have to make sense but to me this sort of explanation has always been a cheap cop-out and that is because if you look deep enough you'll find reasons as to why things are the way they are and I really hope that I got you familiar with those reasons and even if you don't believe me just remember that Miller did not want to create a vague Mad Max game with Max as an American instead he really wanted a true Mad Max fury road tie-in video game that was always the plan but instead this is the second official Mad Max game that we ever got and again it's just something that doesn't have Miller stamp of approval he's not even credited in this for that this game exists completely as its own thing you can forget about trying to put it anywhere on the timeline but you can definitely use it as a study of what fury road could have looked like at some point or have a peek at some backstories that Miller develop or see some ideas that we're running for decades in the production pipeline I mean it's all there now before I end this video let's just make something clear I am NOT saying that this game is bad it is not it is a very solid and a fun game I must have for every Mad Max Band regardless it's just that the story of how this game came about is quite revealing and I think it might help you understand why we never had many Mad Max games to begin with for example or why Miller grew so protective of the franchise or maybe even why'd Miller just recently sued Warner Brothers whatever the case I really hope that one day we're going to get a true Mad Max game with Miller behind the wheel as it should be because this franchise most definitely deserves it just as Miller deserves to have his name in the credits thank you very much for watching this video if you liked it please leave a like in a comment and subscribe for more I'll see you in the next video until then stay shiny and chrome you

Channel: Mad Max Bible

Views: 503,984

Keywords: mad max, fury road, game, 2015, george miller, tom hardy, mel gibson, furiosa, wasteland, history, gaming, fallout, interceptor, immortan joe, chumbucket, unreleased, games, nes, nintendo, playstation, mad max: fury road (film), mad max ps4, mad max gameplay, mad max fury road full movie

Id: o0g5hvx1lwA

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2017