Reader Reviews

Destruction Derby (PSX)

by Peej

Back in the mid nineties or so, I was going through a bit of a gaming dearth. The SNES was showing its age, the Megadrive was getting a bit tired, and I figured it would be time to have a look at one of the newfangled consoles hitting the market at the time. It seems like a long time ago now, but back then people were being wowed by Virtua Fighter 1 on the Saturn and in true fanboy fashion I’d pretty much made up my mind to get Sega’s new black beastie with its newfangled “CD Drive” – Cor, it sounded so great back then.

Two things stopped me dead in my tracks one day. The first was wandering into EB and seeing a fighting game being played that pretty much knocked VF1 on its arse. No angular polygons on show, just two characters knocking the living crap out of each other. That game was Tekken 1 on the Playstation and up until that point I didn’t even know what a Playstation was, let alone want one. But that was it for me, I was sold.

Shortly after taking delivery of my new grey beastie I was hopelessly in love with the thing, and one of the first few titles I picked up purely on instinct was Destruction Derby 1 by Psygnosis / Reflections. I’d seen a short movie clip of it and couldn’t believe that there were games around with that level of detail and with seriously large crashes going on, so I paid my 40 quid and was instantly hooked.

Destruction Derby 1 was the game that pretty much established Reflections back then as being a studio to watch. It was the first time I’d seen that many cars racing round a track in a game, and it was certainly the first time I’d ever seen damage being done to them. DD1’s graphics also seemed amazing for the time, and even on a brief week’s replay lately, you still cannot fault it (having scoured the world for a copy, I finally found one secondhand from an Amazon vendor and am glad to have it back in my collection).

Amazingly the game can put up to 20 racers on the screen at a time, all smashing into each other, with very little slowdown. So the cars aren’t that varied (apart from their paintjobs) and you could hardly call the handling “realistic” but it evolves from a pure out-and-out racing game into something more tactical. For the idea is not to come first in a race, but amass the largest amount of points by smashing your opponents to bits (there are race modes available but let’s face it, where’s the fun in racing when you can smash stuff!)

DD1 also featured a rather cool “housey” soundtrack and as well as the races, there were the final end of season “deathbowl” matches, which basically involved everyone being put in a massive arena, and smashing each other into the dirt until only one car was left chugging along.

The cars suffer damage as I said, smoke belches forth from your busted engine, bits fly off left and right, even debris gets left on the track. This is the PS1 we’re talking about, and it’s amazing to see developers touting stuff like this in racing games now as being “revolutionary” – DD1 is nearly ten years old after all (scary thought that!)