Mashed : Drive to survive
Post nostalgia #7
Revival of gaming in Paris
Type of Game
The perfect virtual companion for your school days, your evenings, and any situation involving video game consoles and people.
Release date on our machines
August 2004—thank goodness I’d already had my license for a year; otherwise, I never would have passed the test.
Developer
Supersonic Software Ltd., makers of crazy racing games since the late 1980s, now absorbed by mobile app giants
Publisher
Empire Interactive Europe Ltd.—a big company that seemed to be all over the place, if I’m not mistaken. But thanks for your service.
Mashed : available on GOG, on Steam, on Epic Games, and it's cheaper than a gas cap, too!
In September 2007, after four years of hitting a wall in college, I left Le Havre to move to Paris and study game design at a graduate school. There, I met all sorts of new people, ranging from the completely antisocial geek, addicted to fifteen different MMOs, who had never spoken to a single girl in his life, to the guy who had shown up there without really knowing why, whose purpose in life boiled down to playing Flash games in his web browser during class and getting drunk out of his mind outside of it. Within a few months, I’d built a group of friends who, while not exactly throwing their tuition money out the window either, leaned more toward the second category of people described above. A whole new world opened up to me, with two to four boozy nights a week as the norm, interspersed with twice as many wild video game sessions. Obviously, I dove right in with immense joy, without the slightest regret or hesitation.
A turbulent student life in the capital
Of all the games we played through in the years that followed—from Castle Crashers to League of Legends—Mashed is still the one that had me crying with laughter. To think it came out after Gran Turismo 2, Burnout 2 and Need for Speed Underground! Sure, it didn’t have the same budget, but still!
Major mechanical failure
Truth be told, there isn’t much going on in this racing game. The cars look like third-generation Honda Civics ready for the scrap heap, and the tracks offer nothing exceptional, whether in terms of atmosphere or the originality of the layouts. The power-ups (mines, missiles, shields, etc.), which players collect by driving over them, have been seen everywhere in competing games for the past twenty years. It’s based on the standards of Wipeout but a hundred times slower, or Mario Kart 64 but a thousand times sloppier. There’s definitely a bit of a post-apocalyptic vibe lingering around, just to justify strapping a flamethrower to the roof of your car as a speed booster, but you might just as well find yourself in the not-too-busy harbor of a small industrial town in 1994. And yet, I fell for its straightforward charm. Mashed’s absolute mediocrity on every level gave it a certain flavor, helped along by the five shots and six pints I’d downed in half an hour just before. And when the bugs kick in? Well, even better. Especially since there are a ton of them!
Cars hit invisible walls at random, especially when they jump over a missing section of road. Every time a ramp appears on screen, players know they have a 50/50 chance of watching their vehicle go flying into the air for no reason and plummet into the hole. The only way to stay in the race is for your opponents to crash too. This ridiculously absurd feature keeps the tension high, eventually making us burst out laughing with a mix of frustration and joy. If anyone understands a single word of that last sentence, kudos to you. I’m writing this article completely drunk—had to get back into the spirit of things. Mashed feels more like a program designed to make you hate your fellow human beings than a real racing-brawler game. The cruelty of this title knows no bounds. The four players face off from the same more-or-less top-down perspective, all on the same screen.
No split-screen here; the camera zooms in or out as needed—up to a certain point, though. Cars that are too slow are subjected to the ultimate punishment of instant destruction by a sort of giant, high-energy scraper that cleans the track. It seems like the only thing that actually works in this damn Mashed is that evil broom! Add to all this chaos ultra-sensitive controls, icy tracks that eliminate all traction, collisions that make the cars react unpredictably, and players who’ve already lost able to fire rockets from the sky… well, skill doesn’t really factor into the equation. So you might as well just go all out and play totally wasted, right? Did we play Mashed to drink, or did we drink to endure this excruciating torture? Damn, I don’t remember. If, in the middle of class, we heard three idiots snickering in the four corners of the room, there’s no doubt about it!
They were playing Mashed online on the school’s PCs, and they didn’t give it a second thought! That said, that time slot during the day let us make some real progress. By “progress,” I mean, of course, trying to anticipate—at least a little—which turn or which ramp the game was going to screw us over at. Because we weren’t going to be fine-tuning our skills during the parties, on PlayStation 3 this time, since we’d turned Mashed into a drinking game. Whoever’s car blew up first had to take a certain number of sips, and the winners got to hand them out. Needless to say, the bottles were going down fast. How many times did we start a game saying: “Come on, just ten minutes to warm up, and then we’re heading out!” Only to end up slumped on the couch at three in the morning, one eye closed so we wouldn’t see double. Whether in the moment, looking back, or looking forward to future gaming sessions, just saying the word “Mashed” invariably had us laughing uncontrollably.
Musical Black-out
The soundtrack? I don’t remember it. I’d say that aside from the music in the main menu, the levels didn’t have any—probably to give center stage to the sounds of leaky exhaust pipes, explosions, skids, and multiple collisions. So many sweet melodies to the ear! In fact, even the sounds would glitch sometimes—when the camera zoomed in on the winning vehicle of a round and its engine revved up, the volume would suddenly be cranked to the max for no reason. But all things considered, am I really sure of what I’m saying? Constantly drunk out of my mind and surrounded by a horde of screaming gamers, how could I know if my brain hadn’t just blocked out the OST, or if we were making so much noise that nothing could filter through to our eardrums? But no, reality is less alcohol-fueled than that. Mashed actually only has a single track. Composed by a single person, or a single group called Muddy Funkers, about whom I can’t find much. I think it’s a pretty good track. It doesn’t necessarily capture the chaotic mess that characterizes the game, but I like it. It had us gently nodding our heads, even before we’d started a game, and while our minds were still more or less clear.
Dead battery and broken heart
Even though I kept seeing my school friends for quite a few years after we graduated, I eventually lost touch with them along the way, for all sorts of reasons. And yes, we did graduate, despite the obstacles Mashed threw in our path. And alcohol, too. Especially alcohol. Did we all land jobs in the video game industry thanks to that piece of paper? Oh no. The school we were graduating from hadn’t yet built its reputation, which seems pretty solid today. But in 2010, nobody knew it, so we just came across as opportunists with no skills. And we were right in the middle of the 2008 crisis. Recruiters were asking for portfolios full of graphics or coded game segments, which I didn’t have, since I’d “specialized” in pure Game Design. Well, I blame the universe, but definitely not myself—that’s it. Anyway, I was saying that today, I don’t see a single one of those people anymore, for reasons that are more or less acceptable depending on the individual, their point of view, potential misunderstandings, unacknowledged mistakes, and grievances exacerbated by this or that event.
I bear some of the blame for what happened. But even before we broke up, we’d kind of let Mashed slide. All those aspiring game designers and their friends didn’t spend weeks glued to a single game like I did; instead, they juggled six or seven different titles across three or four consoles. Every time I visited them, I’d discover a new title that let us get laid while geeking out, starting with Wrecked, the reboot of Mashed (just as funny because it was just as buggy, but a little less ugly and a little richer in content). Suffice it to say that even though it didn’t fix all the flaws of its predecessor, we quickly got over the old Mashed in our minds. Sorry, buddy—you’ll always be the pioneer of a carefree era that did me a world of good, even if it probably cost me a few years of life expectancy.
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