THE HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION DERBY
“We certainly stuck around on Amiga for one game too many,” muses Martin Edmondson, former head of Newcastle-based studio Reflections. He’s talking, of course, about Reflections’ ill-fated platformer Brian The Lion, which launched in 1994 just as the Amiga market was entering a death spiral. Mike Troughton, who joined the studio fresh out of university to work on Brian, recalls the team was wondering whether to make something for the SNES or Mega Drive when Psygnosis, their publisher, got in touch. “They said, ‘Come up to our office in Liverpool and have a look at this,’” recalls Mike – and ‘this’ turned out to be the as-yet-unreleased Sony PlayStation.
Sony had bought Psygnosis in 1993, and the publisher was busy commissioning games to fill out the PlayStation’s European launch line-up. “They asked us to pitch a project,” says Mike, and he mentions that the Amiga games Stunt Car Racer and Indianapolis 500 were big influences on what became Destruction Derby. The team used to enjoy causing massive pile-ups in office games of Indy 500, which Mike says led to the thought: “Could we just make that into a game, just smashing cars up?”
But Martin says that the idea for a game about destroying cars goes right back to his childhood. “When I was very young, my dad used to take me to real destruction derbies – they call it banger racing in the UK. I was fascinated with smashing cars from a very early age, so when the race was
