As a huge majority of action movies have demonstrated, if you can combine cars with explosions, there’s a good chance you’re going to have a hit on your hands. From James Bond’s tricked-out Aston Martin DB5 to the heavily modified fighting cars of Mad Max, genre fiction has always had a thing for turning automobiles into weapons. And, there is, perhaps, no finer or more deranged example of that trope working on overdrive than the invention of Twisted Metal.
On November 10, 1995, the original Twisted Metal for the first PlayStation dropped, and no aspect of gaming was ever the same again. Before Twisted Metal, we did had racing games, and games where you could fire missiles and guns and blow things up. But Twisted Metal combined these subgenres and tropes in a way that had never really been attempted before. And perhaps most crucially, because Sony’s PlayStation was so new at the time — having only been released in North America in September 1995 — Twisted Metal was the first game on this platform that really proved just how different and special the console was.
