Here’s another research project I did on a lark and decided may as well be a blog post: How can you rewrite the characters from Twisted Metal to be good? Some of them require no edits, others require extensive overhauls, and some of them just need to be cut. Mostly the ones from Twisted Metal 4.
Since Twisted Metal is slightly obscure, I’ll explain upfront that it’s a game where you drive around cars armed with missiles and machine guns, with the story being that it’s a death race/derby put on by a supernatural entity who grants the winner a single wish. The game has a schlock horror movie aesthetic, with a lot of its drivers having a slasher villain kind of vibe to them, but they’re all driving cars with machine guns mounted on them so it’s not like the game’s going for genuine dread or anything.
Not listed here are any characters from Twisted Metal 4, because that was the point when 989 Studios clearly didn’t want to be making Twisted Metal games anymore. Almost every driver and vehicle is new and almost all of them suck. Special mention to Goggle Eyes and Trash Man, who might’ve worked with more polish, but as they are everything down to their name screams out that Twisted Metal 4 is full of unedited first draft filler material pushed out because nobody cared anymore.
Auger is a drill car construction vehicle of some sort, driven by someone who wants revenge on Twisted Metal contestants for destroying the neighborhoods and roads he builds. I don’t know what this guy’s issue with stable employment is. He’s a cheap Mr. Slam knock-off and the game doesn’t need two of him (and indeed, he only appears in games without Mr. Slam). I like Mr. Slam better. Cut this guy completely.
Axel is a man who is attached to a pair of giant tires. His wish is to be released from the giant tires. Some versions of the game have a doctor giving him prosthetics that allow him to leave the tires, but demands he enter the Twisted Metal competition and give his wish to the doctor in exchange. Axel’s design is weird and unique but also kind of dumb (surely he’s going to die very quickly with all the bullets flying around, and how does he steer?), but it’s not like Twisted Metal is a super grounded game, so whatever. Rather than being trapped in giant tires, though (what?), he was in a horrible car crash that crippled him for life. A mad doctor offered to give him cyborg prostheses in exchange for piloting a giant tire contraption in Twisted Metal and giving the doctor a wish, and Axel accepted. He can unplug himself from the tires and walk around and grasp things with his cyborg prostheses whenever he wants, so Axel got what he wanted, he just has to get the doctor his wish and then he has his life back.
Brimstone is a pickup truck with stained glass windows adorned with crucifixes, driven by Preacher, a preacher who became a serial killer after being possessed by a demon, and who wants to win the Twisted Metal competition to wish the demon away. Straightforward slasher villain kind of character, works fine as is.
Club Kid is a microcar whose driver is also named Club Kid. Twisted Metal III was really phoning it in. The gimmick with this guy is that he likes to party, wants to wish for an endless party, and his car is like a tiny rave. This aesthetic is otherwise unrepresented in the Twisted Metal roster and makes for a decent filler character, but obviously this should be a party bus, not a microcar. It’s not even a mechanics thing, Club Kid isn’t even close to being the fastest, lightest car in Twisted Metal III.
Crazy-8 is a bug driven by No-Face, a boxer who lost a fight so badly his face got mashed up pretty bad. A facial reconstruction surgeon was a fan of his and offered to rebuild his face for free, but he’d lost $20,000 betting on No-Face in that fight, so instead of rebuilding his face, the doctor cut out his eyes and tongue and then sewed his eyelids and lips shut, which is why No-Face is now called No-Face. No damn clue how this guy drives a car with no eyes, but his wish is to restore his face. He killed six people while seeking revenge on the doctor, which punts him firmly into slasher villain territory, but he could also work as a good-aligned character if you removed that part and just had him be the victim of maiming by a petty, vindictive surgeon.
Crimson Fury is a cool spy car being driven by an FBI agent who plans to use his wish to end the Twisted Metal competition once and for all and arrest all the participants. Cool car, perfectly good motivation for a good-aligned character, no notes.
Darkside is a big rig truck driven originally by Mr. Ash and later by Dollface. Mr. Ash is some kind of devil figure, but he’s not particularly prominent in the Twisted Metal competition. This kind of horror movie occultism doesn’t necessarily require Satan to be the biggest of bads, but he definitely isn’t subordinate to guys like Calypso, who runs the Twisted Metal competition, so what the Hell (no pun intended) is a supernatural force this powerful doing slumming it here?
Darkside’s other driver is Dollface, who has two unrelated backstories. In one, she has a guilt complex relating to her mother’s death while working for a crazy mask maker, who at one point seals her inside a doll mask in a bout of pique, and joins the Twisted Metal competition to get out of the mask. By the end of the competition, though, Calypso, who runs the competition, gives her the key to her mask as part of a Saw trap that will kill the mask maker. Dollface takes the key to kill the mask maker and then throws it away to keep the mask. This is a cool arc, going from a timid abuse victim joining the competition in a desperate bid to escape to a vengeful survivor more concerned with revenge. It is kind of thematically detached from the doll aesthetic she’s named after, though.
Dollface’s other backstory is that she’s a supermodel whose face suffers mild scarring after a car accident and gets a spooky occult mask locked on for six days to try and make her face perfect, only to discover the shop has vanished and she’s stuck in the mask forever. She enters Twisted Metal hoping to be free of the mask but, like in her original backstory, if you win with her, she changes her mind, decides she likes the mask, and instead wishes to get dropped straight back into her modeling career. This backstory gives Dollface an excuse to wear cool high fashion outfits and having her occult doll mask be tied to her vanity rather than unrelated trauma is good, but also it makes Dollface a straightforward villain not that much different from Needles Kane. Also, she drives a giant bigrig truck, so it’s not like this backstory even resolves all the problems with her aesthetic incoherence.
I’d go with Dollface’s original backstory, but instead of being vaguely guilty about her mother’s death and then getting an unrelated job with an evil mask maker, Dollface gets a job with a mask maker after fleeing an abusive home and, out of financial desperation, gets drawn into helping the mask maker victimize several people by locking them in creepy, cursed masks. When Dollface finally works up the courage to quit or object or something, the mask maker does it to her, but she is able to steal the truck he used to make bulk mask deliveries (don’t worry about why) and join the Twisted Metal competition.
Firestarter is a hot rod with a flamethrower driven by Damien Cole, a pyromaniac. Perfectly acceptable as a filler character, even if being such an ancient car suggests it’s probably a joke character.
Flower Power is a love bug driven by Amber Rose, an environmentalist who wants to put a stop to the Twisted Metal competition to stop it from ruining the environment. This is a terrible motivation – this one annual murder derby has a negligible impact on the environment – and walks right past a much more obvious one, to wish the world into a sustainable state somehow. She makes for a decent good-aligned side character.
Grasshopper is a sort-of jeep/buggy thing that’s supposed to fill the same basic niche as the Pit Viper, although they are separate vehicles. Its driver is Krista Sparks, who has some kind of connection to Calypso that I aggressively do not care about because Calypso is best off being unattached to any of the characters. The interesting thing about Krista Sparks is that she died in a car crash and joined the Twisted Metal competition in an attempt to come back to life. There’s a couple of other ghost drivers in the games, but they’re fighting for cars with other drivers who also have interesting concepts behind them. Grasshopper’s only driver is Krista Sparks, so she can be our ghost.
Hammerhead is a monster truck with a different driver in every game. They’re pretty much always played for comedy. Like, Twisted Metal games don’t usually take themselves very seriously, but Hammerhead is usually an actual joke. Dave, Mike, and Stu, paired up as Dave & Mike and Mike & Stu, are Bill and Ted-style comedy protagonists who stumbled into the Twisted Metal competition and don’t seem to grasp the concept of death, Granny Dread is seeking revenge on Twisted Metal contestants because last year’s competition destroyed her quiet neighborhood, and her whole joke is that a little old lady is driving a monster truck in a murder derby. Catfish is less of a straight joke, a redneck hunter who joins Twisted Metal to hunt the deadliest game, which makes him more of a slasher villain like Needles Kane, Mr. Grimm, or Dollface. Granny Dread is probably the best joke Hammerhead’s ever had, and Catfish is a perfectly good replacement if you don’t want any outright comedy characters in the game.
Junkyard Dog is a tow truck driven by Billy Ray Stillwell, a farmer who was nearly killed by a crop duster pilot as part of a scheme between the pilot and Billy Ray’s wife to kill him for life insurance money and then get married. This is all a little convoluted. Billy Ray can just be an extremely divorced man who wants revenge on the man his ex-wife remarried.
Mr. Grimm is a skeleton on a motorcycle. He’s supposed to be the Grim Reaper, having devoured a soul instead of guiding them to their final destination, and having subsequently gotten addicted. I like the idea that the Grim Reaper has entered the competition, but the motivation is dumb. He should obviously be here to shut the competition down because he’s tired of people winning the Twisted Metal competition and wishing the dead back to life. Being here to shut down the competition lets him lean into how much he outranks a guy like Calypso in the hierarchy of horror occult monsters, he can be exasperated that he even has to show up for this.
Mr. Slam is a construction machine of some kind, driven by Simon Whittlebone, the ghost of an architect who threw himself off of his own incomplete building for unclear reasons. In his first appearance he is a living guy who wants to build the tower, but in his second appearance he has thrown himself off the tower and never really explain why. It’s pretty clear that they thought a construction engine would be a cool Twisted Metal car and they half-assed the motivation of the driver. I say we do the Killdozer: A guy is disgruntled with being screwed over by the bosses and turns construction equipment into a siege weapon, but then instead of demolishing the houses of the people who wronged him, he enters the Twisted Metal competition in hopes of getting either a giant pile of money or else getting some horrible revenge upon the bosses who screwed him over.
Outlaw is a cop car being driven by a non-rogue cop in good standing with the police department. I don’t know why it’s called Outlaw. There are two different drivers but they’re both cops trying to put an end to the Twisted Metal competition. The problem is that this is the exact same motivation as Crimson Fury. Since Outlaw is called Outlaw I am letting Crimson Fury be the “it turns out murder derbies are illegal” character and instead Outlaw is driven by a pair of dirty cops who want to wish to have their crimes covered up.
Pit Viper is a dune buggy driven by Angela Fortin, who is an assassin hired to kill Calypso, the guy who runs the competition. Her plan is to win and then wish Calypso dead. It’s not clear who hired her, and both she and Pit Viper are only in the first game, so there’s never really any elaboratin. I guess this is fine? But she seems like a fighting game character who wandered into Twisted Metal by mistake, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the schlock horror aesthetic that the rest of the game has. I’d lean more into the snake theme, make her some kind of reptile mutant from the sewers, and have her motivation be a compound out in the desert somewhere to serve as gathering place for a snake cult. I’m completely freestyling here and I feel like this is still easily one of the weakest characters, but it’s better than what we started with so I’m calling it a win and moving on.
Roadkill is a car assembled from scraps and piloted originally by Captain Spears, a veteran seeking to resurrect men he lost in a jungle ambush (in…the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, I guess? Captain Spears doesn’t look nearly old enough to be a Vietnam vet, not even in 1995, the year of release of the first Twisted Metal). Later games give it to Marcus Kane, who is some kind of alternate personality to Needles Kane or something, I don’t care about the details, it’s an effort to center Needles Kane beyond his being the one most gung-ho about the concept of Twisted Metal itself, which is completely unnecessary. Roadkill’s last driver is John Doe, an amnesiac who wants his memory back. The problem here is that if that’s John Doe’s wish, then he basically has no backstory until the ending cut scene. None of these are good, but Captain Spears might actually be the best. You’d want to update it to a desert ambush, but other than that, he works as a loosely good-aligned character.
Shadow is a hearse with two different drivers. The first, Mortimer, is a dead man brought back to life and who wants to return to the grave. Presumably just blowing himself up with one of the many explosive weapons in the arenas won’t work, he needs a magic wish to pull it off. The other, Raven, is a goth girl whose friend Kelly was killed in a prank gone wrong and seeks horrible revenge on the bullies responsible. Raven’s backstory hasn’t kept very well – the whole big titty goth gf meme suggests the days of goth girls getting picked on are pretty over. We’ve also got other drivers seeking revenge. And it’s weird that Raven prioritizes revenge over resurrecting Kelly, when the Twisted Metal wish definitely has that power. Kelly’s dying wish was for Raven to get revenge on the bullies, but, come on, she presumably wouldn’t have gone that way if she knew reanimation was on the table. If Raven were Shadow’s only driver I’d be happy to play with the idea that she oscillates between revenge and resurrection, but Mortimer being a revenant who wants to re-die is more original. It’s a terrible motivation for a major character, but as someone to fill out the roster, it’s unique in a way that Raven’s is not, and we have no shortage of major characters.
Spectre is a 60s sports car with a different driver in every Twisted Metal game. Scott Campbell is a ghost who wants to be brought back to life, Ken Masters and Lance Wilder both want some kind of fame, Bloody Mary is a nun-themed driver who wants love, and Chuckie Floop won the car in a radio giveaway contest and didn’t realize that by entering the contest he’d also agreed to join the Twisted Metal competition if he got the car. Bloody Mary is kind of like Dollface, a cool aesthetic combined with a cool but unrelated backstory shoved into a returning vehicle while bearing no relation to the original driver or the vehicle’s aesthetic. I’d like to rescue her like Dollface, but unlike Dollface’s competition in Mr. Ash, the other drivers of Spectre can make a much better argument for being retained over Bloody Mary. Chuckie Floop’s name and delivery are a bit too flippant to match the tone of Twisted Metal, but the concept is great: Someone enters a free giveaway contest because hey, why not, wins, and then gets thrust into Twisted Metal because he didn’t read the fine print. This is the kind of setup you’d expect a protagonist in a schlock horror movie to have, and is probably the main viewpoint character early on.
Sweet Tooth is an ice cream truck driven by the evil clown Needles Kane. His wish varies from game to game but consistently he is an evil clown serial killer who participates in Twisted Metal for the fun of it and usually wants some kind of starring role in the production or else has some kind of trivial wish that makes it obvious that he put no thought into what he would wish for until the moment he won. This is a perfectly fine character concept, my only note is to stop trying to create a greater plotline around Needles. He’s a straightforward villain with a cool aesthetic, and a prominent position in the game’s branding is justified because he’s the one in it for the competition itself, which means he can serve as the symbol of the carnival of death and is the guy that good-aligned characters face as the final obstacle to shutting the competition down once and for all.
Thumper is a low-rider driven by a variety of different characters. Most commonly by Bruce Cochrane, who is from inner city LA and wants to win to free his neighborhood from the gang wars that plague it. This is a motivation that made sense in the 90s, although you could switch it to being ambiguously “his home town” and it would work. Later Thumper’s driver is Vinnie and Bruce, who want the “phattest sound system,” and then later Angel, who thinks cars are cool and wants to have the coolest car.
Vinnie and Bruce are dumb, especially for how Bruce’s character gets maimed by the implication that this is the same Bruce who originally drove Thumper, but either original!Bruce or Angel work as drivers. Bruce is a good-aligned character, which can be hard to justify in the “murder a bunch of other drivers for a wish from what may or may not be the Devil” competition, but Angel takes advantage of the fact that anyone who is already good with cars or guns can have an uncomplicatedly selfish motivation to join Twisted Metal, because she has enough relevant skills to plausibly consider herself a favorite to win. I wouldn’t personally put money on a mechanic to win a murder derby, but I’m willing to believe Angel thinks she’s the favorite to win. If I had to settle on one, I think I’d go with Angel because she feels less dated, but ask me tomorrow and I might change my mind, because Bruce has the more interesting motivation.
Twister is a stock race car driven originally by Miranda Watts and later by her sister Amanda. Amanda’s motivation is to find out what became of her sister Miranda, but, like, is the answer to that not that she was killed in Twisted Metal? Having discovered the existence of Twisted Metal, it seems like you’re done, there was no need to enter. Anyway, Twister is one of those cars that implies a high degree of ability in relevant skills to the competition, so the motive for entering can just be a colossal amount of money.
Warthog is a humvee which has had a couple of different drivers. Its big problem is that they keep being assigned to pretty high ranking officers who are on assignment from the army to do something like acquire an ultimate weapon. If the army is entering contestants into Twisted Metal, how come they don’t enter, like, twenty of them, totally flood the roster and have them work together to eliminate the other contestants? Especially since defeat is not necessarily fatal, so it’s not like you’re automatically sacrificing all but one of your entrants. You just have to disable their car, and the army entrants could all agree to stick with methods of doing so that probably won’t kill the enemy driver once it’s just them leftover. At the very least they could send a Bradley or a tank instead of a humvee.
The whole conceit works much better if Warthog is being driven by a rogue NCO who’s taken the humvee he is specifically in charge of to the Twisted Metal competition in hopes of making a wish that will swing whatever war is currently most topical in the direction he wants it swung. It doesn’t have to be super specific about what weapon for which war, it’s fine if the wish is for “the ultimate weapon” still, but it being one guy going rogue matches the tone of the rest of the game and doesn’t raise questions about why one humvee is the best the entire US Army can do.
Yellow Jacket is a taxi cab driven by a relation of Needles Kane, originally his father, later his brother or son. Mechanically, Yellow Jacket is a balanced Mario-style car good for beginners. It’s good to have a role for something like this, and a taxi cab isn’t a terrible choice for it. The problem is that Yellow Jacket keeps getting tied to Needles Kane somehow. There’s three different versions of the character but I won’t bother going into detail on them because they all have that same one-line flaw. Replace the driver with a regular guy whose wish is to bring back his son. If you must have a connection to Needles Kane, it should be that Needles killed his son, not that Needles is his son. But also this can just be a regular working class man driven to desperate action by grief.
So if we’re making a Twisted Metal game, our key eight cast are:
-Crimson Fury
-Darkside
-Grasshopper
-Hammerhead
-Mr. Grimm
-Shadow
-Spectre
-Sweet Tooth
Why these eight specifically? It gives us series mascot Sweet Tooth along with Mr. Grimm as straightforward bad guys, sympathetic characters in Crimson Fury, Grasshopper, and Spectre, and some cool-looking other contestants of varyingly sympathetic motivation in Darkside, Hammerhead, and Shadow.
Eight is a minimum for this kind of game. Twelve is more standard, and the next four I’d recommend are Axel, Brimstone, Outlaw, and Yellow Jacket. That picks up Axel, who is probably the dumbest looking of all Twisted Metal’s iconic designs but it is an iconic design, while maintaining a pretty good blend of slasher villains to sympathetic characters.
If you want more than that, you start asking yourself mainly what vehicles look cool and distinct. Mr. Slam, Twister, and Warthog are immediately recognizable and fit the aesthetic pretty well. Flower Power is immediately recognizable and very aggressively does not fit the aesthetic, which is part of the point.
Thumper feels like a transplant from the 90s, Club Kid, Crazy-8, and Firestarter are reasonably interesting filler villains to help flesh out the roster of bad guys but don’t have super interesting vehicles, and Roadkill, Junkyard Dog, and Pit Viper are all just super boring looking. Pit Viper especially suffers from having been aesthetically almost completely replaced by Grasshopper. They don’t actively detract from the game so you may as well throw them in if you have infinite resources, but realistically speaking, there’s not much reason for any Twisted Metal game to have any of them – and yes, that includes Roadkill, even though it’s been in nearly every game. If you wanted to salvage Roadkill just for legacy’s sake, you’d have to give it a brand new driver made from scratch. It would hardly be the first time Roadkill got a new driver, but that would take effort, so I’m not bothering for a free blog post.
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