Mad Max is once again at the top of the pop-culture world and Mad Max co-creator George Miller appears to be at his absolute best in terms of vision and execution, if Fury Road is to be the yardstick by which that is judged. And in September of this year the Road Warrior gets another go around, this time in videogame form at the hands of Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios.

“George Miller was consulting in the beginning of the process,” reveals Mad Max art director Martin Bergquist when asked if the visionary was involved in the game’s development. “More for us learning about the Mad Max universe; understanding the philosophy behind the look and feel rather than just getting specific designs. So we understood a lot of [why] things are built up in certain ways because it’s so important in this environment.

“So that kind of knowledge was brought to us [early on], but we took that knowledge and created our own Mad Max.”



It’s an important statement, because from the outset this development process of one of Australia’s most-cherished icons, and one of pop-culture's ever-lasting heroes, has been under scrutiny.

Mad Max arguably kicked off the beginning of popularised post-apocalyptia and, third film aside, each entry has upped the ante ten-fold. To see a brand continually reinvent itself with a core discipline still in place each time is a thing of beauty -- a concept that sits on the opposite side of the dark and decaying world it has expansively explored through each new telling of Max’s endless journey. And that core discipline is a broken man and his iconic car.

“Well the game revolves around cars and car combat,” explains design director Magnus Nedfors. “The whole universe is a car-based cult, more or less. So it’s always difficult to design a new system for something like that -- how to create cars and so on, but we really tried to push it forward and make car combat a huge part of the game.”

This point is a design principle for the developer that sits alongside the core discipline for the series, but it’s where Avalanche has crafted its own story, because at the beginning of the game Max is stripped of “the last of the great Interceptors” and the player spends the game building a new car -- one the studio is calling the “Magnum Opus”. It’s a carrot I’m not convinced a lot of Mad Max fans are going to want to chase -- one of the fantasies of the series for fans, and a reason a true Mad Max game has always been wanted is to be able get behind the wheel of Max’s booby-trapped, heavily modified 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe.



“I can’t tell you if [Magnum Opus] is more powerful than an Interceptor or not,” Magnus says. “I’ve never driven the Interceptor. I’ve seen it in action, I’ve seen it in many movies and I know a lot about it -- I think I’ve dug up every piece of information I can about the car and how it works and how it shouldn’t work, if it was real and so on. But the Magnum Opus is your car in this game and we’re really proud of it and you can customise it in so many different ways; you can get a different feel for it -- like if you want a fast and agile car then you can’t have all the armour and heavy attack options on it, so you can customise it for the job you need it for.”

The jobs you’ll be needing it for all work around a single goal for Max, which is to build a set of wheels and to gather as much fuel as possible to just get away. According to Magnus “he is mad and he has a struggle internally of wanting to get away from everybody -- he wants to be in solitude”. There’s a beauty to this idea that belies the gamification of Mad Max in the modern era of gaming though. Mad Max is about upgrades and combat, it’s about XP and crafting and exploration. These things also exist in the Mad Max films proper, but they exist without a UI or numerical values -- they’re gut instinct and survival. How Avalanche hopes to mask an emotional and internal struggle for Max, with collectable car pieces and upgrades is an immediate challenge, but it’s one they appear to be fully embracing as best they can when you marry a property like this to videogames.

“The big loop is Max is mad, but through forced contact with other people he gets a little bit saner,” Magnus reveals. “The ghosts in his head disappear a little bit, but then everything is chaotic and madness again and he becomes mad [again], and so it’s a loop.”



Having taken the game for a proverbial spin recently out at a pre-E3 event in LA, the gamey side of Mad Max actually isn’t all that bad. At its core this game is about being a road warrior -- you’ll take on other vehicles also built for these environments and so the car becomes an important bridge between becoming Mad Max without being able to embody what that means. We know and understand cars and survival like he does, and so it makes sense that, for us, this would be the driving part of gameplay.

Avalanche’s penchant for tight but fun car physics are in play in full force here and there’s a sense of weight differential between every vehicle you come across. Convoys regularly move between points in the wasteland and these are picking for a car picker like Max and his in-game companion Chumbucket. It feels fantastic on the roads, though I found it odd Max’s car just couldn’t roll while everything else on the road could. Though Magnus was quick to point out that what we were playing was a “suped-up version of the Magnum Opus” for E3 purposes.

There’s also a lot to take in, in this barren waste. They’ve explored what it means to be in a post-apocalyptic world, with the Mad Max movie motif of minimalism, such as all the water drying up, but this offering a chance to change the palette and decorate essentially nothing with something. It also creates an opportunity to populate the desolate expanse with points of interest that might otherwise be lost in a more densely layered and visually rich game-world. Something as simple as a silhouette becomes a focal point when there’s very little else to look at, and we’re to understand that there is a lot of exploration within the game-world, which is huge by the way, furthering the value of getting around in a set of wheels you can trust.



Thankfully, while this is definitely Avalanche’s own ‘spin’ on the universe it has been revealed that there is a dog in the game, and he’s the first character you meet. They’re being tight-lipped, however, about how he works as either a gameplay system or in a companion sense for Max, but we do know you’ll be feasting on Dinki-Di dog food, so with those two revelations, Max appears to be presented here in a way that is somewhat consistent with the character and world we’ve loved all along.

Unfortunately we only had a short amount of time with the game and the Avalanche lads, but there’s a reverence they both exuded when talking about the game, even when seemingly defending themselves for taking Mad Max in a direction they’re more comfortable with. It’s looking great and should be even better come September, and if I can drive that Interceptor even for just a little while before they take away my fantasy, I can probably forgive them and just survive the wastes as the Road Warrior, the man called Max.