Mad Max is a “mythological creature” in his own game

Everybody knows Mad Max. The apocalypse, the Road Wars and life so hostile and brutal, it must be yet another example of why Australia is a continent that is made up of pure nightmare fuel.

And that’s the sensation that is captured in the upcoming Mad Max game from Avalanche, where life is cheap and death is just around the corner in a world gone mad.

Gameplay can only take you so far in a game where cars genuinely do matter. In Mad Max, crafting your Magnum Opus ride is one of the key beats of the game. And that’s a beat that required some fine sound design, in order to perfectly capture the roar of a V8 engine after the apocalypse.

“In the wasteland, it’s not about engine models anymore,” Studio Sound Director Magnus Lindberg explained during E3.

They strip everything down and they rebuild vehicles and they’ve done that so many times. So we tried to capture different sizes of engine blocks of different vehicles.

 

Every engine, we recorded with twelve different microphones for each and every part of it, then we combined all of them into this upgrade matrix that you have when you play the game, so whatever kind of vehicle that you have that you as a player build, you will have your own unique sound to it because nobody else will have the same engine audio.

 

“I mean, you took extreme lengths,” Narrative Design Director Odd Ahlgren added. “You even went and bought cars and took them apart and destroyed them!”

 

“Yeah, we lifted out engines, put them on a work bench and drilled them until they exploded. Boom! Just to get the engine right, the sound of it!”, Lindberg said.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen the Road Warrior. Actor Mel Gibson made him popular through a trilogy of films that established his tragic world and origins, with Tom Hardy succeeding him in Fury Road, a film that was released to critical acclaim earlier this year. So what kind of Max will we see in the game? Avalanche’s Max, that’s who.

“It’s kind of our Max. But if I was hard-pressed, I’d say that it was a mix between the Max we see in The Road Warrior movie and the Max we see in the next film (Beyond Thunderdome),” Ahlgren explained.

We consulted with (Mad Max director) George Miller for this game early on, and he laid down the bare essentials for what he wanted Max to be at the time, what he wanted the story to be and how the game world works.

 

Especially all the lore of the Wasteland, how scarce everything else is and how hostile, vicious, brutal it is. My way of seeing it, is that Max is almost like a mythological creature.

 

There’s many tales of him, out there in the Wasteland, he’s like a campfire tale. Depending on who’s telling the tale, you get a slightly different tale of an archetype almost. That’s the way we choose to see it.

Mad Max is out later this year. It may just be one of the biggest surprises that we checked out at E3.

Last Updated: June 24, 2015