(Note — this article accompanies our podcast on the same topic — you can find it free here)

A good example of what happens in the car combat genre

What is ‘Car Combat’?

Here at the Auroch Digital HQ we’ve worked with Games Workshop to create a car combat genre game, Dark Future Blood Red States, and we thought that it was a good time to explore what we mean by ‘car combat’.

Broadly car combat is a subgenre of science fiction about a bleak time where the focus of the story is a lawless highway, often now the road to hell.

The core ideas that creations in this subgenre seem to share are:

Civilisation is falling apart (or has indeed gone).

The resources that are left are both hard to find and keep.

Brute force is replacing any civilised notion of law and order.

The survivors still need to get about and cars are the best option for that, however, they need to be adapted for the new, harsher reality…

An example of a dystopian car combat situation in Dark Future: Blood Red States

Cars on Film

A good start to the ideas can be found in the classic Easy Rider (1969) as it has an ‘outlaw on the road vibe’. As many such films are set in America, it’s hard to do anything on the backroads of the US of A that does not feel that it tips its hat to Easy Rider. We should also give an honourable mention to Duel (1971) directed by Spielberg but also written by Richard Matheson (of I Am Legend fame) about a huge rig that terrorises a driver on the backboards of America. We also need to mention the Australian film The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) — which follows in a similar vein.

However, we really arrive at the key films of the car combat genre with Death Race 2000 (1975) and Mad Max (1979). Both feature civilisation collapsing in on itself and a corresponding rise of violence that is played out on the highways and byways. We’ll take a quick look at each…

Death Race 2000, produced by the legendary B-Move creators Roger Corman, this violence in the form of a new ‘sport’ of cross country car racing called the Transcontinental Road Race where pretty much anything goes in terms of violence and combat. The competitors are each themed like pro-wrestlers e.g Machine Gun Joe, a Chicago gangster or Calamity Jane, a cowgirl complete with steer’s horns on the front of her car. The film was remade in 2008 as Death Race and saw a bunch of sequels — Death Race 2 (2010), Death Race 3: Inferno (2013) and Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018).

Mad Max is a far more gritty and personal view of the erosion of society. The ‘Max’ of the title is a highway patrol cop who seeks revenge on the gangs who prey off the roads and who killed his family.

In this film, we also see kit-bashed cars with souped up engines. We see lawless gangs moving into the void left by no law nor order. However, there is still close to what we’d recognise from today — towns, houses, factories, hospitals etc. Interestingly, the writer and director of the film, George Miller was a medical doctor and had seen his fair share of road-related injuries. The film was a huge hit and soon saw the follow-on in Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) (1981) where the last vestiges of civilisation were long gone and the fight to the death was over fuel. It’s a fully post-apocalyptic setting of scavenged parts made into killer cars and people with spiky armour. As the world has no manufacturing we can see, weapons and cars are now much more improvised. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) followed this showing us the emergence of a sort of new city from the ruins.

The brilliant smash hit Mad Max: Fury Road came later in 2015 and added the brilliant Furiosa to the canon of characters as well as some amazing new vehicles, settings and action sequences.