Carmageddon can't match E3's levels of violence - Stainless

Newspapers had a field day when the original Carmageddon video game was released on PC in 1997. Cars smashing into people, ripping them apart, great torrents of blood flooding car bonnets?

Ban this sick filth!

Even the Pope waded in, apparently calling for "Ban Death Game Now", wrote the Daily Mail, presumably verbatim.

Now, 15 years later, we have a Carmageddon reboot on our hands, thanks to a the successful Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter.

So will there be printed-pitchforks after Stainless Games once again? Production director Ben Gunstone doubts it. He doesn't think Carmageddon holds a candle to the brutality on display at E3 this year.

"I wouldn't have thought so," he told an audience member during his talk at the Rezzed Game Show in Brighton today.

"I was quite happy showing that footage of the people being run over a minute ago." Footage that you can watch below.

"I didn't think that was particularly - it's comedic in the end. And that's always the thing in Carmageddon.

It's even more ludicrous - when you look at the original Carmageddon and see it's actually quite bland compared to some of the footage that came out of E3 this year. They're miles apart."

Ben Gunstone, production director, Stainless Games

"It's even more ludicrous - when you look at the original Carmageddon and see it's actually quite bland compared to some of the footage that came out of E3 this year. They're miles apart."

The Daily Mail apparently had another nibble at Carmageddon for the Kickstarter campaign. "The Daily Mail did a thing on it," Gunstone said.

"We were very, very happy that they did," he added. "'Ban this sick filth' - brilliant."

The rest of Gunstone's talk concerned raising funds via the Kickstarter campaign, and how hard but also illuminating that process was.

After deductions by Amazon and by Kickstarter, he thinks Stainless walked away with $600,000 funding, which means they can make Carmageddon: Reincarnation for PC, Mac and Linux - maybe consoles one day. February 2013 is the date to earmark.

There's even an iOS version of the original Carmageddon game coming out later in the summer this year, Gunstone said. An Android version will follow.

He showed a video of the mobile version. It's higher resolution than in the dark ages, and has fancy pants touch controls that do sensible jobs: touch a car icon to repair your car, and muck around with video replays. Handling looked good enough.

Ben Gunstone also said that Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of Minecraft, was going to the Stainless Games Christmas party this year. And you can, too, if you pledged $7500 in the Kickstarter campaign. You can still pledge now on the game's official site.