If you’ve ever wanted to own the most outrageous video game tie-in car possible then this one’s for you: a rat-rod Chevrolet C10 built as a promotional vehicle for the 2016 launch of Carmageddon: Max Damage has popped up for sale in the UK via Bonhams Cars Online.
For those not aware of the Carmageddon series, somehow, it’s a game you pretty much couldn’t make today. In fact you could barely make it in 1997, when the original came out and made it onto every pearl-clutching segment about violent video games on every TV station and newspaper. Some countries straight-up banned it, or demanded censoring to certify it for sale.
That was pretty much because it was a game where you’d score points for (among other things) killing the pedestrians — “peds” — who happened to be wandering the streets during the Death Race-inspired tournaments. It’s not like they weren’t warned after all, but the gore and, later, immolations put sensibilities on edge.
Considering it was exclusive to MS-DOS at launch it was pretty successful (no doubt controversy-aided, in a pre-Streisand Streisand Effect), and quickly spawned two sequels before entering a tricky period as the rights were passed around several companies.
Original developer Stainless Software — now Stainless Games after its own acquisition and disposal — reacquired the rights and finally self-published the fourth game in the series in 2015, first as a PC exclusive Carmageddon: Reincarnation, then ported to eight-gen consoles as Carmageddon: Max Damage.
It’s at about this point where the C10 enters the picture. While it’s not immediately clear how, the rat-rod came to the attention of Patrick Buckland, certified car guy, original creator of Carmageddon and founder of Stainless. He decided it’d make a great promotional vehicle for the build-up for Carmageddon: Max Damage, getting the car built to its current state.
The truck had already been through a lot at that point. It began life as a humble Chevrolet C10 Blazer, but seems to have ended up being left to the elements in a field. At a time unknown the car passed into the hands of Jim Hall of Iron Customs in Indiana, who built the new, chopped body, before moving it on unfinished.
A second builder, Brian Davis, did most of the remaining work, passing the car over to renowned custom car builder Bodie Stroud of BS Industries for the finishing touches and vital mechanical work across 2013 and 2014. The final, all-black build was known as Nosferatu.
Further customization, including a game-dedicated wrap, turned Nosferatu into the EVILC10 vehicle which Stainless used to tour game shows in 2016 in the lead up to Max Damage. If you attended E3 in 2016, you may well have seen it on the Carmageddon stand.
After that, the car — which oddly never actually featured in the game besides mods, though Bonhams does have official renders of it — seems to have headed back to the UK, to the Isle of Wight where Buckland and Stainless are based. THQ Nordic picked up the rights to the game series in 2018, and aside from a couple of Carmageddon levels in Wreckfest, we’ve heard nothing more from the title.
The car has remained fully functional though, even if it’s incredibly unlikely to ever be road-legal in the UK as it was in California in its current form; we can see the list of reasons for an IVA refusal from 30 paces. Nonetheless Stainless Games took it and a Carmageddon-liveried Radical to a special event at Goodwood last year, where it apparently launched a sausage to the heavens from its exhausts.
It now looks like it’s time for the unique truck to find a new home though, with the listing at Bonhams Cars Online running for another five days until 1300 UTC on Monday February 24. The listing shows that the reserve has already been met at just £1,100 ($1,400), but Bonhams estimates a valuation of £20,000-£50,000 (~$25,000-$63,000).
Whoever lands it will have one of the absolute craziest pieces of videogame memorabilia going, which is somewhat appropriate given the nature of the series itself.
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