Monster Truck Madness Challenge 1997 EPK (1997, Microsoft/Terminal Reality)
This Cirrus Logic-sponsored piece looks at the Monster Truck Madness gaming challenge from 1997.
Monster Truck Madness is a racing video game developed by Terminal Reality and published by Microsoft for Windows 95. During development it was referred to as Heavy Metal Truck or by the internal codename Metal Crush.
Development of Monster Truck Madness started in 1995 as a DOS monster truck racing simulator named Metal Crush. After getting funds from Microsoft and licensing to use real life trucks, Microsoft decided the game must be run in a Windows 32-bits environment, like other TRI games published by Microsoft (that were ported to the Win32 API, like Fury3, a Win32 game based on the DOS Terminal Velocity's engine). The game was ported to Windows and it was renamed to Heavy Metal Truck for a short period of time. Heavy Metal Truck had a very primitive user interface, only 2 tracks (Indiana State Fairgrounds and Arizona), 5 basic trucks and it included a truck editor and a free roam mode, features that later were excluded from the final product. During the development of Heavy Metal Truck, a more user friendly graphical user interface was added, the stock trucks were removed and replaced from real life licensed trucks, and the name of the game was renamed to Monster Truck Madness.
A racing game, Monster Truck Madness allows players to select between the 12 real life monster trucks and compete with AI players in one of four modes - drag (based on PENDA Point Series), circuit, rally and tournament. It is also possible for human players to race against one another via DirectPlay.
GameSpot said for the PC, "I may live to regret admitting this, but I had a blast playing MTM." GameSpot also rated the game 7.4 (good).
Monster Truck Madness was nominated as Computer Games Strategy Plus's 1996 "Racing Simulation" of the year, although it lost to NASCAR Racing II.