It should come as no surprise that the question I get asked more than any other regarding Apocalypse Road is, “What are the cars like?” or “Can we design our own cars?” I guess I should answer the second question first, and you may not like it. No, the cars that come with Apocalypse Road have been designed by Carla and myself and will be the same for each team. As for what are they like…
It should have been such a simple thing, the first test of Apocalypse Road. Carla & I were sure that it would work nicely on a Thunder Alley track and we chose Pullinger’s Pyramid as the first test track. This would be great, we could add four new tracks to the Thunderverse through Apocalypse Road and at the same time have 17 extra tracks already available or in production. They shoot, they score! Except…the Pyramid was really boring for this game. Of course, it needs to be more like Grand Prix, pull out one of those. Buzzzz, not much better. If the combat system is the most crucial and difficult challenge, then the track situation for Apocalypse Road was the most consistent and nagging.
It turns out Apocalypse Road tracks need to be different than the average Thunder Alley or Grand Prix track and they need to have keys terrain-wise for event cards. In addition, they need a starting grid that does not bump against the finish line and something we refer to as “The Chute”. We did some research and found that Racecross tracks seemed to fit all of our requirements, so we dove into those tracks and quickly the ‘terrain’ of Apocalypse Road was laid. All of this means that Apocalypse Road tracks do not have much in common with their predecessors except that at a distance they are identifiable as race tracks. Racing in Apocalypse Road will be a new experience even though it is governed by a familiar engine.
What sets them apart? Glad you asked.
Looking back into the annals of the lost timelines after the apocalypse, I can see that it has been almost exactly two years since Carla & I set out to create Apocalypse Road. Honestly, 3 months prior to that it was not even a blip on our radar. But the summer of 2015 opened our eyes to a major “want” put forth by the fans of Thunder Alley. They wanted to knock each other around and frequently that was followed up with “I want to shoot my opponents, you know like in Car Wars”. In fact it was such a refrain during that summer at Origins, Gencon and Buckeye Game fest that we decided it needed to be done and we were just the people to do it. At the time we were putting the finishing touches on Grand Prix so it got the lower priority of time in the beginning.
Carla and I are proud to announce that Apocalypse Road is in the tidying-up stage at this point. The game just went up on the P500 last month, so this is very fortunate. The idea for the game arose from the response we got from people at conventions where we demonstrated Thunder Alley. Invariably, someone would want to ram other cars. Often the discussion went to putting guns on the cars. We took their desires to heart and sat down even before we started working on Grand Prix and tried to envision what Thunder Alley with guns would look like.
