Trivia / Twisted Metal

• Creator Backlash: While he still loves the end product, David Jaffe has commented that Twisted Metal Black's gameplay suffered in favour of the tone and setting.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: The developers acknowledged that Twisted Metal 2 is their favorite game in the entire series, according to the "The Dark Past" documentary.
• Distanced from Current Events: Black was first released in June of 2001, so it wasn't a big deal when the game allowed you to shoot down a passenger plane in the first level. However, when the game had a European release in December, it was unsurprisingly altered to have the plane already downed, not allowing you to do the deed yourself.
• Dummied Out:
  • Warhawk was meant to be playable at some point, he even has a full Choose Your Driver transition animation hidden within the game files, which can be accessed via data mining.
    • In TM: Black Axel, Warthog and Manslaughter had full unused intros of their vehicles leaving Blackfield Asylum that didn't make it into the final product. Although it made sense for Manslaughter to not have an intro, due to it's driver Black not being a patient.
  • Axel in Small Brawl has no ending shown once the game is beaten, but the video can still be found within the code, showing Axel to be a kid in a wheelchair asking for robot legs. The omission was likely to avoid any possible controversy.
• Franchise Killer: The 2012 reboot was built heavily around its online multiplayer mode, but unfortunately, the servers were barely functional at launch, leaving only the game's rather bare-bones single-player campaigns and couch multiplayer modes, which many felt weren't worth $60 by themselves. As a result, the game met mixed reviews and was a sales disappointment, and there hasn't been a Twisted Metal game since.
• Looping Lines: Two instances in 2012's story mode, due to using live-action cutscenes:
  • On-camera, Sweet Tooth was physically played by bodybuilder, Paul Vinson, but the character's voice was provided by JS Gilbert, reprising his role from Black.
  • Dollface was portrayed by Tara Darby, but was voiced by Annie Hayden.
• No Export for You:
  • Inexplicably, the PC port of the original game was only released in Japan.
  • On the other hand, none of the games after 2 came to Japan.
  • 3, 4, Small Brawl, the Extra Twisted Edition of Head-On and the PC port of 2 were only released in North America.
• Real Song Theme Tune: Black uses "Paint It Black" by The Rolling Stones in the credits.
• Screwed by the Network: The PC port of 2 was quickly rushed out with Sony putting half-hearted effort in its development before deciding to cut support before that version even released. It's one of the reasons why it's incredibly rare in today's age.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before the Vehicular Combat gameplay idea was pitched, The game started out as a pizza delivery simulation but was scrapped when Sony wanted the more violent concept.
  • FMV endings for the original Twisted Metal exist, but unfortunately were dropped in favor of simple text endings (possibly because Calypso's design was hilariously bad and the endings themselves were chock full of Narm.) Fortunately, the FMVs were eventually released in Twisted Metal Head-On: Extra Twisted Edition, and can now be found on YouTube in all their So Bad, It's Good glory.
    • Some of those videos have Calypso referring to the tournament as "High Octane", which was the original title for the game. This was soon changed since there was already a Vehicular Combat game released with a similar title (Hi-Octane).
  • David Jaffe himself released videos of endings that were scrapped from the 2012 reboot: The idea was that there would be three different endings for each difficulty level per character.
    • Sweet Tooth had two endings. In the first, he makes the same wish he did in the canonical ending. Instead of being locked in Sophie Kane's coffin to die, however, he's sent to a summer camp straight out of Friday the 13th, where he finds dozens of bodies... and Sophie, now a slasher villain herself known as Sweet Chick. This version of Sophie also wasn’t intended to be his daughter, as revealed in the notes at the beginning. The two fight, and Sophie triumphs over Needles, hoisting his severed head. (Sophie/Sweet Chick (as Needles’ daughter) would still appear in the final version of the game during The Stinger, where she's brought Back from the Dead by Calypso to fight in next year's Twisted Metal tournament.) In the second, Sweet Tooth gets exactly what he wants. He is sent to the hospital where Sophie was, but she is still alive. Confident that he wouldn't kill his own daughter, she at first appears to have talked him out of it. He agrees that he can't bring himself to kill his daughter... when there's a much more fun alternative in throwing her out the window from the top floor...
    • Mr. Grimm had two alternate endings. In the first, he realizes that the jump his father tried to make was impossible to pull off on any motorcycle in existence, and wishes for a bike fast enough to make the jump so that he can honor his father's legacy. He gets a badass-looking bike that looks like something the Ghost Rider might ride, imbued with the souls of three deceased daredevils. Calypso gives Mr. Grimm his assurance that the bike will make the jump, and he sets out off the ramp... but while the bike sticks the landing, Mr. Grimm goes flying off in midair. The last thing he sees before dying is his father's ghost. In the second, he wishes for Calypso to bring his father to him. Calypso does just that... by placing Mr. Grimm into a truck with his father's corpse, which promptly goes careening into an oncoming semi driven by Calypso, killing Mr. Grimm on impact.
    • Dollface got three endings, wishing for her mask to come off in all of them. In the first, her face is beautiful, but she's still unpleased with it, seeing imperfections that her imagination blows up to monstrous size. Reluctantly, she puts the mask back on rather than let anybody look at her "hideous" face, and then walks into traffic. In the second, it turns out that she's a robot underneath the mask. Calypso's nemesis, the preacher Jebediah, created her and put her into the tournament to get close to Calypso and kill him. Watching Calypso through Dollface's eye cameras, he rants to him before detonating a bomb inside Dollface, presumably killing Calypso... only to find that he had, in fact, survived without a scratch when Calypso sends his aides to capture him. Calypso has Jebediah declared insane and locked in Blackfield Asylum from TM: Black. In the third, it's revealed that the mask had healed her scar, but left her face horribly deformed; the text compares it to the movie The Elephant Man. She proceeds to go on a rampage killing supermodels. Calypso reads about the exploits of the "Supermodel Slasher" in the tabloids, then greets a now grown-up Charlie Kane, revealed to have survived Sweet Tooth's rampage, stating that, when the day comes when he enters the Twisted Metal contest, he will wish for revenge against his father for killing his family.
    • Also from the 2012 reboot: this Greenlight video shows that there was originally a "Chase to Vegas" multiplayer mode, where one team had to defend a tractor-trailer carrying a nuke to Las Vegas while the other team had to destroy it. The scraps of this mode were later recycled into the Diablo Pass level. Nuke Mode in multiplayer also originally had teams competing to capture a government scientist instead of the other team's leader in order to launch a nuke.
  • Darkside would've appeared in Twisted Metal 2 as the boss of Los Angeles.
  • There are screenshots of Warhawk from Black showing he was at one point planned as a selectable car.
  • Several hidden files exist in the PAL version of TM: Black. Among them are a couple of character select CG renders of Warhawk, a pre-rendered garage area with the unlockable cars/characters, a mini-cutscene with Axel driving out of the asylum (implying he was going to have a beginning cutscene), and a few other bits that can't be seen while playing.
  • Twister, Spectre, Mr. Slam, Crazy 8, Yellow Jacket and Pit Viper were all planned to appear in the 2012 reboot and some of them were far enough into production to have finished models, but ultimately all of them were cut from the final game.
  • Twisted Metal: Head-On showed content for a game called Twisted Metal: Black - Harbor City, a sequel to Black, which was unfortunately scrapped. According to the bonus material on "Twisted Metal: Head-On - Extra Twisted Edition", the game was cancelled after the deaths of six key developers, but this was proven false. It was however repackaged in that game under the name Twisted Metal: Lost.
  • Several of the endings in Black were significantly changed from final release. Some of these include minor details being altered (such as Axel's son being murdered instead of his wife, or Dollface's mask being made by her father rather than her boss), the middle section of Outlaw's story would have revealed that Stone watched his family home be burned down by racists, giving him a more personal motivation for losing control while killing the skinhead gang in early drafts. One other scene that had to be Dummied Out for censorship was Preacher drowning the allegedly possessed infant onscreen.
  • As shown in some concept art, an idea for the second game was to have hovercars instead of typical wheeled cars.
• Working Title: The game was code-named Firestorm but had other titles such as "Urban Assault", "Cars and Rockets", and "High Octane"(which was almost the game's final name but was scrapped due to another Vehicular Combat game of the same name).

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