Set in the distant future, the game's backstory tells that of a planet called Ionote which was colonised by humans. Deep drilling in one of the mines unleashed a deadly "virus", plunging Io into chaos. Most of the human population fled Io, leaving behind those who could not get a place on the ships out. The abandoned remnants pass the time until their doom by crafting racing cars to tear about the roads. But there is one seat on the last escape ship, so the survivors tuned their cars and raced them in a series of tournaments, with the winner taking the last ship and escaping to safety, leaving everyone else to die.
An expansion pack, subtitled Back to Hell (also known as Extended Time in France) was released in late 1997, adding 19 circuits and 15 new vehicles to the game. The base game, along with Back to Hell plus a new sound set, would be re-released as POD Gold.
The game was later followed by a Dreamcast-only sequel titled POD 2: Multiplayer Online (released as POD: Speedzone in North America). It follows a similar premise as with the first game, in this case a viral outbreak on Saturn's moon Titan.
Not to be confused with the similarly-named adventure game of the same name.
This game provides examples of:
- Always Close: The escape ship takes off just as the virus covers the last of the planet, and breaks orbit as the planet transforms into a planet-sized flower
. - Apocalypse Wow: The virus ultimately turned Io into a flowery planet-sized entity in the end.
- Beach Episode: The aptly-named Beach track in Back to Hell.
- Cutscene Power to the Max: While you can obviously trade paint with opponent cars, ramming them out of the track (and thus destroying them) isn't possible in-game unlike what was depicted in the intro.
- Excuse Plot: You're a colonist caught up in the cataclysmic viral collapse of a planet in the distant future. Are you a bad enough dude to race your way out of the wasteland? Described in the intro, there's one ticket to off-world survival, so everyone decides to choose the winner through a racing tournament. Hardly believable human behaviour, a good enough excuse for a racing game.
- Game of The Year Edition: The first game, along with its expansion and a new sound set, was re-released as POD Gold.
- Market-Based Title: The first game was simply titled POD in North America, while its sequel, POD 2: Multiplayer Online, was released in the states as POD: Speedzone.
- The Plague: The titular Pod virus, which was unleashed in a mining accident.
- Pre-Rendered Cutscene: Specifically, the intro and ending sequences, as was customary at the time.
- Rule of Cool: That the virus covers the planet's surface in deep, choking mass is believable, but its final form is much more visually striking - the whole planet is transformed into a vast flower that opens as the ship leaves.
- Silliness Switch: Some of the content in Back to Hell—namely the beach track, the pirate ship and witch's broom—were clearly added for fun's sake as it did not otherwise fit in with the game's futuristic setting. At least Loon from GOLD was able to tie into the main story despite its wacky, albeit unsettling appearance.
- Storyboarding the Apocalypse: The game's narrator in the intro cinematic described Io's rise as a mining colony and tragic downfall when the Pod virus outbreak wreaked havoc in the planet.
- Subsystem Damage: Individual parts of a car can take damage, shown in the HUD as coloured segments representing the front and back sides as well as the wheels.
- Tech-Demo Game: POD was one of the first games to utilize Intel's MMX instruction set (which was marketed extensively by Intel at the time), with OEM versions of the game bundled with certain computers running on Pentium or Pentium II MMX processors, and some AMD K6 systems.note It was also one of the first games to support 3D acceleration out of the box, initially only supporting the Glide API used by 3DFX's Voodoo 1 GPU, with Voodoo 2 and Direct3D support in later patches; the OEM 1.0 release did not come with 3DFX support and required a patch to run on said hardware.
