Twisted Metal WTF Moments

One thing that not many people know about the first Twisted Metal games is that they originally had live-action endings. This was during the early days of CD-ROM games, where full-motion video was hot. David Jaffe had hired actors to portray the game's characters as the mysterious Calypso granted them their wishes. These clips didn't make the final release for obvious reasons, but some of them survived. The one that we've seen involves the game's mascot clown Sweet Tooth, who wishes for... a paper bag. Definitely a WTF Twisted Metal moment.

One of the biggest selling points of the Twisted Metal franchise is the ability to wreak tremendous havoc on the environments you're racing through. We all know about the trick to topple the Eiffel Tower in the second game, but did you also know that you could strip the Statue of Liberty down to her skivvies? When you're in New York, take aim at Lady Liberty and blast her with a missile. She'll transform into a hot blonde in a swimsuit. One more missile will reduce her to a deformed, smoldering wreck, though.

One of the most irritating things about the video game industry is that intellectual property is owned by the publisher, not the developer. We got a very harsh illustration of this fact in 1998. During a contract dispute with original developer SingleTrac, Sony took the Twisted Metal ball and went home, giving the franchise to internal dev team 989 studios for the third game. Having to build the entire engine from scratch was more than 989 could handle, and Twisted Metal 3 sucked rocks, causing fans worldwide to let out a huge WTF?

When Sony decided to give the Twisted Metal license back to the people who made it famous, we were hyped. We were even more excited when we learned that the new game, Twisted Metal: Black, would be for the then-new PS2, with all of its advanced graphical abilities. Best of all, the storyline was twisted in an even darker and more horrifying way. In fact, the cutscenes for Twisted Metal: Black were so completely insane that the European version of the game stripped them all out. Now that's a hardcore Twisted Metal WTF moment.