Summary
Mad Max is great. I’ve loved the films since I can remember, and whileFuriosais a disappointing IP slop addition to what was otherwise a stellar series, I still hold George Miller’s creation close to my heart. I love the high octane chases, I love the alternative editing, I love Tina Turner’s shoulder pads, I love the feminist spin of Fury Road, I love the Chrome edition of the 2015 masterpiece. I love it all.
This love for all things Mad and Max culminated when I visited some of the shooting locations for the original films in Australia. They’re just patches of desert in the middle of the outback. Why did I do that?
But the series’ post-apocalyptic influences have bled into other aspects of my life. Why do you think I’m fond ofWarhammerspin-off Gorkamorka, which sees Orks engage in violent car chases and involves mechanics like stacking as many models as possible onto makeshift vehicles? Mad Max.
As a Mad Max Man To The Max,I have a tumultuous relationship with the 2015 Mad Max game. I bought it when on release, as a ‘launch title’ for the desktop PC I’d just had built for myself. It was my first step into PC gaming (unless you count Civilization 5 on my laptop before that), so I wasn’t yet up for building it myself, but I wanted to customise the components to fit my needs.
It wasn’t the highest spec PC ever built. I was a student at the time, so I couldn’t afford the latest GPU or motherboard. But it was decent. It could play most of the games I needed it to – except Mad Max.
I don’t know why it couldn’t play Mad Max, but it straight-up wouldn’t work. Games with higher minimum specs ran fine, games with impressive graphics made my PC sound like a jet engine, but ran at a reasonable frame rate. Mad Max? Not so much.
More like Mid Max, am I right?
Flash forward nearly a decade, and my colleague Jade Kingcasually mentions that she’s been playing Mad Max on her Steam Deck. This game, which nine years ago couldn’t run on a mid-range PC, carries a stable framerate on a handheld. I’m gobsmacked.
mad max
Some of you will be saying this is obvious. Of course technology gets better as time goes on. But in my lifetime, I’ve gone from dial-up internet that you had to plug in to surf the web (and using expressions like surf the web), to having the combined knowledge of all of humanity in our pockets. My first phone was, no joke, a Nokia 3310 (my mum’s old one). Now I have a folding7.92 inch OLED screenin my pocket, with a resolution far better than my household telly as a child. In the 30 years of my life, technology has progressed at an unprecedented rate.
Even in the last ten years, technology has sped ahead, put the pedal to the metal and not let up. The fact that theSteam Deckis leagues ahead of a mid-range PC from 2015 isn’t surprising, but it should be amazing.
This revelation has made me take stock of where we are, and appreciate where gaming is in 2024. Not only do we have consoles capable of rendering near-realistic graphics at 60 frames per second, we have powerful machines to take on the go. Games, too, have progressed at a similar speed.
The Mad Max game that we’re all replaying at the moment feels archaic. Fun, but archaic. Its open world formula has long since been dismantled by the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild andElden Ring, and reassembled in a fresh, exciting manner. ‘Do what you want’ has become ‘build what you want’ and ‘manipulate the complex physics of the game engine to your will however you want’. Mad Max feels archaic because developers have continued to innovate and iterate, and gaming is better for it.
Replaying Mad Max feels like revisiting a 5/10 from 2015. That’s largely because youarerevisiting a 5/10 from 2015, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The game has its ups and downs, some mechanics are better than others, the opening is excruciatingly slow. But, as a blast from the past, it’s brilliant. And you can play it on your Steam Deck.
Take this opportunity to appreciate where we’re at right now. Take a step back and think about the games we suffered through in years gone by. The painful loading times between levels, the janky cameras, the crashes and bugs. Gaming has never been better, and unless Mad Max is a prophecy rather than a work of fiction, it’s only going to get better. Remember that the next time you get annoyed because your framerate dropped momentarily to 40fps.
