The team was potentially working on the sequel to Mad Max, released in 2015 before the pandemic hit.

The situation with Mad Max is interesting: it wasn’t a bad game, it wasn’t disappointing in terms of sales, but Avalanche went on to continue the Just Cause series and, with a slight detour, helped Bethesda develop Rage 2. Now they’re working on Contraband, which we’ll come back to later. But recently, a picture surfaced on Twitter that has got the Internet interested.

Wendy W. Fok shared this picture on LinkedIn as well and was candid about what it was about: “Before times, at Avalanche in New York, when O’Neil invited me to get scanned to be in Mad Max 2 as a rebel. The magic of photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and many cameras.” Writing this tweet so bluntly in 2022 is a brave move, but there’s nothing to worry about, as you can see the same thing on We Designs’ Twitter from February 2017.

So, five years ago, Avalanche’s plan might have been to make the second instalment of Mad Max. The pandemic may have derailed all, so it’s unclear if the game is still in the works. Maybe the digitalization work ended up in Rage 2 since the NPCs there are equivalent of Mad Max baddies. And since neither Warner (the publisher of Mad Max) nor Avalanche requested Twitter to wipe the tweet, they have admitted that the project will not happen.

Last June, Avalanche announced Contraband, which Xbox Game Studios will publish. It was officially described as a cooperative smuggler’s paradise set in a fictional world called Bayan in the 1970s. Jez Corden, writing for Windows Central, has more on this project, and in one of the World of Gaming broadcasts, he explained what he’s read from the design plans.

“I got the design brief… It’s based entirely around vehicle combat, [it’s a] very different type of game. You plan smuggling runs and heists, and then you execute them. It’s sort of like, the idea is not to kill your opponents. The weapons revolve around disabling enemy vehicles like taking out the tires and stuff like that, rather than going on massive killing sprees with bloodshed and all that kind of stuff. They are going for a sort of more tactical kind of action game where killing is seen as a last resort,” Corden said.

In contrast, the announcement on Xbox Wire reads very differently from director Omar Shakir, who says it’s the studio’s most ambitious game yet. It’s been in talks with Microsoft for three years. Still, he didn’t spell out where they were in development: “We’re taking everything that we’ve learned from 18 years of being at the forefront of creating beautiful, vast open game worlds filled with stunning vistas and incredible emergent gameplay moments. To fully deliver on our vision for Contraband, we have an amazing team at Avalanche Studios pushing the boundaries with the next generation of our Apex Engine, the technology behind all our games, including the Just Cause series. We built the engine to unlock the creativity of our developers, and we’re excited to take full advantage of the unique capabilities of Xbox Series X/S.”

So Mad Max 2 no, Contraband yes. Did Twisted Metal inspire the Swedes?

Source: PCGamer, VGC