Brutal Legend: Riding Eddie’s Hot Rod
There’s something about slamming my car’s bumper straight into a group of Glam-band-posers while blasting Back to the Funny Farm by Motorhead. It might be the beautiful thwunk of the bumper colliding into them and breaking their bodies into hamburger meat, or their snide comment about my lack of hair conditioner before their legs and waist are ripped off their torsos. Either way backing up into them as the radio switches over to Tenacious D’s Master Exploder is the perfect finale for the first of what will be several hit-and-runs.
This is my way of saying, I love the Hot Rod car, a.k.a the Druid Plow, a.k.a '“The Deuce” in the videogame Brutal Legend.
There are, and always have been, cars in videogames. Whether it was Pole Position in the Arcades, Grand Prix on the Atari 2600, Mario Kart for virtually every console past the SNES, or Gran Turismo which still manages to be a gold standard for racing games, players have continually demonstrated a love for cars in videogames. And it makes complete sense. I am not, by any means, a car guy. My go-to response for any vehicular conversation is that I don’t know how to replace a spark plug(because I don’t(I don’t even know what they’re for)). I also note for the record that I was so scared of driving I didn’t get my license until I was 21. And while many of the videogames I’ve played throughout my life have rarely, if ever, been about cars or even had cars in them there’s a special place in my heart for vehicles in videogames.
Also Lego Racer for N64, I forgot that one. I played that game a lot.
Also, I sucked at it.
When Brutal Legend was released for Playstation 3 (And Xbox I guess) in 2009, Double-Fine productions wasn’t on my radar, nor was the game director Tim Schaefer. I was still in my early mindset of “The game just appeared from somewhere,” and in my defense I had only graduated from High School a year earlier and was recovering from a small mental and emotional crisis following the experience. The only thing that mattered was that I had inhaled commercials and glossy advertisements in videogame magazines and I was PUMPED. Heavy Metal was my favorite genre of music, I listened to Slipknot almost every evening while I drew and made plans to become a rock star (instead of actually learning to play an instrument), and most importantly the game had hot-rocker-girls in it.
That was reason enough to play it.
The game’s almost two decades old at this point (ignore the cracking sound of my joints), so I should give some basic background of the plot.
Brutal Legend is an action-adventure-fantasy-game about a roadie named Eddie Riggs who dies on-stage while helping a member of the “Heavy metal” boy-band he works for, Kabbage Boy. Upon his death a giant metal beast, which the player later learns is a mythic creature named Ormagoden, kills the band and sends Eddie into the future where humanity has now become subject to a race of demons and can only be saved with the power of Heavy Metal. Eddie will meet the leader of the resistance, a man named Lars Halford, his sister Kita, and his friend Ophelia who will quickly become Eddie’s love-interest. Over the course of the game Eddie learns that his guitar can literally blow stuff up, Titans made heavy metal which in turn made the world, he can transform into a demon during shows/battles, base players are hot and get all the babes, and he possesses the ability (as he did in life) to manage a crew of people to make the world a better place. Halfway through the journey Eddie believes Ophelia has betrayed humans which in turn creates a war when she goes to the Sea of Black Tears and becomes an emo-goth-queen leading her own army of emo-goths.
Also Rob Halford, the lead singer of Judas Priest, does the voice for two characters: a David Bowie knock-off, and, well, basically himself.
Obviously, the tone of the game is silly, but that’s the charm of it. Brutal Legend is as much a parody of the culture and aesthetic of heavy metal music as it is unironically championing it. Jokes about headbangers, S&M demons, Glam-metal rockers, censor-bleeps, and Ozzy “F@$%ing” Ozbourne being the “Guardian of Metal” all create this experience where I’m playing a fantasy-action-adventure game that’s making me laugh as much as it’s making me pump my fist. Not to mention the fact that visually, Brutal Legend is a gorgeous study of how environments can be just as important as graphics, game mechanics, or controls. The world of Brutal Legend is filled with locations, monuments, and weather patterns that look like they were stolen from the notebooks of a Heavy Metal comics reader.
There’s literally a boulder shaped like a guitar being played.
There’s a mountain range made entirely of amplifiers.
There’s a collectathon involving stone dragons who’ve been silenced with ball gags.
There’s giant KISS panthers that breathe fire.
I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point.
All of this aesthetic is important, not simply because I was a teenage metal-head who played this game like he had finally found a universe he could live in permanently (Lita may have had something to do with this(and the KISS panthers))but because it makes Eddie’s car work as well as it does as a game mechanic.
Throughout the main storyline there are missions where Eddie has to drive his car, usually while protecting the “Tour Bus” carrying the army of humans to their next location. However there are also several missions where Eddie will need to use his car to carry beer kegs to the beach, and there’s even several side-quest missions involving a demon named Fletus who challenges Eddie to races. The first mission in the game ends with Eddie building his hot-rod to escape a temple full of demons and even using the car to defeat a giant worm. From the beginning, to the very end, Brutal Legend sets up Eddie’s vehicle as an extension of the character and his ability to move freely through the world.
And, most importantly, it’s really, really fun to drive.
And it has guns attached to it.
Most of my actual time playing Brutal Legend is usually just driving around in the car listening to music, making jumps, and hitting demons with my vehicle. In any other videogame this activity would leave me feeling bored or queasy with moral dilemmas, but Brutal Legend is honest enough in its aesthetic goals to never create this unease. Eddie’s car is built to be a fiery engine of death and destruction, and the narrative and mission contents only further this effect. Most of, if not all, of the missions in Brutal Legend involve violence of some kind. The player is told at the beginning that the game will involve numerous instances of violence; the opening moments the game when Ormagoden is killing the members of Kabbage Boy offers the player the chance to censor crude language and gore (I usually only censor the language(I don’t a fuck about swearing, the beeps just make it funnier)). Given the fact that this videogame is a love-letter to the genre of Heavy Metal which often explores violence and violent imagery, it stands to reason most of the ways to use the vehicle would be violent. All of this violence is portrayed in such a hyperbolic way though that it makes logical sense to just hit a demon nun with my car while listening to High Speed Dirt by Megadeth.
If Eddie can’t destroy an object or enemy npc with his axe or his guitar, he can always just, use his car.
Looking at the Druid Plow in this game, the only other videogame car that feels as much of an extension of the protagonist is the Batmobile in Batman: Arkham Knight.
Like the Hot Rod, the Batmobile is employed to navigate the world, and several missions in the main storyline and side-quests involve using the Batmobile to either overcome obstacles, or else to destroy enemies; at least half of the Riddler side-quest in the game involves racing challenges in the Batmobile. What’s unique about the Batmobile is how well the design of the controls are so that, like Brutal Legend, most of the time playing the game is usually in my car. The Batmobile is fun to move, fun to control (most of the time), and it manages to be one of the best instances of a videogame balancing a playable character and their vehicle. Just like Brutal Legend, if Batman can’t overcome an enemy or obstacle with his body or the multitudinous tools on his belt, he can always use his car.
Researching for this essay I tried to find any article, essay, review, or blog-post that analyzed or even mentioned Eddie’s Hot Rod, but most articles about cars in videogames tend to be listicles of the “Best racing games” and most of it is usually just Grand Turismo, Mario Kart, and GTA. What few articles there are about Brutal Legend are typically just reviews or subreddit posts. It seems that the driving mechanics of Brutal Legend were largely ignored for the tunes on the radio.
This is disappointing, not only because I love this game and wish it got more love and attention these days, but because an opportunity is missed.
Brutal Legend is an open-world game, it’s an action-fantasy-adventure, it’s a collectathon, it has real-time-strategy missions, there’s hunting challenges, there’s stealth missions, and, of course, there’s racing missions for the car which provides the best, and most enjoyable, means of transport from place to place. So many videogames employ vehicles as an “either/or” in terms of gameplay meaning the game is “either” a racing game “or '' it isn’t. While there are exceptions, the genre of car games tends to reinforce this narrative, and other games like the Grand Theft Auto series incorporate cars as only one of a number of systems the player will encounter.
Videogames that have recognised the importance of motion, of creating enjoyable motion have endured, and cars in videogames are no exception. Getting into a vehicle in a videogame, whether it’s in an arcade or on a console/pc, is a chance to enjoy the simulation of driving a car, or driving a car in way that I will probably never be able to do in real life. I will never drive a ferrari down a highway, I will never drive in the Indianapolis 500, I will never ride a go-kart against Bowser and Yoshii, and I will never drive a hot rod manned with gatling guns across a bridge while S&M demons throw spears at me while I blast Superbeast by Rob Zombie. These are just facts.
But, videogames give me this chance, even if it’s just simulation.
Brutal Legend as a game is about pushing the hyperbole of the aesthetic of Heavy Metal music, and the Hot Rod is one beautiful extension of this. Rather than just letting it be an occasional prop, the designers made Eddie’s Hot Rod part of the world and lore of the game, while also designing it as one of the most enjoyable vehicles to control in a videogame to date. The sensation of driving Eddie’s car is the sensation of riding the pure crazy, sublime, ridiculous, awesome essence that is Heavy Metal music.
Which is to say, it’s f@#$ing rad as F@#$.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
4.29.2024
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