I can't think of many games that COMPLETELY revolve around the idea of destruction. I guess this is because it's really hard to frame a story around the act of destroying things and not have any building or collecting to go along with it. Grant it, almost every game has you destroying something as an important element. (Kill this guy, stop this tank, break down this wall – you get the idea.) But luckily, there ARE a few games that have an end purpose which reaches no further than “Fuck This Place UP”. And out of the few I can think of, there is only one I still play to this day.

Pain, a weird little downloadable title I came across one day on the PS3 Playstation Network, is not only a joy to play, it is a masterpiece of destruction! I remember when I first booted up the game, having absolutely no idea what I had just bought, I saw a man loaded in a giant slingshot aimed at a busy city and thought “Holy shit, they've done it!” What they had done is tapped into my childhood and cleverly mined an appreciation for mindless destruction that had been sitting dormant there for some time. And as I fired my character into the city for the first time, banking that poor fool off a speeding cop car, into a building, and finally onto a box of dynamite that was cleverly placed next to an elderly woman (all for the purpose of causing the most damage to get the highest score) I reflected on my love affair with chaos, and how, back in my younger years of gaming, this was the kind of fun we had to make for ourselves.



It's almost as if the creators of Pain were there with me in the early 90s, silently watching over my shoulder as my friend and I took turns playing Road Rash late one night. We were grinding through it furiously because it had to go back the next day and we wanted to get our money's worth. This was a time before Gamefly, when rental times were short, your parents only let you get games on the weekend because of school and you never had enough money to buy the games you wanted, so you better damn well play it to death while you had it! And, with the support of microwave pizza and caffeine, we did just that.

So there we were, stomachs full of Pepsi and pizza, flying down those winding roads, the pixelated roadsigns and trees passing by faster and faster, the odd creaking of the Genesis controller in our hands as we pushed and drove and punched to get to the front of the mob. And then it happened. Crash! My buddy Matt went head-on into an oncoming car right as he was about to jump a hill. Some kind of magic happened with the physics! There was a funny scream and then silence as his rider flew through the air for what seemed like an eternity.



At first we were horrified. You see, the further you flew from your bike, the longer it took you to get back to it because the game made you walk back to where you had wrecked as a punishment for screwing up. But this time we looked at wrecking differently. I think it was the unusual amount of time the rider was in the air that made us first start laughing uncontrollably. It was so unexpected, and while there were no ragdoll effects to add drama to the chaos, the scripted animation of the character flying through the air for that extended period of time was just hilarious!

And then a little light bulb went off above our heads. We realized that, while playing Road Rash properly and striving to win the race was great, attempting to be involved in the most epic wreck ever was something completely different and much more fulfilling to our Beavis and Butthead soakeds minds! And so a new game was born! Road Rash was no longer about racing motorcycles and punching people in the face to get first place. It was about going as fast as you could and then creating the most spectacular wreck possible! How many trees could you hit as you tumbled out of control, how much airtime could you get, how long could you skim and how many of your opponents could you get to run over you as you rolled along? These were the questions that we tried to answer as we stayed up into the late hours of the morning.




Now the creator of Road Rash had not intended for the game to be played in this manner, so there was no incentive to play it the way we were, except the ensuing laughter and the need to outdo each other, but that didn't matter. That's all we needed. And that game created a moment that I still look back on fondly to this day. Of course, things have changed now. Matt and I still get together and game. And we still crave the chaos that we tasted all so long ago, but now we have a new game to eat pizza, get drunk and laugh at, and that game is Pain. The people who made it thought outside the box and have created an entire game around destruction. Still, as I see the Pain character tumbling through the air, about to get nailed by a taxi or smack into a billboard and ram through a pane of glass, as I see Matt and I on the couch attempting to outdo each other, trying to hit one more sign, or nail one more car in our loop of destruction, I see that old red-helmeted roadrash character reflected on the screen, flying through the air, about to meet his imminent doom. Just for the fun of it.