Death Race

On my drive home from basketball, I had a revelation about a new game mode.

It’s been something I’d had kicking around in my noggin for a while, but something just kind of crystallized and it reached a tipping point where I thought it would be worth doing.

Here goes:

The mode is called “Death Race”.

A bunch of characters start out lined up along the left side of the screen.

Each player controls a single character.  The rest are NPCs.

At the right side of the screen is a finish line.

Players can move their character to the right by pushing “A” to walk, or “Y” to run.

The NPCs move randomly to the right, starting and stopping randomly, but always moving directly right (think lanes on a racetrack).

NPCs always walk.  They never run.

The first character to reach the finish line wins!

So why not just run from the start?

Each player also controls an aiming cross hair.  Pushing up or down on the Dpad will select the next character in the race.  (You don’t need to aim, you just select the character by their lane, and the aiming is done for you).

Pulling the trigger will kill the selected character (either NPC or player).

Players only get one shot.

So, here’s how I picture it going:

The game starts, and the players and NPCs start inching forward.  Everyone wants to get to the end first, but no one wants to stand out from the crowd and risk getting shot.  However, everyone KNOWS that no one wants to do that, so actually doing that might not be a bad idea.  Someone starts to take too big a lead, and a player shoots them dead.  As people get closer to the finish line, someone makes a break for it by sprinting, but is quickly shot down.  All of a sudden, it’s a mad dash to cross the finish line first, and laughter and pandemonium ensues.