Steel gonad o' death

From Carmageddon Wiki
The steel gonad o' death mode activated.

The steel gonad o' death is a weird unused mode found in Carmageddon II. It can only be activated by cheat codes, but because its official cheat code isn't known, other alternatives can be used, such as EZPZKBALLXXEWAZON.

In-game

This mode turns the car's shell into a giant ball (hence, gonad; testicle). The loose components (windows, doors etc.) disappear. This mode isn't totally implemented, so the car's aspect is really weird. The driver will most likely be embedded with the car as well.

This giant gonad is indestructible; not even explosives can damage it. It's also notably strong, if the player is able to guide it into opponents.

Controlling it is a bit awkward. The four direction keys spin the ball in that direction which in turn moves it, even if the ride is a bit bumpy. The direction is relative to the camera's position, so for instance, hitting reverse will always drive towards the camera. Pressing the handbrake will instantly halt all spinning momentum.

Writing the cheat code again will make the ball grow even bigger. If one of the ball's parts touches a wall when it changes shape or grows, it may freeze the game, because two parts are embedded inside one another.

Entering Action Replay mode will reveal that the car's shell is still normal, which means that only the aspect changed. Recovering while in this mode may sink the car underground, seeing as it grew, its coordinates shifted position and now it considers the ground to be a bit lower. Using kangaroo on command can fix this.

The power up still has a lot of undocumented effects. Some users claim to see opponents warp away when the player gets close, however this was never the case - the AI knows nothing of the "power up".

History

Some time after the game released, Cesm found how to swap which cheat codes have what effects, which in turn revealed that this mode exists, and even that there is some cheat code that activates it. Cesm's cheats editor was then made to let other players enter the mode, but only by changing their game and swapping cheat codes around so the player can activate it with a known power up cheat code.

During the heyday of Carmageddon: Reincarnation, some developers dropped some information about this mode. As said by Neil Barnden (nobby) on the Kickstarter campaign's reddit AMA, "The Steel Gonad o'Death was a physics test of spheroid physics shapes, it was a bit buggy IIRC and so never made it into the released games".[1]

Batwick, Carma Lead Programmer and owner of Stainless, also edited this very wiki page on September 25th, 2012 at 15:59 to add: "The Steel Gonad o'Death was written by Richard Batty, the programmer in charge of crashing and car damage, as a distraction when going mad fixing bugs late one night. He did it for a laugh, and showed it to me the next morning. It was so funny, we tried to get it in there as a powerup. However there were just too many side-effects and bugs with it, as documented here, so it didn't make the cut. The compromise we decided upon was to leave it in there as a cheat so people can have a laugh with it if they wanted to."

On December 13th, 2021, Carmageddon Discord users Liam and Espyo attempted to figure out the real cheat code for the mode.[2] Because of the way cheat codes work, the game's binary doesn't store any cheat codes, but rather their hashes. Through the help of the Dethrace project and its devs, as well as the cryptography expertise of Robin Jadoul, eventually several cheat codes have been found that are able to trigger the mode in-game. Most are nonsensical, but the string EZPZKBALLXXEWAZON is by far one of the most fitting and easiest to type; so much so that it could even be considered the official cheat code for this mode.

See also

References