SonyThe Twisted Metal franchise has a flawless elevator pitch. What if we made a game where we strapped a bunch of weapons to cool cars driven by psychopaths in a winner-take-all demolition derby tournament? Unsurprisingly, this airtight premise catapulted Twisted Metal to iconic status during Sony’s ‘90s-era PlayStation heyday. Then TM nearly became the victim of its own success. After four releases in four years, it seemed like the franchise was running out of gas in Twisted Metal 4. Two years later, in 2001, Twisted Metal: Black returned with the best the series had to offer. Too bad it wasn’t enough.Twisted Metal: Black is a great example of Captain Picard’s famous adage that it is possible to commit no errors, but still lose — that’s not weakness, that’s life. There’s no way the team at Incog Inc. could’ve known that, despite having fantastic character depth, peak system performance, and some of the best car combat mechanics ever designed, 2001 would see a seismic cultural shift that would wipe our appetite for Twisted Metal-style games off the map. The era of Grand Theft Auto had arrived.Twisted Metal Black released on June 19, 2001. The critical reception was glowing. At 91 on Metacritic, it’s the highest-rated game in the series. And for good reason. Twisted Metal: Black does just about everything right. The genre was saturated with imitators by the time of its release, but that only seemed to inspire a fervent dedication to making an undisputed champ.It earned every inch of its M-rating as critics celebrated its deeply dark and disturbing storyline featuring the most twisted characters in the series’ history. The mechanics were simple enough to pick up and play, but intricate enough that high-level play could evolve around a range of strategies. Overall, it was just fun, and reflected an ethos that game director David Jaffe summed up efficiently in an interview with Wired in 2008. “We think it's fun to put guns on cars,” he said. “We have laughs doing it.”Even in the early concept stages its clear the team behind Twisted Metal: Black understood the cars+guns=fun equation. | Sony // Lee R WilsonAs summer turned to fall in 2001, it seemed like Twisted Metal: Black was well-positioned to have a successful holiday season. Then, two very big things happened. The first, and most obvious, was the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It’s hard to sum what Americans were going through at the time, but a super-dark game glorifying vehicles-as-weapons obviously became a tough sell.The second, and somehow almost as big, was the release of Grand Theft Auto 3 in October. By then a multi-billion dollar behemoth, the third entry in the franchise was in many ways its first because of the startling amount of innovation on display. It was a revolutionary open-world sandbox. Twisted Metal: Black, while atmospheric and mechanically tight, was still rooted in arena-style vehicular combat. It offered scripted, mission-based gameplay with limited exploration. One felt like the past, the other felt like the future. While Twisted Metal inspired a lot of other car games, GTA inspired all games, and popular culture, in ways that still resonate 24 years later. This is in large part because GTA 3 wasn’t just a game set in America, it was a game about America. “The whole thing is meant to be America as if it's the way it's presented in the media,” Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser told GameSpot in 2011. “This prism of America as if viewed only through movies and advertising.”In a game chock full of amazing satire, nothing else captures the unique insanity of America like Ammu-nation. | Rockstar GamesSo why did GTA 3 overshadow Twisted Metal: Black so quickly? It offered players a textbook power fantasy. Total freedom and control with very little consequence. Twisted Metal: Black, for all its strengths, was more nightmare fantasy than power fantasy. It leaned into psychological trauma at a time when most of its audience had experienced plenty.GTA 3 also served up a blistering satire of America’s political and cultural institutions in a way that made it current and smart, and it gave its audience a safe space to feel critical of America when that was incredibly taboo elsewhere in the media.“For games to develop into a fully fledged art form, they have to do things you can't do in movies, you can't do in books, you can't do in painting or photography or whatever,” Houser told IGN in 2011. “I think those are the areas, interactivity and life and witnessing life and movement, are what it can do so well.”“When the moon hits your eye like a bomb from the sky that’s G-T-A.” | Rockstar GamesFor all its clever satire and edgy commentary the real reason GTA 3 made us forget about Twisted Metal: Black is that it offered us a look at what games were going to be instead of perfecting what they were.Because make no mistake, Twisted Metal: Black is a GOAT in its own right. It’s not a stretch to label it as the pinnacle of its genre, but the genre has its limits. Unless you’re a particular kind of diehard, Twisted Metal: Black doesn’t have much to offer after a few months. And that’s largely how games were made during the lifespan of the franchise. There weren't a lot of reasons to go back once a new game came along.GTA 3 offered something totally different. The chaotic freedom you felt when you dropped into Liberty City meant you never got the same thing twice. The replayability was off the charts, and suddenly became part of the value proposition. You could play GTA 3 for hundreds of hours doing everything from following story missions to wreaking havoc to joyriding with the radio on. Twisted Metal: Black offered a singular experience, albeit a polished one.For all its influence, even GTA hasn’t come close to creating a character as iconic as Sweet Tooth. | SonyJust because Twisted Metal doesn’t have the legacy of Grand Theft Auto doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Twisted Metal: Black is a fantastic game in its own right, and does what it does better than anything else in its genre. And Twisted Metal has a legacy of its own that still endures.There always seems to be an on-again-off-again reboot in the works, and smart money would bet on there being another entry eventually. It’s also gone beyond games in a way GTA still hasn’t thanks to a hit TV show. The second season of Twisted Metal begins this July and promises to be a bigger, better version than the first. And the best news? No GTA TV shows on the horizon to steal its thunder.