Retro's third project (of its initial batch) was a vehicular-based fighting game tentatively titled Combat Car, and later renamed Thunder Rally before eventually being cancelled.
Though N-Sider tried, and we did try, we were unable to locate a single person involved who would publicly speak up on the project. However, thanks to the efforts of a few anonymous sources, we were able to dig up some juicy tidbits.
According to several reports, at least one of Retro Studio's resident superstars was connected to Combat Car in the early stages of development. What superstar you ask? Well, none other than programming guru David "Zoid" Kirsch. For those unfamiliar with the name (most likely a lot of you), David Kirsch was the man behind the Threewave Capture-the-Flag (CTF) modification for Quake (PC), which went on to become one of the most popular mods ever created for the game. On February 29, 2000, David Kirsch decided to depart from id Software, opting not to renew his contract with the company, and made his way to Retro Studios.
Also reportedly connected to the project was environment modeler Rick Kohler. Rick is the only known member of Retro with ties to nearly all of the company's titles, with the exception of Retro NFL Football. We are not entirely sure how he moved between projects, but we do know that he was once an environment modeler on Raven Blade and also did work on Action Adventure, before being relocated to Metroid Prime with his brother, Gene Kohler.
As reported by IGN in April 2001, Car Combat was a "Twisted Metal Black killer," which was initially pitched to Nintendo of America as an off-the-wall mix of "Quakeworld, Twisted Metal 2, and Mario Kart 64 with shades of Mad Max and Street Fighter II."
However, something that not everyone may know is that the team behind Car Combat worked very hard to make the game online enabled, from the very beginning. The title was originally designed to combine split-screen four-player battles with Internet play. Nevertheless, as fun as it sounds, online functionality would have ultimately proven costly and didn't mesh with Nintendo's business plans for the GameCube. "We never got details from Nintendo on the Internet end," a person working on the project told IGN in April 2001.
As development progressed on Thunder Rally (a.k.a. Combat Car), Nintendo grew impatient with the development of several projects at Retro. With the Nintendo GameCube already launched and the 2000 NFL Football season already over, Retro and Nintendo had to take a hard look at where things stood. And take a hard look they did. It was determined that investing an additional year's worth of development into Retro NFL Football was not financially feasible, nor was releasing the title during the NFL off-season. The order came down to terminate the project. Perhaps of more interest is the fact that Nintendo and Retro also viewed Thunder Rally as a "high risk" investment and, it too, was terminated on the very same day, along with roughly 20 employees. The decision to cancel the project is notably strange considering the fact that Thunder Rally was reportedly further in development than any of Retro's other projects. It was even closer to completion than Metroid Prime!
Though the title was going to feature fewer and much smaller levels than other vehicular-based combat games at the time, the team did aim to deliver an interactive masterpiece. "We could have literally blown [Twisted Metal Black] away on the level of interactivity the game could've had. Much more strategy in manipulation, avoiding, changing world objects to modify gameplay, and so on," a source told IGN back in 2001. "We would have had many more weapons than Twisted Metal Black, with multiple functions including counters, additive effects, complementary effects, etceteras."
With two projects now in flames, Metroid Prime facing design hurdles, Raven Blade hitting a brick wall, and reports of mismanagement and lay-offs rampaging, it became very clear that Nintendo was going to have to step-in to resolve the issues that plagued the Texan developer.