This Custom Carmageddon Chevrolet C10 Could Be Yours

Remember Carmageddon? Unless you’re either over the age of 30-ish or have an appreciation for mediocre mid-2010s reboots of ’90s vehicular combat video games, then there’s a good chance the answer’s ‘no’.

Still, you could remind yourself of its existence with this custom Chevrolet C10, which decked out in this, erm, striking livery as a promotional tool for the fifth (and so far final) instalment of the series, 2016’s Carmageddon: Max Damage.

If you need a refresher on the series itself, the first title launched in 1997, just as moral panic around violent video games was reaching a fever pitch. Rather unsurprisingly, Carmageddon was at the centre of some of this controversy, given that you could win its destruction-heavy races not only in the traditional way, but by wrecking all your opponents or slaughtering all the pedestrians unfortunate enough to be wandering around the game’s low-poly circuits.

Two more instalments followed in 1998 and 2000, before developer Stainless Games (founded by original Carmageddon creator Patrick Buckland) rebooted the series as PC-only title Carmageddon: Reincarnation in 2015. This title was then ported to PS4 and Xbox One the following year as Carmageddon: Max Damage, but while the original games have become cult classics, these rebooted versions received middling reviews at best and are largely forgotten these days.

Still, it’s that last iteration that led to this Chevy becoming a giant V8 billboard. It began life (somehow) as a humble 1966 C10 pickup, before bouncing around several custom car shops in the US, eventually being completed in the mid-2010s by Bodie Stroud of BS Industries and christened ‘Nosferatu’.

It was soon after this that it was spotted by Buckland, who saw its potential as a promo tool for Max Damage, hence the game’s branding covering the car (a wrap that would apparently be fairly easy to remove, should you wish).

The car is a hodgepodge of lots of different bits, but the bit you’re wondering about – the engine – is a 454 Chevrolet big block motor. That, in numbers our feeble European minds can understand, is 7.4 litres.

Somehow, the car is road-legal in the US, although it’s currently located in the UK, where it isn’t road-registered (although the ad doesn’t rule out the possibility). It’s currently being auctioned online by Bonhams where, with five days left on the auction, the highest bid is £1100. Nobody seems quite sure how much it’ll go for, because the estimate is anything between £20,000 and £50,000. Is that good value? We have no idea.