Twisted Metal Wiki
Twisted Metal Wiki
0SweetTour2

Sweet Tour

Sweet Tour (sometimes referred to as Sweet Tour 3D) is a special gameplay mode featured in Twisted Metal: Head-On. It features two maps of the on-foot missions that were originally going to be featured in the canceled game Twisted Metal: Harbor City. However, the game was never released, and the mode was shipped as part of the Twisted Metal: Lost extras.

Features[]

In this mode, you control Sweet Tooth, and are able to tour areas around Blackfield Asylum and the police Impound Lot, containing factoids from previous games.

You are able to look at concept art of characters, vehicles, gameplay elements, and several scrapped content.

Complete list of factoids[]

Asylum[]

N# Location Name Text
1/29 The Black That Never Was Page 1
An entire on foot section was planned for the never released TWISTED METAL: BLACK PART II. In those sections, players would have selected both Sweet Tooth and the Preacher and gone on foot to perform a variety of character based missions. What you see here is all that remains of those foot missions. The animation is crude, the art is not final, and there is little gameplay. Still, we thought you would enjoy this behind the scenes look at what might have been.
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See if you can locate all of the glowing Sweet Tooth heads in the level. Each head will reveal more about the past of the Twisted Metal series.

Thanks for playing our game and exploring the twisted past with us!

Yours truly,

The Twisted Metal Team
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2/29 Birth Of A Level
Twisted Metal begin life in one of two ways: someone has an idea for a cool setting and then the team comes up with gameplay for that setting, or someone has an idea for a cool battleground shape that would lead to fun gameplay. As you can see from these images, many levels start as very simple shape sketches and then expand out to highly detailed maps. Most of these maps are from Twisted Metal 1 and 2.
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3/29 The Need For Concept Art
Concept art is used to aid the game's modelers, showing them what the world they are building should look like. Concept art is also used to sell the core ideas of the level, helping everyone involved get the emotional feel the level should evoke. Sometimes, as you can see from these images concept art reaches a finished, polished state. Other times the art is just a rough sketch meant to indicate layout, perspective, or mood.
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4/29 The Origins Of Sweet Tooth
This is concept art from Twisted Metal 2. As you can see, the city rooftops level originally included flying Sweet Tooth helicopters as bosses, an idea that would not be implemented until Twisted Metal: Black. The Darkside vs. Sweet Tooth image marks the first time an artist gave the ice cream truck head a living personality. Seeing the clown with such an evil personality inspired the team to flesh out the driver of the truck itself, applying the vibe of the head on the truck to the driver inside.
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5/29 Battle In Your Own Backyard
This is concept art from Twisted Metal: Head-On * It builds on the theme established back in Twisted Metal 1: destroying the familiar. The team always felt that car combat battles would be more fun and satisfying if they took place in your own backyard. This is why the suburbs has been a staple of the series: the team assumed most players would be suburban dwellers and would enjoy destroying the very place in which they lived. The fairgrounds is another variation on the destroy what is familiar theme.
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6/29 Crazy Cars
These are cars that were too far removed from reality to exist in the Twisted Metal universe. In the same way the team wanted players to fight on battlegrounds they could relate to, they also felt it necessary to create cars that people would see driving around in real life. Without these reality grounding elements, the game would never have resonated with such a large audience. These images did not fit into the vision and were therefore cut from the game.
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7/29 Darktooth Design
These are rough designs for DarkTooth and Tower Tooth from Twisted Metal: Head-On. These are a long way off from the original DarkTooth in Twisted Metal 2, which was basically the Sweet Tooth ice cream truck scaled up to a giant size and given a huge number of hit points. With each title it gets harder and harder to design a Sweet Tooth boss that is unique and special enough to be a boss character while still retaining the core elements of the very simple ice cream truck design.
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8/29 Hover Cars
Focus test reception was so poor for Twisted Metal 1 that the team explored the option of turning the vehicles into hover cars for the sequel. It was believed that the focus test results were poor because control of the Twisted Metal 1 vehicles was too confusing and frustrating. The team felt hover vehicles would be easier to control and more user friendly. However, once the positive reviews and fan reaction from Twisted Metal 1 came in, the team decided to stick with standard vehicles.
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9/29 Selling The Vision
While a development team may be excited about making a game, other folks need to be just as excited in order for the game to get the support it needs from various departments (marketing, sales, PR, etc). The following images were created to sell the vision of Twisted Metal to other departments within Sony.
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10/29 The Evolution Of Sweet Tooth
As you can see from the photograph taken during the filming of the Twisted Metal 1 end movies, Sweet Tooth was at the start simply a circus clown. He did not even have his trademarked flaming hair. But by Twisted Metal: Black, the classic look of Sweet Tooth had emerged. From chicken scratch sketches to full blown CG character models, no expense was spared in bringing this mascot character to his current incarnation.
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11/29 The Beginning Of An Idea
These are sketches of various play ideas, drawn over the course of Twisted Metal's 10 year history. Hundreds of pages of game design notes were created with various members of the team contributing to the game's design. Many elements of the Twisted Metal series arose from these sorts of rapidly sketched, spur of the moment bursts of inspiration.
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12/29 The Prison Ship
From rough sketch to finished level, these images show the progress a level goes through as it grows from an idea to a fully functioning battleground. Often times as shown in the double image a simple 3D level is handed over to a concept artist who will draw on top of the 3D art, creating the details that transform a level from a dull world of grey shaded blocks to a believable 3D battleground.
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13/29 Going Wacky
Designing a new Twisted Metal game, there always seems to be a desire to go wacky with the car designs. It's a temptation that the team has always resisted, feeling that going wacky while generating a laugh or two would hurt the thematic integrity of the title. Here are some fun but wacky vehicle designs that felt too silly to include in the Twisted Metal universe.
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14/29 Shu 3D Model
These are 3D models of Sony Computer Entertainment America's vice president Shuhei Yoshida and Sony Santa Monica Studio's head Allan Becker. The team placed the characters in the game as homage to the executives responsible for some of Sony's biggest hit games.
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Impound Lot[]

N# Location Name Text
15/29 Twisted Metal: Rejects
For every vehicle that makes it into a Twisted Metal game, there are twentyor more that end up in the reject pile. Sometimes a vehicle gets cut because it's too similar to another vehicle already chosen for the game. Other times a vehicle is rejected because it looks bad from the game's behind the car view. Here are some vehicles that over the years found there way onto the YES list several times, only to be cut from teh game at the last moment.
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16/29 The Evolution Of Axel
Axel was inspired by a game tester on Twisted Metal 1. The tester suggested a vehicle with a cage sandwiched between two giant wheels. A man would sit inside the cage and control the vehicle. The idea of a man strapped between the two massive tires grew from this core idea. This concept art shows how Axel evolved from that initial concept to the staple Twisted Metal character he has since become.
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17/29 Vehicle Concept Art
Attempts are always made to give Twisted Metal vehicles a flourish that will elevate them from simple cars into full blown characters. But balance is necessary. Too much flourish and the fantasy of car combat is lost; too little and the vehicles feel generic and bland. In these images, notice the drooping headlights on the taxi, meant to suggest a tired, worm out character. Even the smiley face on the tow truck's wrecking ball is an attempt to spice up what would otherwise be a generic and thus dull vehicle.
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18/29 Traps
The 'on foot' levels of Twisted Metal: Black 2 were slated to contain various platforming gameplay challenges, like the one you see before you. Collision on the traps, as well as the careful timing needed for any platforming play challenge, was never completed. This is why you can walk through any of the traps and platform challenges in this level and not get hurt. Enjoy! We won't go so easy on you next time!.
19/29 What Would Sweet Tooth Do?
Notice the trash cans on front of the truck. These images from Twisted Metal: Black show an attempt to create a world where contestants used what they had around them in order to fortify and defend their vehicles. Stepping away from the fantasy based Twisted Metal 1 and 2 where cars battled with no armor at all Black attempted to create a more realistic version of what a Twisted Metal contest would be like in the real world.
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20/29 Recurring Themes Page 1
These images show concept art for a shopping mall, a freeway, and city rooftops; three locales that come up for a discussion each time the team makes a new Twisted Metal game. Rooftop and freeway levels seem to make it into every title. But the shopping mall discussed as far back as Twisted Metal 1 has never made it into a Twisted game. The challenge has always been having enough texture space so the shop fronts inside the mall would look different from one another. With limited texture space, the game would have to repeat the same
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hobby shop store front for example over and over. In a game where split screen is a huge factor, not being able to glance at your opponent's screen and know which of the 10 hobby shop store fronts he is racing past makes for really bad gameplay.
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21/29 Pitfalls Of Concept Artists
One of the pitfalls of having amazing concept artists on the team is that people get swept up in the drama of an image and forget that the actual game, no matter how good the graphics, will never look like the art. It is not a graphics issue, it's a camera perspective issue. The game could not be played from the dramatic cameras shown in these images. Because of this the finished levels, some having graphics that look very close to the concept art, lack the same punch that the concept art delivered.
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22/29 Same Body, Different Skin
Often times a car will be chosen to go into the game, but the debate over the skin that covers that car's body will go on for months after. In Twisted Metal: Black, the black & white police car became Crazy 8, the rusted red, old time stock car. The other image is Severed Sam's modern day race car, seen in the bonus Twisted Metal: Black levels. This car went through many color variations before the team settled on the final color choice.
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23/29 Game Design
Game design concepts are usually sketched out or paper designed to determine if they will be worth putting into the game. Here are some gameplay specific images, including interactive billboards that never made it into Twisted Metal: Black, the much hated hover cops from Twisted Metal 1, and a whole slew of game play concepts from a designer's sketch book. If you look closely at the sketches you can see initial concept for the ejector seat play mechanic that found its way into Twisted Metal: Black.
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24/29 The Evolution Of Mr. Grimm
Grimm began life as a mysterious badass on a motorbike. From there as these images show the team flirted with giving Grimm an animated skeleton riding shotgun in the side car. There was also the concept of a decaying department store mannequin sidekick. One version of Grimm showed him as a man wearing the head of a slaughtered bull on his head. Fresh spins on old characters is one of the trademarks of the Twisted Metal series, keeping the characters and stories fresh from game to game.
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25/29 The Ice Cream Truck
The ice cream truck for Twisted Metal: Black took six months to design, with over three hundred concept sketches done before the team locked on the final version. In the following images you can see the attention to detail that went into everything from choosing the right clown head to figuring out what was inside the back of the truck itself. You can also see the original art of the ice cream truck labeled DEMONIC ICE CREAM TRUCK that was designed well before the character of Sweet Tooth was even conceived.
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26/29 In Game Art
These are two posters designed to go into the game world of Twisted Metal 1. The image of Calypso can be found in the arena level of the first Twisted Metal. The image of the hover cop admonishing players of Urban Assault (the game's title when it was in production) did not make it into the game.
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27/29 TM2 Master Maps
Once a level is laid out, concept artists create a high level map of the entire battlefield. The image helps team members get a good sense of the level as a whole, as well as capturing the visual mood and feel that the level should have. The following images are high level master maps from Twisted Metal 2.
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28/29 Moody Characters
The world of Twisted Metal has inspired a great deal of moody concept art. Often times the art is designed solely to convey the mood of the game, never intended to be used for game production. The following images show some of the moodier art created for the series. The last image is a storyboard from the evangelist's sequence in Brimstone's end movie from Twisted Metal: Black.
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29/29 The Lost Toys
Over the years, toy companies have routinely approached Sony, hoping to get the go ahead to create a line of Twisted Metal toys. From action figures to collectable cars, many companies have expressed interest in bringing the Twisted Metal universe into the world of toys. While there are currently no plans for a Twisted Metal toyline, the following images show some of the prototype toys made in hopes of bringing final toys to the market.
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Trivia[]

  • During this mode, it was noted by David Jaffe that a coding skip obstructs it where on occasion Needles will have his knife in hand; other times, he will be palming something, but have nothing in his hand.
  • The hospital section of the Asylum from Harbor City (the second half of the level) was completely removed from Sweet Tour.