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It began, where some of the very best obsessions do, in a rental store."We were fortunate enough to live close to this place that had all these crazy exotic systems you could hire," says Ian Fisch, getting audibly excited over the Skype line as he recounts how he and his brother would spend their summers. "We rented Road Rash on 3DO, and it was amazing. It was the first time I got into the series - I'd played the Genesis ones, I liked them - but Road Rash on 3DO, that's when it really clicked for me. I played it for hours."
The fascination has stuck with Fisch throughout a career in games development that has taken him to some strange places. At Gameloft, he suffered the honour of working on a Paris Hilton-branded puzzle game before seeing the socialite take to the stage at E3 and repeatedly get its title wrong, or the time he worked on a movie licence where his employers were so paranoid about the film being pirated by staff they were made to work without internet, or without USB ports.

Throughout all this, though, Fisch's love for Road Rash has never really wavered. In 2009, a full decade after the last game proper had released on the N64, he took to his Gamasutra blog to tell the world why it needs a new Road Rash. "If done right, a new Road Rash would give the videogaming world a shot in the arm," Fisch wrote. "So let's get moving.""We were fortunate enough to live close to this place that had all these crazy exotic systems you could hire," says Ian Fisch, getting audibly excited over the Skype line as he recounts how he and his brother would spend their summers. "We rented Road Rash on 3DO, and it was amazing. It was the first time I got into the series - I'd played the Genesis ones, I liked them - but Road Rash on 3DO, that's when it really clicked for me. I played it for hours."
The fascination has stuck with Fisch throughout a career in games development that has taken him to some strange places. At Gameloft, he suffered the honour of working on a Paris Hilton-branded puzzle game before seeing the socialite take to the stage at E3 and repeatedly get its title wrong, or the time he worked on a movie licence where his employers were so paranoid about the film being pirated by staff they were made to work without internet, or without USB ports.

Throughout all this, though, Fisch's love for Road Rash has never really wavered. In 2009, a full decade after the last game proper had released on the N64, he took to his Gamasutra blog to tell the world why it needs a new Road Rash. "If done right, a new Road Rash would give the videogaming world a shot in the arm," Fisch wrote. "So let's get moving.""One of the greatest things about Road Rash is that it's an action game, but your environment is constantly changing," Fisch says today about the lasting appeal of the series. "You play a game like Arkham Asylum, or God of War, you're essentially just playing in a cube, a wrestling ring. It's a flat surface, the enemies are spaced out, you're not really using the environment. In Road Rash, you're having a fight and all of a sudden a car will come out between you and your combatant, and you have to react to that. Or maybe you pass a telephone pole, and all of a sudden you've got an opportunity to win the fight by kicking them into a pole. You have all these amazing emergent situations, where every battle is different, just because your environment was constantly changing."
Fisch's blog post was meant as a call to arms to EA to resurrect its series, though the inactivity over the past five years suggest it's a call that fell on deaf ears. It's probably no surprise, either; the arcade racing genre which Road Rash embodies has taken a battering in recent years, claiming high-profile casualties in studios such as Black Rock and Bizarre.
"You look at Split/Second, you look at Blur, and both of those games failed commercially," says Fisch. "You look at a beat 'em-up where you use weapons like chains and bats - name a game like that that's been successful in the last ten years. I can't. You're pitching this game to studio heads, and they're asking how do I know this will be a success? If you're pitching a game like Road Rash to people like that, it's tough. They won't take the risk."