Twisted Metal was hailed as an instant classic when it debuted on the original Playstation in 1995, popularizing the “vehicle combat” genre with fast-paced action that kept gamers battling through innovative death match arenas late into the night. The series’ popularity has continued to endure over the past 15 years, and is once again being brought back to the screen by Eat Sleep Play, a Utah-based gaming studio headed by original Twisted Metal creators David Jaffe and Scott Campbell.

Working on the new Twisted Metal is one of the many gamers who lost hours of sleep in high school thanks to the series, Computer Animation graduate Ben Ridge. After completing Full Sail, Ben was hired as a 3D modeler at Eat Sleep Play, and has spent the past three years helping bring the series up to date after its nine-year break from home consoles.

“I’ll be 30 next month, and I was 15 when I first played Twisted Metal,” he says. “Now I’m actually working with most of the original team members, and they are the most talented, greatest people to work with. Being a part of this has been an amazing experience.”

The new Twisted Metal brings back the classic driving and combat mechanics that fans remember, while adding revamped graphics, expanded level design, and new levels of carnage thanks to the power of the of the Playstation 3 hardware. The series has always been defined by its visceral action, which Ben is helping deliver this time out, with his role putting him in charge of animating the damage players can inflict on the game world with their arsenal of weapons – machine guns, missiles, fireballs, mines, you name it.

“Anything that is big, explodes, throws debris, and plays animation when it falls down – that’s me,” he says. “It can be very difficult, especially with Twisted Metal, where we tend to be wacky with our destructibles, like having a giant ferris wheel rolling down the street smashing cars and buildings. So we have to go the extra mile to make it look good, but still have that Twisted feel. There’s a real art to the setup you have to do in order to make it all work seamlessly.”

While work on the game began in 2007, it wasn’t officially announced until the 2010 E3 convention, as the finale of Sony’s press conference. The unexpected news was delivered with Sweet Tooth’s iconic ice cream truck driving up on stage, which got a huge response from the crowd, and was seen as a highlight of the year's show. After years of being so focused on production, the moment helped put the scope of the project in perspective for Ben.

“E3 was so good for our whole team,” he says. “You sometimes get so caught up in the minutiae of making games and fixing bugs, it can be overwhelming. But when you see it all blown up, and marketed out, and you see something that you personally worked on up on a 20-foot tall monitor, and there’s hundreds of people watching it – it really brought everything to fruition for me, what I’ve been doing with my three years.

“Everybody who came up to us was so excited too. And that was great, for industry people to say how excited they are about it, that almost means more to me than the die-hard fans. Your peers know exactly what goes into making a game, how hard it can be, so when they’re impressed by your game it really means something.”

Following E3, Ben and the rest of team at Eat Sleep Play returned to the studio inspired by their showing, and ready to put the finishing touches on the new Twisted Metal. Fans will still have to wait until 2011 to see their hard work, but Ben assures that they won’t be disappointed, explaining that even after working on it for so long, the designers still kick back every Friday to challenge each other to death matches.

“If you can work on something for 10 hours a day and then play it at the end of the week, and still have fun, that means something,” he says. “There’s a part of me that kind of doesn’t want it to end because I’ve put so much time and effort into it, but it doesn’t hurt that there are a lot of fans waiting to buy the game. That alone keeps you going. Even in its current state it would do really well, but we’re really working hard to make it even better for the fans.”