Some confusion comes up here, as Chris Gray made a name for himself designing Infiltrator> for Mindscape, and its success is what inspired him to create Gray Matter Enterprises in 1986. Both Mad Max, Dirty Harry, and a few other Mindscape games were developed by Chris Gray’s short lived Gray Matter Enterprises ( Space Funky B.O.B., Incredible Crash Test Dummies). This may explain why Eastridge is not actually credited in the manual itself, but the credits of Mad Max in general are a bit more convoluted than that. Whenever you enter a shop or reach the game’s final boss, you just get to hear that theme song again.

There’s a 1.5 second panicked jingle that loops for way too long whenever you lose a life, receive a password, or enter an Arena level. It’s pretty good rendition, which is fortunate because it’s THE ONLY SONG IN THE GAME. A text crawl of that film’s opening narration is accompanied by Mindscape regular Nick Eastridge’s take on Brian May’s (no relation to the Brian May of Queen) Mad Max 2 score. Despite the title screen and cover using logos from the original movie, the cover itself and opening of the game makes it clear that this is a game based mostly on Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Their earlier attempts like Mad Max and Dirty Harry, however have a few interesting ideas that make their flaws stand out even more. None of these games are particularly good, and some like The Terminator are almost unplayable. Future games based on The Terminator and even Flight of the Intruder would follow in the early nineties. In just one year Mindscape delivered video game adaptations of Mad Max, Dirty Harry, Days of Thunder, and The Last Starfighter. In this one year Mindscape attempted to do for the NES what Ocean had done for the Commodore 64: Make a profit off movie fans by churning out as many barely playable adaptations of their favorite movies as possible. Despite the popularity of post-apocalyptic movies dying down a bit in the late eighties, and countless video games released in imitation of the three Mad Max films, it wasn’t until 1990 that the official Mad Max game would be appear on the NES from Mindscape.

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