Blast Corps

Blast Corps is a single-player action video game. The player controls vehicles to destroy buildings, such as farms and other structures, in the path of a runaway nuclear missile carrier. The player fails if the carrier collides with an object. The eight demolition vehicles vary in the way they clear structures: the bulldozer rams, the dump truck drifts, the lightweight buggy crashes from higher ground, the motorcycle shoots missiles, another truck presses outwards from its sides, and three different robot mechs tumble and stomp from the land and the air.

The player must transfer between vehicles and other machinery to solve puzzles. Objectives include transporting timed explosive crates and bridging gaps. The game's puzzles increase in difficulty as the player progresses through its 57 levels.

Blast Corps was among Rare's first games for the Nintendo 64 and led a run of seven critically acclaimed Rare titles for the console. The game's production began in 1995. The development team consisted of four recent graduates, though it expanded at times to seven concurrent staff. Martin Wakeley became the game's lead designer.

He credited the team's small size for their easy progression from planning to market. Rare founder Chris Stamper was the impetus for the project. He had wanted to make a game about destroying buildings for years prior to Blast Corps's development. The team worked to fit his idea to a gameplay concept and devised a "Constantly Moving Object" conceit that would give the levels a time limit.

The game received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator Metacritic, and "unanimous critical success", according to Retro Gamer. Reviewers highly praised the novelty and variety of Blast Corps's gameplay. Peer Schneider of IGN, in particular, lauded the game's originality. Trent Ward commented in GameSpot that the premise taps into childhood fantasies, while "the unique relationship between the terrain and the vehicles you pilot ensures that Blast Corps will exercise your mind as well as your reflexes".

Reviewers struggled to master the game's controls. GamePro's Slo Mo praised this aspect of the game, saying that even mastering the extreme precision of the steering is fun, and rewards the player with both better gameplay technique and an appreciation for the strong distinction between the game's many vehicles. Schneider likewise overcame his initial concerns to appreciate the complexity of the controls and the differences between the vehicles. He considered the locked camera view restrictive when compared to the unrestricted 3D camera in the game's contemporaries.

Wakeley, the game's designer, considered making a sequel as an action combat game, but thought the concepts behind Blast Corps had been fully exhausted. After praising the game in a 2010 Rare retrospective feature, Retro Gamer's writers craved a sequel. The magazine said the title was proof of the company's inventiveness. Steve Ellis, who was a programmer at Rare, thought Blast Corps to be among the company's most underrated games, and though its physics were now dated, he continued to find the game fun enough to revisit regularly.

Rare's Blast Corps began a run of highly praised Nintendo 64 games, including GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Jet Force Gemini. Retro Gamer wrote that Rare had doubled the number of classic Nintendo 64 games and was an important alliance for Nintendo. Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002 for a record price of $377 million, acquiring the rights to the game from Nintendo. After the industry had changed, Blast Corps designer Martin Wakeley reflected a decade after the game's 1997 release.