Furiosa director George Miller’s comments on Mad Max game and Hideo Kojima prompt response from Mad Max’s original devs

In a recent interview with GAMINGbible, Furiosa director George Miller expressed his displeasure with how the 2015 Mad Max game turned out. When asked if another video game adaptation would be possible, Miller stated that he would prefer someone like Hideo Kojima to take the reins and give it their all rather than have it be half-baked. 

The Mad Max game George Miller is referring to is the Avalanche Studios title named after the series’ titular hero. In the game, Max Rockatansky finds himself being assaulted by a renegade group called the War Boys while on the search for the famed Plains of Silence. His beloved Interceptor vehicle is stolen, leaving him to enlist the help of the hunchbacked mechanic Chumbucket and his vehicular creation the Magnum Opus. Avalanche Studios’ Mad Max is set in an open world and has players driving to points of interest as they collect parts to upgrade the Magnum Opus. While Mad Max has on-foot combat, the draw of the game is its vehicular combat where players are free to customize and drive the Magnum Opus as they see fit. The game received mixed reviews but has since become a cult classic amongst gamers and fans of the franchise. 

George Miller’s comments on the Mad Max game reached the ears of none other than Avalanche Studios founder Christofer Sundberg, who took to X to share his side of the story. According to Sundberg, Miller and his team approached Avalanche Studios – a studio that was then known for making open world games like Just Cause and theHunter – with the intention of making a linear game. It was only after a year of development that Miller’s team told Avalanche Studios to scrap the game’s linear segments in favor of a more open world approach, which was the studio’s initial pitch. This explains the title’s polarizing approach to game design whereby players are free to drive through the open world but are pigeonholed into linear sections once they reach their destinations. 

In addition, Sundberg explains that Avalanche Studios was forced to release Mad Max on the same day as Hideo Kojima’s own Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and subsequently blamed the coinciding releases for sales not meeting expectations. This led to “a bunch of awesome DLC” for the game being cancelled, according to Sundberg.

While Sundberg is displeased about how the collaboration between George Miller and Avalanche Studios turned out, he is positive that Hideo Kojima’s take on the Mad Max franchise would make for “an awesome game.” Kojima Productions is currently preoccupied with a ton of projects including Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, OD (co-written with Jorden Peele), and an unannounced game that goes by the working title Physint. Kojima, on the other hand, was recently seen riding in the business end of a compact tractor on a sandy beach in Germany (presumably for work), which could help his chances at scoring a Mad Max collaboration with George Miller.