The Z car — Russian war propaganda in Apple Arcade? …and Warped Kart Racer review
Released in May 2022, three months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Warped Kart Racer unlocks a car with the distinct Z mark after a handful of hours of play.
Warped Kart Racer is a Mario Kart clone based on the 20th Television cartoon franchises American Dad, Family Guy, King of the Hill and Solar Opposites. The game is well made and fun. Tracks have varied, inviting designs and reward a search for unexpected driving lines and shortcuts. Graphics, animation and audio are engaging and fun, and maybe even tops Mario Kart with a touch of grit and attitude. The game mechanics are pretty much identical to Mario Kart, so you can just pick it up and employ the tactics you’ve learned from your hours or decades playing Mario Kart.
After a handful of hours of playing the game, me and my kid unlocked a car with the distinct Z mark. It seemed at first like a really kid friendly car, with pieces from toys and Lego and my kid was excited.
Upon discovering the Z symbol, the excitement turned into indignation and hostility for my 9 year old, and when racing: ”Hit the Z car!” In the three months leading up to us playing the game, Z, a simple latin letter, not cyrillic, had come to symbolize the Russian military force in Ukraine, for supporters and opponents alike. No one could tell exactly what the Z was supposed to signify, nor the origins of its propaganda use. Was it the first letter of a word, was it a pictogram or something else? We hadn’t discussed the war in any detail in our family, nor talked about the Z symbol. My kid must have picked it up from media and/or school. She was pre-conditioned to percieve the Z symbol with indignation and hostility.
My own reaction was of bewilderment. We hadn’t watched the Solar Opposites series from which the Z car was unlocked, so we actually had no idea if the car or symbol was integral to the series story telling. Not that it mattered, really: three months into the war the symbol had acquired a new meaning distinct form anything it could have meant before. A quick googling to make sense of it failed. The Z car was a bit of a provocation in our gaming.
Was it a designer sympathizing with the Russian invasion who included the Z car in the game, as a kind of propaganda activism? If so, it worked the opposite way for me and my kid. We routinely used the Z car as our enemy in the field of characters racing. The Z car had the effect of reminding us that we opposed the invasion. Still playing the game several months later, since it is a genuinely good game, the Z car is still reminding us of the invasion, even when news fatigue sets in.
It is easy to see the Z car as designed to appeal to kids, constructed from toy and play parts, complete with matches as ammunition. There is also another angle. It is a bit shoddy put together and early in the war Ukrainian propaganda published images of unexploded Russian ordnances and seized equipment, to show how the Russians used outdated and inferior technology. Is the Z car a reference to this?
It could of course also be a deliberate attempt to trigger outrage and controversy, and thus bring attention to the game.
Whatever thoughts and ideas that went into designing the Z car, the thoughts and ideas it provokes for the player are individual and probably impossible to control at the design stage, no matter what the designer is trying to achieve. It is really hard to take into account all the responses and all the pre-conditioning for all users in a globally available game. And I still don’t know if the Z car makes perfect sense in relation to the Solar Opposites series!
The Z car is not the only political car in the game, there is also the CIA car. This time it is clearly associated with the American Dad series, where the main character works for the CIA. The CIA car doesn’t trigger any indignation and hostility from my kid. Rather, it triggers a kind of excitement, recognizing CIA from kids spy movies and tv series. Again, previous experiences direct the reaction. These experiences are not the same for everyone. CIA is a tainted brand in some parts of the world, maybe with the highest level of disdain in South America over its instrumental involvment in the harsh and violent political oppression of Operation Condor.
Maybe that is the reasoning behind the Z car? If there’s a CIA car, there sure must be room for a Z car, for some opposition? When playing the game, my thoughts drift as my kart drift, to the havoc wrecked by Z and CIA, in intervals through modern history, as the drivers of the respective cars pound each other with turtle shells. There’s no relativism in these thoughts, Russia is a clear aggressor in Ukraine that wrecks people’s lives and livelihoods, destroys freedom and democracy, and send poor youth to die at the front.
Again, my thoughts on world politics are pre-conditioned, and triggered in my own particular way by the Z car. What kind of peace will there be in Ukraine and the world when the war ends? CIA and Z came together in the freudian admission by George W. Bush, as he said a “wholly brutal and unjustified invasion of Iraq” when meaning to say it about Ukraine. The war in Iraq started by Bush was a disaster, and brought immense suffering, as well as radicalization and the rise of IS, plus further regional destbilization. There hasn’t been sustainable peace yet. The rationale for starting the war was laid out to the UN in the infamous presentation by Colin Powell on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, based on cherry picked intelligence from the CIA. The invasion of Iraq set an example that if you have the power, you can just invade another country at will under whatever weak pretext, regardless of international laws and charters. That example is not lost on the Russian leadership, but what about the rest of the Iraqi experience? It is easy to see a peace of longterm distrust and hatred between Russians and Ukrainians, of guerillas and sabotage, of soldiers and volunteers returning to their homes with fresh military experience and the heaps of weapons that a war leaves behind, loitering, looking for other exciting adventures and something to do with their experiences. Will there be knock-on effects for neighbouring countries, or for the global power balance, for India, China and Taiwan and beyond?
Did the designer of the Z car anticipate to trigger these thoughts? If so, thanks, well done! The Z and the CIA cars are sparse enough symbols to give my own thoughts on world politics room to meander as I chase the perfect lines through the tracks in Warped Kart Racer.
The game is pretty great, but it sorely lacks one key feature from Mario Kart: local split screen multiplayer. Can we have it, please?
Extra thought: The Great Giana Sisters
Warped Kart Racer parallells The Great Giana Sisters, a clone of the original Super Mario Bros game. I played both games in my childhood at different friends’ places. The Great Giana Sisters was made for 80’s home computers and the similarities with Super Mario Bros led to pressure from Nintendo. Its sales were halted, but it was heavily pirated and thus available pretty much everywhere. The Great Giana Sisters was a godsend for the lucky kids having access to a home computer, but still unlucky enough not to have a Nintendo NES/Famicom. Warped Kart Racer works the same way, giving me and my kid access to Mario Kart, almost, in our Apple Arcade gaming.
Update November 2022 — 9V!
Sometime during september-october, after the original publication of this article, the Z was changed to 9V. It was pointed out in a reddit thread I started to dig deeper into why the Z was there.
In the thread, another user dug up some concept art for Solar Opposites, that potentially could be the source of the Z, if the bonnet of the car is supposed to be a 9V battery.
The battery hypothesis first appeared in another reddit thread I started, but it seemed rather far fetched to me at the time. The Z is front and center in the design, you don’t put anything there by mistake. Even now the 9V looks really weird and misplaced, especially in comparison to the other cars, with either no or symbolically relevant signage. The 9V battery is not contributing.
Maybe the battery hypothesis is real, maybe it is a smart way to disappear the Z. Anyway, how did the Z car make it through quality control in May 2020?
