IGNPC: Auto Assault seems to intersect with lots of popular properties -- The Road Warrior, Car Wars, Motor City Online, etc. Where did the inspiration for the game come from? What elements are essential to the experience?

Ryan Seabury: When we started NetDevil, we already had a couple of ideas for online games that we wanted to make. The first one was Jumpgate, our space combat MMOG. The next was a car combat game, which became Auto Assault. Inspiration for the game came from many sources, including all the classic post-apocalyptic games (pen & paper and video), movies and books.

As for the essential experience question, we wanted Auto Assault to be a very visceral, high action experience as opposed to a heavy simulator. I think we nailed that target in how the game is ending up. It's just so fun to move in Auto Assault, taking jumps, skidding out, ramming stuff, and the pace of combat is just simply the fastest of any MMOG yet. Additionally, none of us realized how much fun the destructible environments would end up being on top of the vehicular combat core gameplay.