Editor’s note: This story uses info and content from the latest video from SHIRO!’s own PandaMonium. He got access to builds of Maximum Surge for the video Digging for Isix: A Digital Pictures History. You can watch the chapter about Maximum Surge at this timed YouTube link. We would like to sincerely thank Tyler Hogle and Amanda Welsh for contributing to what is in this article.
Unearthing the Ruins of Brokaw
In late 2022, I started the preliminary research phase for a simple video about Double Switch for the Sega Saturn. Fast forward to 2025. By this point, I had reached multiple forks in the road in which each fork formed its own rabbit hole. One such dimensional portal opened up when a source, Tyler Hogle of Screaming Villains, graciously granted me access to DOS and Saturn builds of Maximum Surge.
On my Digging for Isix YouTube video, commenter XJ-0641 brought up the definition of scope creep, “continuous or uncontrolled growth in a project’s scope, generally experienced after the project begins.” To you, I say — yeah, pretty much.
Covering Maximum Surge was always something I sought to do as a sort of “bonus feature” at the end of my eventual Double Switch video. That was part of the plan all along. Use the scraps of info released by gaming magazines and online sources over the years, then thread it all into a chapter about what the game could have been. Internet archeology, cryptic hieroglyphics and such. I wrote a long script with all that I could uncover.
Then Hogle found out Digital Pictures actually finished the game. That was news to us. He sent me the build and told me I could make a video about it. On top of this, he also sent me three hours of behind-the-scenes footage. None of this had ever been seen by the public.
Battle Trax
When Digital Pictures hit its stride in the early 1990s, interviewees said they would start the year with several proof of concepts for potential future games. One such concept was Battle Trax, described by one staffer as “Sewer Shark on land.” The proof of concept is said to have been filmed with a model train set in the office, allowing players to choose their path. There were also sections where the player would get into shootouts with Digital Pictures employees ducking behind cardboard boxes and whatever else they could find.
After Digging for Isix was published, Tyler Hogle found some of the Battle Trax footage. A clapper board shows some of it was filmed on April 28, 1994.
Throughout 1994, the company would instead spend the summer filming Corpse Killer, Supreme Warrior, Slam City with Scottie Pippin, and Kids on Site. After filming, workers in San Mateo hurriedly programmed and battle tested these FMV spectacles, releasing them before the 1994 holiday season. Though the Battle Trax concept was shelved, the idea still bounced around the minds of this interactive film studio.
The Year is 1995
“Talking about Maximum Surge, that really was the culmination of having figured a bunch of things out,” recalled Amanda Welsh, then producer at Digital Pictures. “We weren’t into factory churning stuff out. We were really explorers, pushing the envelope as fast and as hard as we could.”
The Battle Trax concept evolved into Maximum Surge, a post-apocalyptic tale, taking place in the fictional Brokaw territory. In its world, nuclear war ravaged the Earth many years prior. War has broken out over the precious resource known as Dagan-12. To the player of this video game, Dagan-12 is Earth’s salvation. To Drexel, the twisted dictator of Brokaw, it is his ticket to ultimate power. The player is a rebel commando fighting alongside Jo to defeat Drexel, take down his army of android “Uglies,” and prevent the villain from completing his ultimate weapon — Maximum Surge.
Filming took place in May 1995. This was early, compared to when Digital Pictures usually filmed its games in a given year. Much of it was filmed on sets in California.
“We actually didn’t film in the desert,” Welsh recalled. “At that point, we were getting better about less practical filming and special effects.”
Like all Digital Pictures shoots, this was not the same experience as filming a movie. Many of the characters talk directly to the camera, or “the player” of the video game. Instead of a “beginning, middle and end,” the script is more of a “beginning and then a choice,” to quote Double Switch cinematographer Sandi Sissel. In a given day, the cast and crew may shoot several dozen scenes in one or two takes each. They had to be very economical with their time. During a behind-the-scenes clip, the film crew was heard discussing how to finish the day’s work before the sun set.
Jo, the character who accompanies the player, is played by Yasmine Bleeth. At the time, she was best known for her role in the TV show Baywatch. The villain Drexel was played by Walter Koenig, known well for his role as Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek series.
William Mesa served as director of Maximum Surge. I mean “director” in the traditional film sense of the word. He oversaw the filming process, while others at Digital Pictures spearheaded the gameplay mechanics and other such elements. Mesa is well known in the world of Hollywood for his visual effects work, having done effects for movies like Deep Blue Sea (1999) and The Fugitive (1993).
The Onslaught ship rides “the beam,” a sort of railroad the player travels in the overworld of Maximum Surge. You navigate intersections and power stations in a grid map while fighting enemy ships with a mounted turret. This is the evolution of that Battle Trax concept from 1994.
Some intersections are power stations, where the player can get out of the ship and shoot “uglies,” traversing them in dungeon crawler fashion alongside Jo. The traversal of a power station concludes when the player and Jo reach the control room, where they use a computer terminal to convert the Dagan-12 power station away from the control of Drexel and into the hands of our heroes. Convert each power station on the map to move on.
To beat Maximum Surge, you must convert power stations on two overworld maps, then defeat Drexel at his secret lair in an on-foot battle against motorcycle android ladies and other assorted “uglies.”
Maximum Surge was reportedly filmed and developed on a roughly $3 million budget. They went big on stars, sets and special effects. The budget is about on par when compared to the many other projects created by the company.
Threading Footage into a Video Game
Back at the office in San Mateo, Welsh essentially finished bridging the gap between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. While on set, she made sure they filmed exactly what was needed to make a functioning video game.
Sometime in the fall, they showed a build of the game to focus groups. They said the power station shootouts needed more variety, so more shootout “scenes” were filmed on different sets. Costumes of enemies in these new rooms are noticeably different from the rest of the game.
These new scenes would spice up the on-foot combat and allow for the creation of key rooms to gain access to the control room. Some of these new rooms would provide extra ammo to the player.
At around this time, Digital Pictures had come to terms with its lackluster sales and apparent financial woes brought on by its publisher. They would later allege in a lawsuit that Acclaim mishandled the release of several games, holding copies in warehouses without shipping them to stores, and refusing to give millions of dollars owed to the company. (Acclaim would later settle the lawsuit.) Be it caused by one of or all of those factors, Digital Pictures laid off a sweeping majority of its own staff at the start of 1996. Between January and March, a skeleton crew put the finishing touches on Maximum Surge.
During that time, Sega Saturn ports of the game were sent to Sega for quality assurance and testing. One test report from January shows a build of Maximum Surge failing its testing process.
In March 1996, the Digital Pictures board of directors voted in favor of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. From that point onward, the company stopped producing video games.
About thirty years after it was filmed, I was allowed access to a three-disc DOS build of Maximum Surge completed in March 1996, as well as a two-disc Saturn build from February and another from January. All of these builds are playable from start to end, though the DOS version is by far the most complete. It includes the extra battle scenes while the Saturn builds do not. DOS also has a greater variety of dungeon maps, more presentation elements, and more music. Its combat is more balanced, and movement animations play out faster.
Welsh does not recall why there are such vast differences between the two versions. Though she highly doubts they were going to release these ports in such different states.
“It could have had something to do with the nature of the hardware we were working with and some limitations,” she recalled. “But we really tried to mitigate that. That was not really the way we released products.”
Chapter 5 of my video Digging for Isix has an exhaustive overview of Maximum Surge from start to end, threaded with behind-the-scenes footage showing how they filmed it. You do not need to watch other parts of the video to understand Chapter 5.
What’s Next for Maximum Surge?
Tyler Hogle is the one-man army who has been remastering Digital Pictures games in HD on modern platforms. He works under Josh Fairhurst, who recently purchased the rights to all Digital Pictures properties. Hogle is working on HD remasters of Sewer Shark, Slam City and Supreme Warrior. Once these are out, he will finish an HD remaster of Maximum Surge. It would mark the first time it has ever been officially published — more than 30 years after being developed.
As for the DOS and Saturn builds, I would likely get into legal trouble if I personally leaked them. Though Hogle and Fairhurst have said they will post these builds to the internet when the Maximum Surge HD remaster comes out. They already did this with Saturn builds of Prize Fighter: Heavyweight Edition.
There is no official release date for Maximum Surge at this time. Though Hogle has already begun working on the HD remaster.
News about the remaster was a surprise to Amanda Welsh.
“The people who are getting joy out of this, they’re like our people,” she said. “The things that are driving the joy and the delight are absolutely what motivated us to make it in the first place, and that just feels unbelievably cool.”
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