The Secrets of the Patriotmobile feature

Whether it be Ghost Rider’s Hell Cycle, Batman’s Batmobile or that ghastly thing the Fantastic Four rode around in in Rise of the Silver Surfer, every good superhero needs a kick-ass vehicle. Now the Purple Patriot is not exactly most people’s idea of a good superhero, but in his own mind, he’s the best thing in New York since sliced bagels. So in order to give his enormous ego the stroking it so desires, it was necessary to come up with a suitably impressive vehicle.

Now the trouble with creating anti-heroes like The Purple Patriot is you can’t afford to make them too successful, powerful or impressive. If your anti-hero is too powerful, the audience will never relate to him or feel any empathy with him. You’ll have created a character who has no redeeming qualities. Unlovable. Perhaps it sounds odd to suggest that an obnoxious anti-hero – a guy who is described in our last press release as “a bit of a dick” – needs to be loveable, but he does need something to make the audience relate to him. In the case of The Purple Patriot, my solution was to make him utterly inept and lacking any semblance of good fortune. If you passed him a hat with ten pieces of paper with prizes written on them and asked him to pick one, all he would get is a paper cut.

The first instinct, then, is to give him the most pathetic super-car you’ve ever seen. Remember, though, this is a guy with an ego the size of Algeria. If you gave him an obviously pathetic car, he simply wouldn’t drive it. He’d turn up to a major showdown against Doctor Arachnus in a yellow cab and spend the first five minutes rummaging around in his tights for the right change. So he has to have a car which matches his ego, yet still somehow makes him the victim. So we give him a second-hand car. Not satisfied with merely giving him a used car, we go one stage further and make it pink – guaranteed to make him self-conscious about his own sexuality. Here’s the car when he obtains it from the previous owner.

Most rational people would be pretty content with a car like this. It’s a classic! The Purple Patriot, however, is not most people – or indeed rational. Underneath the vintage exterior, this is a pretty powerful vehicle. It’s got armour-plating to rival the Batmobile, and it has the kind of engine you’d normally see strapped to something NASA was sending into space. In short, this vehicle has most of what the Purple Patriot would need from his super-car. His ego is not going to be satisfied without some serious work though. So as soon as he gets hold of the vehicle, he remodels it into something more his style. The first thing he does, of course, is get it sprayed purple. Ideally, red, white and blue would be more patriotic, but purple matches his tights. Then he has some enormous spoilers strapped on the back, and a massive set of bull bars erected on the hood. Not that he’s overcompensating for anything, you understand. A nice Stars and Stripes flag hooked on where the radio aerial used to be – just in case people suddenly forget what country they’re in. Finally, we have some flame decals because… well everything looks better with flame decals, right?So what we’ve got now is something more like this:

I was tempted at this point to suggest that we had finished, but The Purple Patriot is not a person who does things by half-measures. He really wouldn’t be satisfied with a super-car until it was carrying the kind of arsenal to take down a South-American country. Machine gun? Check! Wheel spikes? Yes, please! Missiles? Hell, why not!? However, even the Purple Patriot and his colleagues know a classic car when they see one, so sacrificing that classic sleek body shape by strapping on a bunch of ugly-ass weapons is a no-no. So we had to find a better solution. A way to give his car the kind of firepower that George W Bush still expects to find in Iraq one day without completely obliterating the style of that classic auto. And so we find ourselves staring at the final result. Please forgive me this one GIF. I know you hate them – I do too! But there’s just no other way to properly show off The Patriotmobile without seeing it animated as it is in-game.