For a lot of American gamers growing up in the 90s, PlayStation is Twisted Metal. But in Europe, the series never hit in the same way.

There are a multitude of reasons for that, with marketing and local tastes being among them. But availability was an issue as well: Twisted Metal 3 and Twisted Metal 4 never released outside of USA.

That will change later this week with PS Plus Premium, as the two car combat outings will finally get a run out on the continent.

In truth, these are somewhat divisive entries, as they were developed by 989 Studios, the now defunct Sony subsidiary based in Foster City.

The internal development team was prolific in the 90s, making many of PlayStation’s flagship sports games for the PS1, including NFL GameDay and Jet Moto.

SingleTrac, who made the first two Twisted Metal games, got acquired by GT Interactive, prompting many of the staff to leave for Incognito Entertainment – including key creatives like David Jaffe and Scott Campbell.

But while it was originally announced they’d be involved with the development of Twisted Metal 3, they started work on series reboot Twisted Metal Black for the PS2 instead, meaning they had very little involvement with the latter two PS1 games.

As a result, the critical reception for the releases plummeted, as Sony was accused of milking the franchise.

It’s perhaps part of the reason why they were never released in Europe, although PlayStation had a much more complicated corporate structure in those days, with SCEA operating largely independently from SCEE.

Either way, it’s going to be good to finally have these games officially available in Europe.

Personally, we’re curious how Sony is going to get around the soundtracks here, because the original releases had music from the likes of Rob Zombie and Cypress Hill. We can’t imagine those songs are going to be relicensed, so we wonder if they may just be removed.