POD: Planet of Death (titled simply POD in North America) is a futuristic racing video game for Microsoft Windows released by Ubi Soft in 1997. Plot Set in the distant future where humanity has successfully colonized one of Jupiter's moons, Io. After years of prosperity, a mining accident unleashes a deadly fungus from within the mining facility, causing widespread destruction and panic throughout the colony. Desperate, most of Io's population escapes the now-termed "p.o.d." (planet of death) while a few survivors remain, voluntarily or otherwise. With only one ship remaining, the survivors soup up cars, which they use to race each other in tournaments throughout the desolated city streets, and the winner of the final tournament will commandeer the last ship and escape to safety, leaving the others to die. As the player wins the final race on the "HQ" circuit, the creeping fungus nearly engulfs the remaining portion of land where the platform with the last ship still stands. Ditching the vehicle, they successfully take off with the ship before the mold consumes the launch pad. As the last person to leave the "p.o.d.", the player witnesses Io's final stage of destruction: being reborn as a giant flower in outer space. History Influences on POD included Super Mario Kart and Ridge Racer. POD was published in 1997. It was one of the first games to support the MMX instruction set and came bundled as an OEM version with computers using Intel Pentium or Pentium II MMX processors, and some AMD K6 systems. The OEM 1.0 version did not support 3dfx cards or a network mode. A retail version of POD (called POD 2.0 by Ubisoft) was later released and featured more circuits and cars, plus support for 3dfx video cards and network play. A special multiplayer program called "Game Service" was provided by Ubisoft for POD players so that they could race on Ubisoft servers. POD was among the first games optimized for video cards with a 3dfx chipset using the Glide API. Only video cards with the 3dfx Voodoo 1 chipset were supported upon the game's release. Ubisoft later published patches, which added support for the Voodoo 2 using the Glide API and non-3dfx chipsets via Direct3D. Less than a year after publishing POD, Ubisoft issued an expansion pack under the title Back to Hell (also known as Extended Time in France) in late 1997. This pack contained