This was, by far, LMC's best-selling vehicle. It was a collaborative design with a friend, Racer Plisskin, who was also one of my biggest car-design mentors and influences. And it defined the SL police cruiser for years.

Shortly after I got onto SL, I commissioned Racer to design a police cruiser based on the famous Ford Crown Victoria, as a personal project, because no such vehicle existed in Second Life at the time. He did, and the resulting design was a popular seller at his car company, sold as the RPM Interceptor. I commissioned other vehicles from him, but this was my favorite, and it was partly what inspired me to start building my own cars.

By the time Lupinia Motor Company started to really take off, Racer was winding down his car business, and I couldn't bear to see this beautiful design go off the market, especially since it existed because of me. So, I bought the rights to the design, refreshed it with new textures to give it a more realistic look (and to make it easier to apply custom livery designs for various police RP groups), replaced the lights with a brand-new system of my own design (available on several other LMC models as the "PE" option package), and rebranded it as the LMC Tsaritsky.

At a time before uploading custom 3D models to SL was possible (even through "sculpties"), and texture loading was slow and unreliable, the Tsaritsky was also one of the best-looking vehicles in Second Life, because it relied on real modeling for its shape, instead of using arrays of flat boxes with glitch-prone transparency layering to create the illusion of a curved vehicle from certain angles.

The addition of the Tsaritsky made LMC one of the leading SL car companies for a few years, and it was a staple of the police RP community on SL for over a decade. It was copied and imitated by countless users, but always with significantly inferior scripts, inferior modeling (lots of people stripped off pieces of the body to add more lights, making it look a lot more blocky and unfinished), or inferior textures (many of the textures used in the LMC Tsaritsky were made from my own photography, because certain parts of the car simply didn't have source photos online that were usable as 3D textures).

Despite all the imitations and rip-offs, sales never decreased until sculpt-mapping made curved vehicle bodies more intricately detailed and easier to make, rendering the Tsaritsky's elegant prim-based design dated by comparison (and making the rest of the LMC lineup look impossibly obsolete). But it was a wonderful ride while it lasted, and I'm proud that the Tsaritsky became a piece of SL history.

Photography/Artwork