This was originally written as a feature for Mixmag coinciding with the release of the original ‘DJ Hero’ video game back in September 2009. Whilst the piece eventually took the form of a smaller advertorial (http://kvisit.com/S6Zhx), I felt it was worth a look back on.
Given the recent demise of the ‘Hero’ branded music games and wider collapse in popularity of a genre that seemed less than two years ago to offer an alternative, financially sound revenue stream for musical artists suffereing turbulence within their own industry, this becomes yet another indicator towards the relentless pace of change and fickle nature of current trends.
So read on for an interesting history of dance music in video games, featuring interviews with DJ Shadow, Lee Rous (Plump DJs), Si Begg and more – and perhaps think about where we’ll all be in another 18 months…
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Save & Continue: How Dance Music Got Its Game On
With the launch of DJ Hero, dance music and games have never been closer. But is armchair DJing really the future?
“Hey it’s ya boy, DJ Grandmaster Flash, the first DJ to make the turntables an instrument,” hollers the legendary and rather chirpy hip hop originator from his Bronx basement on the TV screen. “I’m gonna teach you everything you need to learn about being a DJ, so listen up and let’s get you started!”
This is DJ Hero, the new game from the makers of Guitar Hero. Instead of a mini-guitar, the game comes with a sleek-looking mini record deck (in gamespeak, the ‘peripheral’). Players scratch, cut, sample and rewind their way through over one hundred mashups, pre-mixed by the likes of Daft Punk and DJ Shadow. The challenge is to time your button stabs, scratches and fader moves to the coloured lines of the vinyl ‘highway’ as it scrolls towards you – ripping between everything from the Gorillaz to The Killers as you journey to become the most party-whoopin’, badass DJ in the whole wide room. Grandmaster Flash, DJ Shadow, Daft Punk, Z-Trip, Jazzy Jeff and the late DJ AM all feature as playable characters.
“It’s a social, party game with music for everyone,” reckons Jamie Jackson, hip hop fanatic and creative director at Freestyle Games, the British company snapped up by publishing bigwigs Activision to develop the global phenomenon – 25 million selling – ‘Hero’ franchise. “Social gaming is the biggest form of gaming in the world right now – before you go out, in a room full of mates and a crate of beers. Having a party.”
Game on. But this isn’t the first passionate embrace between dance music and video games. In fact they’ve been flirting for nearly two decades. Games like Wipeout – a futuristic, anti-gravity racing game (think F-Zero on pills) were introducing the Playstation generation to ‘Xpander’ by Sasha, Leftfield’s ‘Afro-Ride’ and ‘Under The Influence’ by the Chemical Brothers as early as 1995. Alongside artists like Daft Punk, The Prodigy, Plump DJs, Orbital and Underworld these were released as full soundtrack albums making this incredible new music available to buy (had you not already ripped the game CD straight to mini-disc).
“Dance music and computer games were deemed by those in positions of power to be two of the great ‘scourges on society’ in the Nineties,” recalls Andy Crysell, current MD of insight and strategy agency Crowd DNA, who works with Sony PlayStation , “so bringing them together made perfect sense. There was Xenon 2 before Wipeout – a PC game from circa ‘89 which had a Bomb The Bass soundtrack, but Wipeout was as much about making a cultural connection as merely providing a soundtrack”, says Andy, who’s also a former Mixmag journalist. “As my somewhat over-excited sleevenotes [for the Wipeout 2097 album] were looking to suggest, dance music and gaming make for perfect partners – adrenalised, digital and future-facing – and while many were forecasting that gaming would kill the music industry, in fact, it could offer a new platform and outlet for artists.”
Indeed, the advance of more powerful processors and CD-rom based games like Wipeout opened the door for hundreds of artists to a new audience, recalls Lee Rous of the Plump DJs. “We got some interest after finishing our first album from Wipeout’s creative department at Sony and met in their Liverpool office – with its car park full of Ferraris!” The Plumps initially licensed their tracks to the game, but as their relationship with the commissioners developed, they began producing tracks like ‘Big Groovy Fucker’ with Wipeout in mind.
“It’s about getting the biggest voice possible,” says Lee. “We like making innovative dance music – less targeting who listens to it where, more playing it as loud as we can so as many people can hear it as possible. So it’s a great industry to be involved with.”
Gaming has brought artists into music too. Like Radio 1Xtra’s drum and bass star Crissy Criss, who credits his first steps in production to ‘Music’ on the PS1 – a 1998 release similar to the popular ‘Dance eJay’ series on the PC, which allowed gamers to sequence pre-made and original riffs and samples into a track. “Obviously it was the shittest thing ever,” laughs the youngster, “but that was my first track and that’s how I got into it. From there it was on to the next version, then up to Cubase, when I really needed to work with sound.”
Games like Crissy’s copy of ‘Music’ – notably featuring ‘remixable’ tracks by Leftfield and Grooverider – have also developed the idea of computer games and consoles as useful tools, exemplified by our current fascination with Nintendo’s massively popular ‘self help’ software on the Wii and DS. Then there’s forthcoming ‘apps’ for the iPhone like Beaterator from RockStar, the makers of Grand Theft Auto – a Timbaland-powered, pocket production program – providing further evidence of cross-industry collaboration and a shift in attitudes.
Music producers have also sampled computer games, giving rise to tracks like DJ Fresh’s ‘X Project’, set to appear on Wipeout HD and the ‘chip tune’ phenomenon – with forums like 8bitcollective.com bursting with Game Boy beats and artists like Mars Wind boasting fans like Deadmau5. Even Tiesto’s latest album features a track, ‘Louder than Boom’, bursting with Super Mario-style diddles and pings.
After all, there are loads of similarities between the worlds of dance music and gaming. Both have traditionally invested in creative talent and production with the artists earning their keep by creating entertainment. And both see publishing giants operate with or alongside small independent labels jockeying for their piece of the pie. Their starkest difference? While the record industry flounders in the face of web 2.0, the games industry is thriving.
According to Activision’s CEO Robert Kotick, the Guitar Hero franchise is only the third game in history to reach $2 billion in sales after Mario and Madden NFL, in a global industry expected to reach $76.1bn in value by 2013. Compare this to a decline in music sales since 1999 – with issues like file sharing and piracy undermining the record labels and hurting artists’ ability to earn an income from royalties – and it’s no surprise to see musicians embracing involvement with profitable video games like Wipeout and DJ Hero to diversify their income during an increasingly turbulent time.
Wonky techno producer and turntablist Si Begg was recently employed to score an entire 8-bit soundtrack for an iPhone game called ‘Guts’ by Channel 4 Learning. Formerly on Mute Records, he now makes his money as a sound designer for websites, adverts and TV, which he says has ‘liberated’ his music production from the money-making pressures of the record industry that would have seen him and now see other artists continuously touring and prodded towards current trends in search of hits and radio play. His choice now is to make his new E.P. available for free, or for £100 – as an elaborate limited edition box set including a laser etched wooden record from www.sibegg.com/24bit – which provides an interesting and experimental insight into the split trends in music consumption that have shaken the music industry to the core. So could the video games industry save the music industry?
Well if the importance placed on great music in creating DJ Hero is anything to go by, it could well be a possibility, says Jamie Jackson. “The music industry realises what we have to offer. Look at the numbers. If there are over 25 million consumers worldwide – game buying, peripheral buying, consumers of Guitar Hero, and if DJ Hero comes even fractionally close to that – that’s a lot of new people listening to your music who are prepared to pay for things they like…”
More importantly for Jackson, however, is the effort taken by his co-developers to expose a wide variety of new, relevant music and classic tracks to new audiences through the game. They regularly questioned DJ Shadow to help identify classic DJ rarities and samples (and how to spell ‘boyeeee’ a la Flavor Flav) and through nothing short of a licensing miracle, the game, three years in the making, features a quite staggering range of artists, which they recruited a whole bus load of talent to mash up.
Radio 1Xtra DJ, D-Code, who got into dance from the hardcore scene, before hitting the mark with his drum and bass productions, was approached by the game’s developers in February 2008, and alongside his brother (known as Silent Source) he landed the job of Senior Remixer. However, balancing mixes that D-Code states “worked well sonically” with compelling game play became a tricky proposition, as even one of the games megastars will freely admit.
“The first mash-up I attempted was Boogie Down Productions’ ‘Jack Of Spades’ and David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’,” recalls Joshua Davies, aka, DJ Shadow. “I wanted to make sure that they would work as a stand alone mix – on a musical basis – then I had to implement the game play aspects which was really the hard part.” The easy part for the Californian turntable wizard– rumoured to own a collection of over 60,000 records – was making the decision to get involved in the first place.
“Well I can definitely tell you that this game came along at a good time for me. I’m not touring this year and you can’t really make a living off of royalties anymore so speaking on a purely pragmatic, frank level, it’s given me an opportunity buy some free time to record my next record properly. If you’re a musical artist you are constantly looking for ways to diversify your streams of income simply so that you can continue doing what you love to do.”
Of course, featuring in a game that gives you an excuse to play with yourself every night had nothing to do with it? “Ha ha! Well that wasn’t discussed in the first meeting. It felt strange. I mean when I was on MoWax, I remember James Lavelle being really excited about making little cast toys of his likeness and I was thinking, ‘I really don’t think I would want that!’ But having discussed this with my wife I thought ‘well ok, I have been a DJ for a long time – I’m passionate about the music and the artform of DJing – so this is hopefully a chance to portray it to people in a way that is credible.”
But could this stop the kids learning the real thing, as old school rockers Bill Wyman and Paul McCartney have suggested of the ‘Guitar Hero’ games? Not for Shadow. “To me this is access to music,” he says. ”You can be discouraged and you can grumble – that’s fine, but you have to have an eye on reality. In fact, I think a lot of the most innovative minds in music are the ones that end up being the most conservative – and that’s true in this case as well.” And for Si Begg it’s obvious. “There’s plenty of kids that are going to want to be the one on the stage, without pretending. The fact is, if they want girls after them they’re going to have to get on the real thing! …Not that I ever get any bloody women – it’s always blokes wanting to know what software I’ve used!” Maybe being a DJ Hero in real life isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be…
The fact is, for all his concerns about credibility, Shadow is a modest man. With his help DJ Hero is about to ignite the mother of all parties in a living room near you and expose millions of new game players to some of the greatest music ever made – mashed up by some of the greatest DJs of our time – and then by you and your beer-guzzling mates. In fact lads, now you‘ve arrived, here’s a free lesson. ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’ into ‘Genesis’ by Justice? Simple. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a dozen times, you don’t need to be a pro to be a hero.
