The Weirdest Video Games Based On Bands

We were a company that made video games with rock bands and rap collectives in all kinds of genres. We had Kiss first-person shooters, Def Jam fighting games, and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

Nowadays, the subgenre of musician-led games is almost non-existent; only the biggest pop groups like BTS still star in their own games, and those are likely for mobile platforms. Musicians in console and PC games are largely relegated to appearing as Fortnite And Call of Duty: Warzone hides.

The era of band-based games is all but over. Sega is out of the Make My Video business, we’ll probably never get another Spice Girls-themed game, and, for better or worse, a Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker reboot seems almost impossible. But over the course of three decades, we were given fascinating, baffling, and truly awful video games based on bands.

Here are nine of the most memorable — and often dystopian — band-based video games.

Journey, the video game

In 1983 Bally Midway released the album tripan arcade game based on the then wildly popular rock band of the same name. Journey (the band) was just coming off the huge success of their seventh studio album, Escapewith classics like “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Open Arms,” and “Who’s Crying Now.” (Journey even had a video game out at this point, the much less memorable Travel Escape (released in 1982 for the Atari 2600.)

trip‘s arcade outing set a precedent for bizarre justifications for video games based on rock bands. The idea was that “feral alien Groupoids have confiscated Journey’s electro-supercharged instruments,” and the player’s mission was to guide each band member back to their gear, which was scattered across five galaxies. Collect them all and there would be a massive Journey concert at the Galactic Stadium, where a looped cassette tape would play “Separate Ways” from the 1983 album in the arcade cabinet Borders.

trip was notable for its use of digitized graphics; the playable band members were composed of black-and-white photographs of Steve Perry, Neal Schon, Steve Smith, Jonathan Cain, and Ross Valory on small cartoon bodies. Now, trip is synonymous with the 2012 game of the same name by thatgamecompany.

Mötley Crüe’s Crüe Ball

Electronic Arts used to be a much stranger, much riskier company. In the 1990s, EA published games like Crue Balla digital pinball machine for Sega Genesis based on the heavy metal headband Mötley Crüe. The game was originally known as Twisted FlipperBut developers eventually secured Mötley Crüe’s blessing and ended up using artwork and music from the song “Dr. Feelgood,” the kind of crap we listened to unironically in the late ’80s. Crüe mascot Allister Fiend graced the box art and appeared in cutscenes.

Crue Ball wasn’t great, and the Genesis’ tinny sound chip didn’t do Mötley Crüe’s music any favors.

Aerosmith’s Revolution X

Although the game was at one point pitched as an arcade game similar to Jurassic Park, Midway ultimately decided to make its on-rails shooter Revolution X to a game starring Aerosmith, released in 1994. In the game’s dystopian future setting, an oppressive government/corporate-military regime known as the New Order Nation has taken over the world – and to make matters worse (in theory), Aerosmith has been kidnapped by NON, led by leather-clad headmistress Helga.

Revolution X tasks players with gunning down dozens of NON-soldiers, who take on various forms: roller-skating gunmen, ninjas, and spear-throwing natives. In addition to questionable cultural sensitivity, Revolution X was hot. Players freed bikini-clad cage dancers and freed women sentenced to hard manual labor wearing little more than cut-off denim shorts. Every woman in the game, from Helga to the bikini-clad hostages, was played by Kerri Hoskins, the model for Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat-3.

Like another arcade shooter from Midway, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Revolution X was designed to squeeze as much quarter out of players as possible. To pull it off required not only deep pockets, but also a tolerance for Aerosmith’s early ’90s song catalog.

Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child

Glam rockers Kiss went multimedia with their 1998 record Psycho circuswhich spawned a 31-issue comic book series, action figures, and the first-person shooter Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child.

Released for PC and Sega Dreamcast in 2000, The nightmare child casts players as members of a band called Wicked Jester who are imbued with magical powers and must defeat the Nightmare King. Each playable character in Wicked Jester has a Kiss counterpart and a section of the game to complete. In addition to calling upon the godlike powers of Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley, you can acquire a suit of armor that makes you look like Gene “The Demon” Simmons as you embark on a quest to kill a reborn Nightmare King, who manifests as a red skull with scorpion legs.

What does any of this have to do with Kiss? Very little! The band’s iconic makeup and silver-and-black costumes served as window dressing for a very average shooter.

Devo presents adventures of the smart patrol

The mid-1990s welcomed a flood of new games built around the interactive multimedia CD-ROM. Often featuring a mix of raw early 3D graphics and full-motion video, the CD-ROM gave us puzzle classics like Mystery And Clovenand creepy horror adventures The 7th guest And PhantasmagoriaThe trend of interactive CD-ROM games also gave us bizarre experiments, such as Devo presents adventures of the smart patrol, criticized by GameSpot upon release as “a haphazardly cobbled together collection of sounds, graphics, crude animations, and sloppy transitions that lacks any working plot, pointless or otherwise.”

Created by Devo’s Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, Adventures of the Smart Patrol sends players to a “surreal, Blade Runner Blade Runner-on-steroids urban wasteland where disease is profit,” according to a description on the back of the box. Their mission is to track down the genetically engineered freak the Turkey Monkey and find a cure for the degenerative disease Osso Buco Myelitis, which will turn people into “writhing sacks of pulsating slime.” Devo is meant to be weird, but Adventures of the Smart Patrol is far from the band’s best work.

Queen: The Eye

Before there was a futuristic dystopian Queen musical We will rock youthere was Queen’s futuristic dystopian CD-ROM adventure game Queen: The EyeDeveloped by one-time studio Destination Design and published by Electronic Arts, The eye spanned five CDs of games, largely because the discs were filled with remixed and remastered Queen songs.

Players of Queen: The Eye Take on the role of a man named Dubroc, a secret agent working for the all-seeing Orwellian organization known as The Eye. After discovering a treasure trove of rock music — banned by The Eye as a dangerous form of creative expression — Dubroc is sentenced to death in a Running man-style tv show known as The Arena.

Originally released in 1997, Queen: The Eye seems to have had no shortage of inspiration from Capcom’s Resident Evil. The eye places 3D character models over pre-rendered backgrounds and Dubroc moves through the game’s five domains using Resident Evil-style tank controls. Gameplay is a mix of exploration, puzzle solving, hand-to-hand combat, and some poor platforming; critics criticized the game for its dated graphics and the crammed-in Queen references.

Ed Hunter of Iron Maiden

Even metal band Iron Maiden ran for the interactive CD-ROM hills with its rail-mounted, light-gun-style shooter, Ed Jagera game that was part of the greatest hits package of the same name released in 1999. Ed Jager starred the band’s mascot Eddie, who makes his way through levels inspired by LP album covers Iron Maiden, Murderers, Peace of mind, The Number of the Beast, Life after death, Power slaveAnd Somewhere in Time.

Iron Maiden seemed quite passionate about Ed Jageras it scrapped a previous game it was working on, citing quality concerns. The British band has since released another Eddie-led game, Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beastand an Iron Maiden pinball machine via Stern.

Metallica: The Game (aka Damage Inc.)

In the early 2000s, Metallica tried a different approach for a licensed game based on its music. The band’s (failed) plan was to create an open-world competitor to Sony’s Twisted Metal series, and in 2003, along with the release of the controversial album Saint Anger, promised that Metallica: The Game came to video game consoles in 2005.

While Metallica: The Game (also known as Damage Inc.: Metallica) was cancelled shortly after the announcement, concept art and footage of an early version of the game has since been made public. Metallica’s take on car combat is said to have taken inspiration from games like Twisted metal: black And Grand Theft Auto 3and the futuristic dystopian worlds of Crazy Max And Blade RunnerThe band members — James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo — would appear in the game as drivers of heavily armored and weaponized cars.

Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style

The origin of Wu-Tang: Shaolin Stylealso known as Wu-Tang: Taste the Painare fascinating. Originally, the game that would be transformed into a Wu-Tang Clan-blessed fighting game was the controversial, extremely violent, adults-only Exciting murdera scrapped BDSM themed arena fighter.Exciting murderit is worth mentioning, originally began its development as a game based on the Mesoamerican sport Pok Ta’ Pokwhich is also notorious for its violence.) Exciting murder was almost finished and even got a doomed AO rating by the ESRB for its violence and gore, before being buried by publisher Electronic Arts.

Studio Paradox Development subsequently managed to save his work Exciting murder by revising the game as Wu-Tang: Shaolin Stylein which all nine members of the rap collective were playable in a story mode and in local multiplayer. The game retained Exciting murderthe level of violence of the Wu-Tang and each Wu-Tang member had deadly moves at the end of the match, a la Mortal Kombat. Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style received a mixed reception upon release, but we can thank the game for giving us a Wu-Tang W-shaped PlayStation Controller.