Grand Theft Auto

[Blackdown]

how old are you Martin? you always seem strangely insulated from the world you live in. the only times i've seen you i've been reeling drunk but you look my age if not younger. surely you played streetfighter as a kid?

well fucking thanks for that luka, i've built a blog about going out and interviewing people beyond "my world" so thanks for the par.

but no i havent played streetfighter, beyond about the age of 14 computer games dropped off my radar, as music crept in. i quite like them but they never grabbed me.

 

[scottdisco]

anecdotal:

my cousin who recently turned 18 has loads of mates in the 15/16 to 18 bracket, and loads of them are well into the GTA series, it's a proper musical education for them.

 

[luka]

ah nah, not in a bad way, just in an intriguing way. i've just noted a couple of instances where you seem to have just discovered something which i would have assumed would be in the blood of a londoner of my age (29). eg, streetfighter 2 which came out when i was 11 and was the most played game around by a long way. (before console days remember) i just wondered why. and you're being modest i think. you seem to have built a career not a blog....

 

[Corpsey]

When I was into video games at school it was still seen as quite a nerdy/niche thing I think, it certainly wasn't a case of everyone owning a console. I lost interest in them quite a while ago, mainly because I wanted to spend all my money on music and weed/beer, and in that time they've become so ubiquitous... And there seem to be a lot more games slanted towards 'realism' (Call of Duty.. even GTA, allowing for its surreal humour, constant pop culture referencing etc.), which I suppose has made them seem more like credible alternatives to films (although again, a while ago realistic war games would have been seen strictly as geek-bait).

I wonder how this transition came about? The game which seemed to hook most people in around me was Pro Evo, which is still surely the game with least geeky associations... Anyway, having recently become addicted to a mate's copy of Gears of War 2, I think I'm going to get back into them.

Sorry I haven't addressed your question at all...

 

[owengriffiths]

I wonder how this transition came about? The game which seemed to hook most people in around me was Pro Evo, which is still surely the game with least geeky associations...

Everyone has a geeky part to them, everyone has a geeks obsessive knowledge of at least 1 subject. for most here it would be music. I'd say that football is pretty geeky. And for computer games, sports titles are the only type of game that has new editions released every year which are 90% the same as the last, and yet are still lapped up by the public

 

[owengriffiths]

i think a lot of otherwise inexplicable phenomena can be explained by this game. temps t's flat top

that hair cut is alot!

 

[hint]

I wonder how this transition came about? The game which seemed to hook most people in around me was Pro Evo, which is still surely the game with least geeky associations...

The ball started rolling with Wipeout on the original Playstation I think. It featured Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers on the soundtrack and Designers Republic artwork. Tomb Raider was also a turning point - Lara Croft was a game icon that wasn't a little cartoony sprite like Sonic or Mario.

Sony aggressively pushed the console in nightclubs and manufactured the current market for older gamers - people who perhaps played on a Megadrive or NES when they were young but stopped when drinking / going out became an option. The secret was making it socially acceptable to be a gamer beyond the age of 18 I think. Could never have happened if games still looked like Super Mario World, of course.

If you play something like Call Of Duty online on the Xbox now it very quickly becomes clear how much gaming has crossed over. Usually feels / sounds like you're playing against the meathead high school wrestling team rather than the nerdy Dungeons and Dragons club. It's just another competitive sport these days.

 

[Corpsey]

Everyone has a geeky part to them, everyone has a geeks obsessive knowledge of at least 1 subject. for most here it would be music. I'd say that football is pretty geeky. And for computer games, sports titles are the only type of game that has new editions released every year which are 90% the same as the last, and yet are still lapped up by the public

You're absolutely right about football - the number of hours I've spent in pubs silently listening in complete bemusement to intricate conversations about malaysian transfer windows and the entropic principles of offside throw-ins etc...

But football has always been a socially acceptable thing to be a geek about, hasn't it? I suppose it has its negative stereotypes (skinhead with a swastika cut into the top of his pie) but it seemed to me when I was into video games that people who were into them were seen as being antisocial hermits who were in all likelihood unable to spot their own nose amidst the pimples.

But, you know - kids nowadays, with their bloody square-eyes and rectangular faces.

 

[Corpsey]

hint - I'd forgotten about how the Playstation was marketed as being edgy and cool. I suppose the Lara Croft thing fed into the men's magazines/lad culture acceptance of video games generally as well...

I suppose the massive popularity of video games, and of the huge arguments people seem to be constantly having about which console is best, is also linked to the same sense of one-upmanship that motivates people in pubs to get out their absurdly sophisticated phones and start waving them in front of my face, yelling ''look! it can whistle! You can feed it grapes''

 

[owengriffiths]

Sony were smart to properly market games to the over 20's. It's a bit strange for me as although I started in the Nes/ Mega Drive era, I was only 12 when the Playstation came out. So I missed that stage where once you discovered booze you put down the joypad. In fact booze & games make for a good combination it's hard to think that those born in the late 70's were so slow to realise this that Sony had to install playstations in Ministry of Sound & Miss Moneypennys to remind them.

Another grime videogame lyric for Blackdown:

everybody wants to look at my pad,
I'm not talking about Mario Kart, its the music game, blood are you mad?

 

[Corpsey]

There's been a thread on here about video games influencing music...

Here it is: http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=1883&highlight=video+games

One interesting thing about this is that eventually those who make music influenced by video game soundtracks won't be drawing on the simple/cheesy (but great) music of Sonic 2/Mario etc., but on the soundtracks of modern games - which I suspect are mainly divided between pop/electronic music ala GTA and grandiose orchestral music ala Halo. So there will come a time where music which explicitly draws on 8/16 bit games will lose that association for new listeners... in fact, I suppose that's already happening.

 

[zhao]

to me the phenomenon noted in this thread is indicative of a possible future where the different media that we know converge into new hybrid experiences/commodities. commodities which embody the various creative disciplines of the past. after all, that's what films are (literature, painting, photography, music), and of course video games.

commodities that will certainly be more interactive, and hopefully more generative as Eno outlined (no song sounds the same twice, etc.).

are there any histories of media along these lines of hybridization? Virilio's amazing account of the history of seeing -- The Vision Machine, comes to mind.

 

[owengriffiths]

What people often forget about the Playstation is that their first year of advertising was fucking lacklustre. There were some stupid TV adverts that 'appealed' to the traditional 8-14 gaming market- I think it was called Society Against Playstation, it was a dire concept which had the odd bit of slapstick in it. It was many years before they got david Lynch to do the ads

Then they caught on to this idea that having a Playstation was as essential a purchase as having a video player under your TV. It wasnt a new concept either considering as the Nes was probably installed in just as many homes as the Playsation was in the 90's. But it was done in a more sophisticated way. it's significant that the Playstation era was the first to have game on CD's, a format a lot 'cooler' than cartridges & tapes, also associating the console with music. They reinforced this with the second console, which looked more like a hi-fi seperate than a games machine.

 

[4linehaiku]

i also think there's a tech question here too. isnt it the case that you cant easily crack/download computer games? whereas MP3s are everywhere. Surely when games do become easier to download than buy, these mega-sales figures will fall. that doesnt mean their influence will fall, as people will still play them, but their revenue might - and games arent something small indie players make and sell for small units (like music...).

I'm afraid that's totally wrong, a glimpse at any of your favourite bittorrent trackers will reveal a top 100 downloads list stuffed with recent blockbusters and new games in nearly equal measure. Even consoles can be modded in various ways to accept downloaded games (at least the last generation could, not sure about xbox 360 / PS3 but if you can't do it yet you will be able to soon). Cracking computer games probably goes back as far as home taping.

Not got a massive amount to add, as I have never really been into games at all, a childhood with no consoles and then later the family computer being a mac has resulted in a major lack of nostalgia for them. I live in a student flat though and we have about 5 consoles under the TV so score one for ubiquity I suppose. Oh and one flatmate actually has one of the GTA soundtracks on (illegally downloaded of course) MP3. Not sure how much it's influenced his taste though.

 

[CHAOTROPIC]

The ball started rolling with Wipeout on the original Playstation I think. It featured Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers on the soundtrack and Designers Republic artwork. Tomb Raider was also a turning point - Lara Croft was a game icon that wasn't a little cartoony sprite like Sonic or Mario.

(Revealing my age) I remember the Bitmap Brothers using a Bomb the Bass remix of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 for Xenon 2: Megablast on the ST in 1989, then using John Foxx to do the music for Gods a couple of years later.

Flashback!!

They were the first coders to try & brand themselves as anything other than faceless geeks or maths geniuses (dark sunglasses & black leather jackets: coolest of the cool ) and their games were the first I'd seen that seemed to consciously tap into the huge ST & Amiga demo & electronic music scenes.

 

[Amplesamples]

Yeah I remember Bitmap Brothers. If you remember Magic Pockets, you'll remember the music was basically a Betty Boo instrumental here.


As for cracks not being easy available, cracked computer games have been around far, far longer than MP3s. At school people used to use a program called X-Copy on the Amiga to copy cracked discs, kids used to swap them like football stickers (look at this for an example)

See here how they used to advertise state of the art computers in the 1980s. Awful!

 

[benjybars]

but no i havent played streetfighter,

What?!?!?

you've never played street fighter?!? how?

 

[IdleRich]

"(Revealing my age) I remember the Bitmap Brothers using a Bomb the Bass remix of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 for Xenon 2: Megablast on the ST in 1989, then using John Foxx to do the music for Gods a couple of years later."

I was just about to mention the Bitmap Brothers. All their games had noteworthy music I think or at least attempted to.

"And for computer games, sports titles are the only type of game that has new editions released every year which are 90% the same as the last, and yet are still lapped up by the public."

Yeah, it's weird that. My brothers have playstations or something and I really only see them once a year at Christmas when they have the new football game and it will always be indistinguishable from the last one (to me). I'll question this and they will describe some minute difference but really it's incredible that EA can get away with such minor tweaks. I guess every time they think up two improvements they reason that there is no point in putting both of them in the next game as people will buy it if it only has one and they can put the other difference in the new game the folllowing year.

GTA has a new level of popularity amongst adults though. I know someone who was taking a week off work recently and when I asked what he was up to he said he was taking it to coincide with the latest version coming out so he could play that all day for a week (or was it two?).

 

[luka]

there is always one big change, year to year, in football games and if you can't work out what it is and why its important then there's no hope for you.

 

[Corpsey]

It's the number after the title, innit?