I love this little platform game, Get Home, that accompany the song “Weathervanes and Chemicals” by Norwegian band Team Me. Cunningly enough, you have to make it through before the song is over to win, which means that you (or at least I) end up listening to the song many, many times trying to jump higher and run faster. After nearly an hour I admitted to myself that I’m really not a very dexterous gamer and watched someone else play it on YouTube – and oh, how sweetly the game mechanics and narrative speak to the message of the song.
I’ve not really been following the video game accompanying new music trend. Local game company Mwahaha made a simple platform game for Eye Emma Jedi’s Lights, which is fun. As far as I was able to play it it doesn’t add a lot to the song as Get Home does, but it does have an ornamental sort of function – or maybe it should be understood more along the lines of dancing, or choreographing the audience? I have to admit, my terrible skills at platform games might mean I missed something really interesting going on on the upper levels of the game because I never reached them. Please leave me a comment if that’s the case! The creators of the Lights game also wrote a nice little post mortem about the development of the game.
A couple of years ago Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown was a great example of a personalised, engaging web experience programmed to go perfectly with a song. It was created by Chris Milk, who has a few other “experimental” projects listed on his portfolio.
Do you know of any interesting games or “online experimentations” to music that I should check out?
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Walter Iriarte
There is an older Red Hot Chilli Peppers song titled, “Californication”. It is music video that imitates a video game. However, it is not interactive.