The weirdest video games based on bands

We used to be a society that made video games starring rock bands and rap collectives in all sorts of genres. We used to have Kiss first-person shooters, Def Jam fighting games, and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

Today, the sub-genre of musician-led games barely exists; only the biggest of the biggest pop groups like BTS star in their own games anymore, and those are likely to be for mobile platforms. Musicians in console and PC games are largely relegated to appearing as Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone skins.

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

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

In 1983, Bally Midway released Journey, an arcade game based on the then-white-hot rock band of the same name. Journey (the band) was coming off the massive success of its seventh studio album, Escape, which featured classics “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Open Arms,” and “Who’s Crying Now.” (In fact, Journey already had a video game by this point, the far less memorable Journey Escape released in 1982 for the Atari 2600.)

Journey’s arcade outing set a precedent for bizarre justifications for video games based on rock bands. The conceit was that “wild alien Groupoids have seized Journey’s electro-supercharged instruments,” and the player’s mission was to guide each band member back to their gear, which had been spread across five galaxies. Collect it all and there’ll be a big Journey concert at the Galactic Stadium, where a looped cassette tape inside the arcade cabinet would play “Separate Ways” from the 1983 album Frontiers.

Journey stood out for its use of digitized graphics; the playable band members were composed of black-and-white photos of Steve Perry, Neal Schon, Steve Smith, Jonathan Cain, and Ross Valory atop tiny cartoon bodies. Now, Journey is synonymous with the thatgamecompany game of the same name from 2012.

A long time ago, Electronic Arts was a much stranger, much riskier company. In the ’90s, EA published games like Crüe Ball, a digital pinball game for Sega Genesis based on heavy metal hair band Mötley Crüe. The game was originally known as Twisted Flipper, but developers wound up securing Mötley Crüe’s blessing and ended up using artwork and music from the song “Dr. Feelgood,” the kind of shlock we listened to unironically in the late ’80s. Crüe mascot Allister Fiend adorned the box art and showed up in cutscenes.

Crüe Ball wasn’t great, and the tinny sound chip of the Genesis did Mötley Crüe’s music no favors.

While the game was at one point pitched as an arcade Jurassic Park tie-in, Midway ended up pivoting its on-rails shooter Revolution X to a game starring Aerosmith, which it 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, which is led by the leather-clad Headmistress Helga.

Revolution X tasks players with shooting scores of NON soldiers, which take various forms: as gunmen who ride on rollerblades, as ninjas, and as spear-throwing natives. In addition to its questionable cultural sensitivity, Revolution X was horny. Players freed bikini-wearing cage dancers and liberated women who had been sentenced to hard manual labor while wearing little more than denim cutoffs. All of the game’s women, from Helga to the bikini-clad hostages, were portrayed by Kerri Hoskins, the model for Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat 3.

Like another Midway-made arcade shooter, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Revolution X was designed to squeeze as many quarters out of players as possible. Completing it required not only deep pockets, but a tolerance Aerosmith’s early ’90s song catalogue.

Glam rockers Kiss went on a multimedia tear with their 1998 record Psycho Circus, which 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 cast players as members of a band named 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 on your 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 mostly served as window dressing for a very average shooter.

The mid-’90s welcomed a flood of new games built around the interactive multimedia CD-ROM. Often featuring a mix of crude early 3D graphics and full-motion video, the CD-ROM gave us puzzle classics like Myst and Riven, and spooky horror adventures The 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria. The interactive CD-ROM game trend also gave us bizarre experiments like Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol, lambasted by GameSpot upon release as “a haphazardly stuck-together collection of sounds, pictures, crude animations, and slipshod segues in want of a working plot, pointless or otherwise.”

Conceived by Devo’s Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, Adventures of the Smart Patrol sends players to a “surrealistic, Blade-Runner-on-steroids urban wasteland where disease means profits,” according to a back-of-the-box description. Their mission is to hunt down genetically engineered freak the Turkey Monkey and find a cure for the degenerative disease Osso Buco Myelitis, which will turn humans into “moaning skin-bags of pulsating ooze.” Devo is meant to be weird, but Adventures of the Smart Patrol is far from the band’s best work.

Before there was Queen’s futuristic dystopian musical We Will Rock You, there was Queen’s futuristic dystopian CD-ROM adventure game Queen: The Eye. Developed by one-and-done studio Destination Design and published by Electronic Arts, The Eye spanned five CDs worth of game, largely due to the fact that the discs were packed with remixed and remastered Queen songs.

Players of Queen: The Eye take on the role of a man named Dubroc, a secret agent who works for the all-seeing Orwellian organization known as The Eye. After Dubroc discovers a treasure trove of rock music — banned by The Eye as a dangerous form of creative expression — he 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 taken no shortage of inspiration from Capcom’s Resident Evil. The Eye overlays 3D character models on top of 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 bad platforming; critics panned the game for its dated graphics and shoehorned-in Queen references.

Even metal band Iron Maiden ran for the interactive CD-ROM hills with its on-rails, lightgun-esque shooter, Ed Hunter, a game included as part of a greatest hits package of the same name released in 1999. Ed Hunter starred the band’s mascot Eddie shooting his way through levels that were inspired by the album cover art from LPs Iron Maiden, Killers, Piece of Mind, The Number of the Beast, Live After Death, Powerslave, and Somewhere in Time.

Iron Maiden seemed pretty passionate about Ed Hunter, considering it scrapped an earlier in-development game it was working on, citing quality concerns. The British band has since released another Eddie-led game, Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast, and an Iron Maiden pinball table through Stern.

In the early aughts, Metallica tried a different approach to a licensed game based on its music. The band’s (failed) plan was to make an open-world competitor to Sony’s Twisted Metal series and in 2003, alongside the release of the contentious album St. Anger, promised that Metallica: The Game was coming to video game consoles by 2005.

While Metallica: The Game (aka Damage Inc.: Metallica) was canceled shortly after its announcement, concept art and footage of an early build of the game has been made public since. Metallica’s take on car combat was said to draw inspiration from games like Twisted Metal: Black and Grand Theft Auto 3, and the futuristic dystopian worlds of Mad Max and Blade Runner. The band members — James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo — were expected to appear in the game as drivers of heavily armored and weaponized cars.

The origins of Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style, also known as Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain, are fascinating. Originally, the game that would be transformed into a Wu-Tang Clan-blessed fighting game was the controversial, extremely violent, adults-only Thrill Kill, a scrapped BDSM-themed arena fighter. (Thrill Kill, it’s worth mentioning, originally started its development as a game based on the Mesoamerican sport Pok Ta’ Pok, which is likewise infamous for its violence.) Thrill Kill was nearly completed and even given a doomed AO rating by the ESRB for its violence and gore before it was buried by publisher Electronic Arts.

Studio Paradox Development then managed to salvage its work on Thrill Kill by overhauling the game as Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style, in which all nine members of the rap collective were playable in a story mode and in local multiplayer. The game maintained Thrill Kill’s level of violence, and each Wu-Tang member had end-of-match killing moves, à 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.