Welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach, a collaboration between musicians and mediums alike.
My plane arrives at its eerily uncharted destination by the sea. Fortunately, there isn’t an abrupt crash landing, or an Ayn Rand-inspired dystopian society to welcome me. Unfortunately, my first contact is with the insufferable likes of a dopey pelican and a suicidal seagull voiced by the lead singer of Blur.
I must be in Gorillaz territory.
Whether you’re a fan of the cartoon band Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have conceived, or are sickened by the infectious sounds they emit every five years, you have to admit their collaborative endeavours do an admirable job of bluffing a believably offbeat world.
The definition of a multimedia musical project, the Gorillaz project is ahead of the curve, at least technologically; especially in terms of live shows (or the rarity thereof). These days though, they’re simply struggling to keep abreast of their bandwidth quota:
“Due to the popularity of the new Gorillaz.com, we’ve had to temporarily put the site into maintenance mode while we upgrade our systems.”
For such a dismal nowhere place, the virtual shores of Plastic Beach have become a proverbial siren call for online tourists. One can’t really blame the downtime notices on eager visitors, considering the invitation for fresh arrivals is explicitly encouraged on the front of the eponymous (and fast-selling) new album.
None of this is necessarily new for Gorillaz. Both their self-titled debut and the Demon Days follow up each produced respective iterations of a point-and-click adventure front-end for the band’s website, along with several standalone browser games. The games were never fleshed out to the unified degree of Plastic Beach, though; friends lists, high score tables, Xbox Live-styled achievements, a relatively exhaustive virtual media player/organiser, and even future purchasable DLC are the thoughtful comforts for today’s playerbase.
In hindsight, it’s a good thing that self-professed Gorillaz leader Murdoc Niccals’ burnt Kong Studios to the ground for insurance-capitalising purposes; despite the band’s supposedly reclusive new home having attracted a fleet of disgruntled hitmen out for Niccal’s life, it … dear me, I speak of these events as if they actually took place in the Real World™. Such is the ridiculously compelling power of the Gorillaz fiction. Tightly woven between the band’s exploits as depicted in its music videos, interviews and books (et al.), what 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel have been up to lately becomes all the more enticing when it’s so resonatingly interactive. As the satanic bass player points out:
“If you look and listen to all three albums, you’ll notice that there’s an evolution, a growth and a narrative that you’d never get with any other band.”
Self-confident posturing on Niccals’ part maybe, but the virtual band’s game-heavy headquarters is impressively unique in communicating said narrative when compared to their non-fictional contemporaries.
Rarely have recording artists wholly embraced games as a viable medium to expand the texture behind their work. Traditionally, the context of a given single or album is a space exclusively explored in music videos. Sometimes, said music videos involve videogame aesthetics and iconography to charming or retro degrees. It’s any wonder they don’t take the next step and simply make them playable.
Certainly, the likes of 50 Cent, Aerosmith, KISS, Michael Jackson and the Wu-Tang Clan have left a mark on the medium to varying (low) degrees of quality. However, such games are irrelevantly-designed genre pieces, tenuously based on the licensed icons rather than the story behind the music itself. As credible as Method Man performing bloody fatality after bloody fatality is, it doesn’t say much about the basis for 36 Chambers; yes, part of the album’s charm is it’s aggressive, violent lyricism, but arguably metaphorically so.
Presumably, not every recording artist is as simultaneously experimentally flexible and believable a subject matter as Gorillaz. After all, the band is a tongue-in-cheek antithesis to manufactured pop, and the tired personalities and stories that come with such a cultural phenomena; the group’s fictional qualities are therefore wisely capitalised upon. The actual reality of celebrity stereotypes leaves little to work with narratively or interactively, beyond what sordid tales are published on the front pages of tabloids.
The National Enquirer wouldn’t last long in bowels of Plastic Beach, however. Between tentatively curing 2D’s fear of whales, coercing the assistance of the creepy maintenance man, and joining Murdoc in his quest for knowledge concerning The End Of The World As We Know It™, there’s a lot on offer — and plenty more in the months to come — to confuse the curious and please the fanatical. That is, if they’re not distracted by the curiously inaccessible domains of the island. Or the catchy atmospheric music piped into every area, courtesy of the Plastic Beach LP. Or indulging in the destructive delights of the Escape to Plastic Beach Unity-powered beta.
It (arguably unfairly) helps that there’s a level of appreciation toward videogames evident in so much of what Jamie Hewlett’s design team embeds into the artwork and ongoing story of Gorillaz. The initial draft for the band featured lead singer 2D clad in an Atari-branded t-shirt, the first of many pop cultural references that would become an aesthetic shtick; since then, there have been sly winks to everything from Xboxes and PlayStations, to the classic Game & Watch systems. If quirky character-based rhythm games such as PaRappa the Rapper, Um Jammer Lammy or Space Channel 5 hadn’t fallen out of favour, one could just as soon have expected an appropriately-themed Gorillaz take on the genre.
It’s a shame that when most people I know hear the phrase ‘browser game’ they invariably think ‘cheap’, ‘casual’ and an overall sense of a ‘waste of time’. What the Plastic Beach experience lacks in a ‘hardcore AAA epic’, it makes up for in it’s attention to detail and love for the subject matter. More than a cleverly marketed stylistic choice, the Gorillaz brand has deftly offered an alternative; the suggestion that there’s a larger collaborative mindset between recording artists and the game industry to work toward, beyond licensed rhythm games. Presumptuous possibilities perhaps, but much like Plastic Beach itself, it’s an area that begs to be explored.
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Tags: adventure games, browser games, casual games, Gorillaz, marketing, music
[...] ever before. The Lego movie games are widely recognised; Gorillaz new album Plastic Beach promoted its tie-in game world on the cover; music games continue to squeeze sales and widespread enthusiasm off the back of [...]