The Top 20 Music Games of All Time
God gave rock & roll to you – then he made it playable with an obnoxiously loud fake plastic guitar. Still, long before titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band ever took the video game world by storm (before suddenly crashing overnight), the interactive universe was already a hotbed for headlining acts. As seen in new book Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming‘s Greatest Hits of All Time by Rolling Stone contributor Scott Steinberg, chart-topping artists and thumb-numbing digital diversions have long enjoyed a hit-making relationship.
As with the continued success of some of the Eighties’ hottest acts, everything old eventually becomes new again. Chronicling the field’s best, worst and wildest smashes — and the rise and fall of gaming’s hardest partying genre — consider the following excerpts your backstage pass to some of virtual rock’s finest moments.
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1978 – Simon
Behind The Music: Launched on May 15 at Studio 54, this Jurassic forerunner to today’s touch-sensitive Nintendo DS featured four colored buttons and three simple variations on its gameplay. A great memory is crucial – players have to repeat back a randomized or user-created sequence of lights and tones with a simple poke. Named after the child’s game Simon Says and created by Ralph Baer – who also invented home console gaming with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 – it quickly became an American institution.
Why It Rocks: Besides single-handedly popularizing handheld electronic entertainment and directly influencing every subsequent system from the Game Boy to the PlayStation Portable (PSP), its pattern-based action formed the basis for nearly all music-themed titles to come.
Did You Know… Not only is Simon still available to buy today, but it makes regular appearances in modern pop culture too. Cartoon shows such as Dexter’s Laboratory, Family Guy and Robot Chicken have made reference to it, and Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft even has two quests where you have to play a life-size version of the game.
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1983 – Journey
Behind The Music: Riding high on 1983’s No. 2-charting Frontiers album and with spirits undoubtedly buoyed by one of the music industry’s first sponsorship deals (with Budweiser), the San Francisco balladeers were tapped by coin-operated amusement staple Bally Midway to computerize their brand of corporate rock. The setup: controlling band members with black-and-white photos for heads, the player avoids or blasts glowing alien adversaries while collecting instruments to be rewarded with an animated concert complete with a cassette player-fueled rendition of "Separate Ways." Having been named one of Game Informer magazine’s Top 10 Worst Licensed Game Ideas Ever, we can only assume editors hadn’t played Data Age’s Journey Escape for Atari 2600—released a scant year earlier, this home console counterpart, also inexplicably set in space, saw you fighting intergalactic groupies and promoters with the help of roadies in hopes of reaching your insect-like spaceship. Seriously.
Why It Rocks: Purely for permanently setting the quality bar for hard-rockin’ videogame cash-ins somewhere around Mariana Trench level, a proud tradition that’s still alive and well today (Lady Gaga Revenge, anyone?).
Did You Know… Journey was the frst ever example of a band being given its own licensed videogame—previously, only pinball tables had played host to such branding. One might argue that the title paved the way for every other band appearance, or interactive tribute (e.g. Green Day: Rock Band, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, etc.) since.
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1984 – Break Dance
Behind The Music: California Games wasn’t even a twinkle in daddy Epyx’s eyes when the company first offered Commodore 64 owners the chance to do the worm by using joystick inputs to repeat back computerized dancers’ moves.
Why It Rocks: As primitive as popping-and-locking may seem here, it nonetheless kicked open the door for game makers to shine the light on musical subcultures, not just songs (a method later to be explored in titles like B-Boy and Def Jam: Fight for New York). Besides, as rudimentary as the animation is, every move looks like you’re doing the robot.
Did You Know… The most recent game to bring breakdancing to videogames was Red Bull BC One for the Nintendo DS, which sees players drawing geometric shapes on the touch screen in order to recreate breakdance moves in one-on-one street battles. The game is licensed from the official Red Bull Breakdance Championship, which takes place every year.
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1985 – Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Behind The Music: Launched on British home computers, this offbeat adventure saw you playing mini-games, solving murders and otherwise attempting to escape life as a boring, nondescript sod on Liverpool’s streets. Admittance to the fabled Pleasuredome – your ultimate goal – came at a price though: Specifcally, having to boost your sex, war, love and religion attributes, each statistic inspired by ciphers on the dance-pop staple’s album covers.
Why It Rocks: Hailed as a classic across the pond, it helped break down barriers for independent game makers and was among the first titles to dabble with symbolism (a prelude to later offerings like Peter Gabriel’s EVE and Devo’s Adventures Of The Smart Patrol).
Did You Know… The original ZX Spectrum version of the game came packaged with an extra cassette featuring a live version of the hit single "Relax." Frankie says, “Hell yeah!”
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1987 – Otocky
Behind the Music: Released only for the Famicom Disc System in Japan, Otocky was a side-scrolling shooter that let the player fire in eight directions, with each direction producing a different note. In this way, the player could essentially become a composer and add their own beats to the background music, making the an early preface to later music creation studios such as MTV Music Generator, Traxxpad and Beaterator.
Why It Rocks: Think generative music content is a modern-day thing? Think again. While Rez gets most of the credit for allowing players to directly influence the background music through their actions, Otocky—which does exactly the same thing—predates it by 15 years.
Did You Know… The man responsible for creating Otocky, Toshio Iwai, was also behind Nintendo’s quirky music creation ‘game’ Electroplankton.
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1990 – Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Behind The Music: A "Smooth Criminal"-era arcade and Genesis title that saw the skull-faced, androgynous albino King of Pop shimmying it out with suited thugs to rescue kidnapped children, way before the concept became so ironic.
Why It Rocks: You mean apart from an inexplicable cameo by Bubbles the chimp, who turns you into a laser-spewing robot? Surprisingly enjoyable to play and featuring MJ’s direct creative input in the development, it showed that with a little TLC, even the strangest SoundScan spin-off could (gasp!) occasionally be good. It was also a forerunner for Jacko’s involvement in other games such as Space Channel 5 and the posthumously created motion-controlled dance and karaoke simulator, Michael Jackson: The Experience.
Did You Know… Jackson also turned up as an unlockable character in Midway’s boxing title Ready 2 Rumble: Round 2. Oddly, there was no dancing involved, only punching.
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1993 – Rock and Roll Racing
Behind The Music: An early collaboration between development studio Silicon & Synapse and industry legend Brian Fargo’s Interplay, this arcade racer nearly single-handedly destroyed millions of high-school GPAs. A spiritual sequel to NES cult classic R.C. Pro-Am (and a direct sequel to RPM Racing, since it was originally developed as RPMII), it featured heavily-armed miniaturized cars jockeying to outmaneuver or blow each other to bits to backing tracks like "Born To Be Wild" and "Paranoid."
Why It Rocks: As well as being among competitive multiplayer gaming’s earliest hits, its catchy blend of combat and hairpin turns made for an unexpectedly satisfying destruction derby.
Did You Know… You probably know Silicon & Synapse by a different and far more well-known name these days—it evolved into Blizzard Entertainment, the giant behind Diablo and World of Warcraft.
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1994 – Revolution X
Behind The Music: Packing a full-size machine gun in the arcade (or a SNES/Genesis/PC controller for the home version), players overthrow the fun-squashing New Order Nation regime and save Aerosmith in a series of mind-numbing shooting gallery engagements.
Why It Rocks: Educational value at best. After all, what other game teaches us the dangers of hyperbole (CDs and laserdiscs double as grenades), poor contractual negotiation (Steven Tyler’s contributions mostly include shrieks of “Don’t give uuuuupp!”) and the danger of filtering social commentary through the marketing department’s eyes (enemies are led by the sunglass and leather bustier-sporting dominatrix Headmistress Helga)?
Did You Know… The lady who played Headmistress Helga, Kerri Hoskins, also played the role of Sonya Blade in several Mortal Kombat games, as well as on the live Mortal Kombat tour.
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1997 – PaRappa the Rapper
Behind The Music: A far cry from what was going on with PCs at the time (see: bizarre adventures like Peter Gabriel’s EVE), this quirky PSOne Japanese import challenged players, as the titular paper doll pooch, to bust-a-move by pressing buttons in time to featured beats. Do it correctly and you drop mad science on onion-headed martial arts masters, moose driving instructors, Rastafarian frogs and chickens that pass for chefs. It’s still one of the freshest interactive approximations of MCing hip-hop heads will find.
Why It Rocks: PaRappa brought the "rhythm game" category home to North American shores, which eventually gave birth to countless hip-wiggling rivals from Unison to Bust-A-Groove.
Did You Know… PaRappa The Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura was previously the head of a Japanese progressive rock band (or "pop unit" as he labels it) called Psy•S. Formed in 1983, they had a number of hit records before disbanding in 1996.
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1999 – Dance Dance Revolution
Behind The Music: The arcade game that inspired a cultural revolution and pioneered active gaming over a decade before motion controls made Dance Central or Just Dance household names. Standing on a virtual dance stage, the player works up a rhythm and then steps, jumps and twists in time to floating arrow icons and J-Pop hits, hopefully performing something resembling an actual rump-shaking routine. Still a hot property even after more than a decade, new versions are hitting consoles and arcades regularly to keep the time-honored tradition of couch potato choreography going strong.
Why It Rocks: DDR has touched our society in so many ways. It inspired local and national dance competitions; muscled its way into gyms nationwide; spawned a generation of footloose tweens who could contort like pretzels at the local Dave & Buster’s but barely shoulder lean otherwise; spawned over 100 hernia-inducing sequels/spin-offs; inspired numerous rivals like Pump It Up and In the Groove; and gave us all something to gawk at. Plus, it was actually adopted by states like West Virginia as part of state PE programs to combat childhood obesity.
Did You Know… Playing DDR while holding the rear guard bar (which is there to prevent you from falling of the back of the machine) to improve balance and increase foot speed is known as "bar raping."
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2001 – Rez
Behind The Music: Enter a surreal, vector graphics representation of cyberspace and clear it of viruses by using a targeting reticle to highlight enemies and dispatch them in a psychedelic spray of colored light and shapes. Ever-present house music rounds out the experience’s peyote-tinged favor, which players can currently experience as Rez HD on the Xbox 360.
Why It Rocks: One of the earliest games obviously intended to be played under the influence, Rez’s use of synesthesia (the stimulation of various senses through a single sensory input; in this case, sound) is well documented. It also integrated support for the Trance Vibrator, a USB gizmo that shuddered and pulsed in time with the soundtrack, further prompting several fans to conduct well-publicized experiments in masturbation.
Did You Know… THQ’s de Blob (2008) on Wii similarly uses synesthesia in its gameplay; as Blob paints buildings, different colored paints create different musical effects that can be layered on top of one another when applied in sequence.
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2003 – Def Jam: Vendetta
Behind The Music: Long before hip-hop and karaoke successfully mated in Def Jam Rapstar, fighting was the genre of choice for blinged-out video game tie-ins. In Def Jam: Vendetta, rap’s premier record label unleashes its roster of living caricatures (Ludacris, DMX, Ghostface Killah et al) on unsuspecting haters in a WWE-style battle royale that goes heavy on the urban machismo. Hip-hop and you don’t stop… smashing rival MCs’ faces in with punches, roundhouses and occasional shots to the groin, that is.
Why It Rocks: Just like the far-superior sequel Def Jam: Fight For New York, Vendetta gave urban artists the perfect outlet to showcase their exuberance and outsize personalities. In keeping with the genre’s sometimes misogynistic roots, women could also fight to become your girlfriend and serve up revealing photo spreads.
Did You Know… The similarities to traditional wrestling games shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since Def Jam: Vendetta was developed by Aki—the same developer that created WCW/nWo World Tour and WWF WrestleMania 2000.
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2005 – Guitar Hero
Behind The Music: Not heard of Guitar Hero? What planet have you been living on? It’s a $2 billion franchise that’s sold over 25 million units worldwide and spawned piles of spin-offs including dedicated tributes to bands like Aerosmith and Metallica, not to mention the likes of Band Hero and DJ Hero. The series also scored chart-topping adaptations for nearly every platform from Nintendo DS to mobile phones, once enjoyed a cult-like following amongst teens and twenty-somethings and even boasts entire South Park episodes devoted to its charms. That said, the dynamo which sparked an entire industry was once just a risky, unproven gamble from RedOctane, a little-known manufacturer of dance pad peripherals and dabbler in online video game rentals.
Why It Rocks: Guitar Hero turned the nation’s youth into drooling vidiots, single-handedly built today’s fastest-growing game category and potentially helped save rock through the sale of online music. But despite being directly responsible for the last decade’s fastest-growing (and collapsing) gaming genre, the title once hailed as the music industry’s possible savior has sadly been placed on temporary hiatus by now-owner Activision. Thankfully, there’s still hope for a rebirth via online, social and downloadable platforms.
Did You Know… In a list of top grossing games published since 1995 released by NPD in March 2011, Guitar Hero 3: Legends Of Rock came out on top with life-to-date sales of $830.9 million – more than the Call of Duty games – and that’s not including revenues earned from additional downloadable content.
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2007 – Rock Band
Behind The Music: The first game to combine all aspects of the virtual music-making experience (singing, pounding drums, playing guitar or plucking bass) was also the initial offering to deliver peripherals for all (including microphone, plastic drum set and faux axe) in one kit. In total, over 100 million digital songs have been downloaded for the Rock Band family of games, with more than 2700 tracks from 900 artists including Metallica, The Ramones and Fleetwood Mac available across all retail and downloadable installments.
Why It Rocks: Providing the now-defunct MTV Games a then-marquee entrée into the gaming universe, it also laid the foundations for groundbreaking tributes (The Beatles: Rock Band), cutting-edge online innovations (Rock Band Network) and future motion-controlled games (Dance Central) to come.
Did You Know… The runaway success of Rock Band is obviously the downloadable content store, which, at its peak, was estimated to generate one million song downloads every nine days. An example of how popular it is can be seen in Motley Crüe’s Saints of Los Angeles – released as a single simultaneously on both the Rock Band Store and iTunes, first week sales were 34,000 higher in Rock Band’s favor. According to Harmonix, nearly 5 million people have downloaded songs from the Rock Band catalogue, and more than a million players still sign in each month to play the game and purchase new music.
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2008 – Tap Tap Revenge
Behind The Music: The iPhone Guitar Hero clone that spawned a dynasty, leading to tens of millions of downloads, numerous sequels for iPad and iPod touch (Linkin Park Revenge, Katy Perry Revenge, Riddim Ribbon and more) and creator Tapulous’ subsequent purchase by Disney.
Why It Rocks: Tap Tap may have been the first major beachhead in music gaming’s war to become a mobile, online and social gaming staple, and has rapidly become a torch-bearer for where the genre will potentially head going forward.
Did You Know… The very first Tap Tap game, called Tap Tap Revolution, was developed by one person—Nate True—in just two days and was created independently from Apple’s iPhone development kit, meaning only people who’d jailbroken their phones could play it.
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2009 – The Beatles: Rock Band
Behind The Music: A groundbreaking collaboration between music channel MTV, leading developer Harmonix, Apple Corps and surviving members of the Beatles camp (including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison’s wife and son Olivia and Dani, and Yoko Ono), this was to be interactive entertainment’s Abbey Road. Sadly, despite launching to widespread critical acclaim and sporting dizzying production values, family-friendly play and dozens of definitive, career-spanning songs from "A Hard Day’s Night" to "Can’t Buy Me Love," it struggled to go multiplatinum. Developer Harmonix had hoped to single-handedly grow the size of the music game market with it, but it failed to move both Baby Boomers and Gen X/Yers en masse compared with previous titles.
Why It Rocks: It’s the ultimate tribute, packed full of loving care and attention – there are previously unheard studio asides of the boys talking before many of the tracks, and each song has its own unique setting that just screams the Beatles style from the time. It was also the first Rock Band title to introduce three-way harmonies on the vocals and, if you were so inclined, you could use the built-in drum trainer to learn just how Ringo managed to do the things he do… er, did.
Did You Know… Ringo Starr’s unique drumming ability was made possible thanks to the fact that he’s ambidextrous. If you’re not, consider the Expert drums of The Beatles: Rock Band off-limits… unless you like failure, of course.
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2009 – DJ Hero
Behind The Music: Never has the phrase "spin-off" been more apt – DJ Hero took the foundations laid by Guitar Hero and applied them to the art of the disc jockey. Nearly 100 remixes, mash-ups and other tracks brought multiple tunes together, with players having to push buttons, move a cross-fader and scratch the custom-made plastic turntable controller in order to score points.
Why It Rocks: Besides taking a successful formula and doing something interesting with it, you can now pick up a full controller with the original game (or even the sequel) for less than a third of what it originally retailed for. Thanks to the franchise failing to do anywhere near as well as Activision hoped – a problem it blamed on the sagging music game market, not on the fact that it had managed to create yet another $100+ product for people to buy – anyone with a bit of shop savvy can find the entire package for hardly any money these days.
Did You Know… Despite sales falling well short of what Activision expected, the publisher still claimed that DJ Hero was the highest grossing new intellectual property (IP) of 2009. Of course, when your game’s selling for $120 a pop, that’s not surprising.
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2009 – Just Dance
Behind The Music: Family-friendly gameplay, idiot-proof controls and an innocuous "best of "-style pop/dance soundtrack propelled what’s otherwise a critically-panned dancing simulation (average Metacritic rating: 49 out of 100) for the Wii’s gesture-tracking remote to household name status.
Why It Rocks: Shockingly, its 4.3 million-strong sales – a testament to the power of suburbia’s fascination with Top 40 radio and harmless hip-waggling fun – have made it the second-highest selling Wii game not published by Nintendo. Top honors are reserved for its 5 million-selling 2010 sequel, Just Dance 2, with Ubisoft planning to get its money’s worth from the franchise for many years to come. Just Dance 3 is (non-shocker) set to arrive this holiday season.
Did You Know… The game that suffered the utter humiliation of being knocked from the top of the chart by Just Dance? That would be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which had previously been at number one for nine weeks. Oh, the humanity.
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2010 – Michael Jackson: The Experience
Behind The Music: Ever wanted to dance like Michael Jackson? Well, Michael Jackson: The Experience offered the chance to do so… or, at least, pretend that you could before failing miserably. How you did that, of course, depended on the format you played it on – Wii players used the Wii Remote, a la Just Dance, to match on-screen movement, while those using the PlayStation Move or Kinect could have their whole bodies tracked to prove just how unlike Jacko their movements were.
Why It Rocks: As posthumous releases go, Ubisoft’s hybrid karaoke and dancing simulator was as cynical as it was accomplished, racking up over three million sales worldwide simply because that’s what happens when someone famous that people love passes on. Still, you can’t knock those figures: That’s a lot of balding middle-aged managers trying to recapture their youth and master moonwalking.
Did You Know… Early versions of the game shipped with a faux-diamond studded glove just like the one Jackson famously wore on stage at Motown’s 25th anniversary event in 1983. Tasteful.
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2011 – Rocksmith
Behind The Music: Looks like Ubisoft didn’t get the memo about games utilizing hefty peripherals being supposedly dead in the water: The soon to be released Rocksmith takes the opposite approach, as a music game that’s only playable using real guitars. And yes, we mean the real McCoy; not some pointless piece of plastic styled up to resemble an actual axe, but literally ANY real guitar with a standard quarter-inch jack on the end.
Why It Rocks: Supposedly, Rocksmith automatically adjusts to the player’s skill level, thereby acting as a guitar teacher by offering up challenges appropriate to your actual talent. It sounds great in theory, but whether it works in practice is another matter – the final product has yet to ship, giving you a chance to prep in the meantime as millions traditionally have before, e.g. twanging away poorly to Led Zeppelin covers.
Did You Know… Contrary to Ubisoft’s claims, Rocksmith isn’t the first game capable of using real instruments to interact with the music – that honor went to Power Gig in 2010. You'll find that one in Music Games Rock's "Worst Music Games" section.