Is everyone loving The Beatles: Rock Band? In this new age of lifelike mo-cap, crisp digital audio and video games being more mainstream than ever, we’re finally seeing the most famous rock gods and musical heroes take to the polygonal stage in games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. However, slapping a celebrity musician’s face on the box of your shiny new game isn’t actually that novel; in fact, since Journey Escape on the Atari 2600, every notable band from Aerosmith and Queen to Kris Kross and INXS has graced the world of videogames in a vain attempt to shift copies. Heck, there was even another Beatles game, long before Harmonix entered the scene.
Above: Just the tip of the musical iceberg
We’ve already given you theworst music-themed games of all time, but here are the weirdest psychedelic first-person puzzlers, text adventures and full-motion video games we could dig up.
For the first, and last, game from Number 9 Software, programmer Gary Marsh dreamt up a way to combine his two most passionate hobbies: legendary British rock/pop band The Beatles, and obscure Commodore 64 text adventures.
The love child from this sordid relationship? A piece of interactive fiction comprised almost entirely of Beatles lyrics. “You can see a young girl, about seventeen (you know what I mean). The way she looks is way beyond compare.” We’re not making this up; the game’s descriptions are pieced together from the Liverpudlians’ entire back catalogue.
To make matters worse, Number 9 wasn’t concerned with confusing the crap out of you by replacing “you can’t do that” style messages with a cryptic “Goo Goo G’Joob?,” and a plea for help gives the eternally unhelpful reply, “You'll get by with a little help from your friends.”
The Fab Four dropped a few members for the Paul McCartney-masterminded film Give My Regards to Broad Street. In the movie, Paul chases a seedy crook that’s pinched his next album’s master recordings, only to find that the thief’s accidentally locked himself in a shed. It flopped.
In the game, however, you drive a car around a very green version of London (it’s changed a lot since the ‘80s, we guess), trying to figure out which tube stations your band members will emerge from, so you can rerecord the album’s first single, No More Lonely Nights. It probably flopped.
In its defence, it did reproduce a pretty snazzy version of Wings’ ‘Band on the Run’ via the Commodore’s sound chip, and getting your car clamped for parking too long should totally be a feature in Grand Theft Auto V.
