The Best Gaming Moments of 2009

Alex - The Beatles: Rock Band

I have a blog, a Twitter, a Flickr and a Facebook account, and of course, for work I write almost every day. Despite the volume of information generated by me, I still feel like quite a private person; these things are only the tiniest part of me. In part it’s - obviously - because writing about DirectX 11 or headphones doesn’t always lend itself towards personal expression.

Then there’s the age old difficulty of getting it right when you write, and if anything, the things I write and pictures I take are somehow less personal, less meaningful than things I read and the movies I see.

This is especially the case with the songs I hear. If I’m taking notes for a piece of writing, I’ll often end up scrawling favourite song lyrics in the margins, signposts to where I want to get to. It often feels as if my meaning is inside the song, and I need to hear it to get to what I want. Fragments of melody lodge themselves in my head, and I’ll end up needing exactly the right song to write certain paragraphs.
So it was obvious I was going to love Guitar Hero.

My housemate Phil and I played GH2 on the PS2 endlessly, taking turns to unlock all the songs and then turning on each other to try and post highest scores. One afternoon when he was out, I texted him a picture of a five-starred Sweet Child of Mine, and I left the score screen on for him to see when he got back. He responded with a deadly perfect rendition of the Pulp fiction song, Dick Dale’s Misirlou.


Given that it was a single player game (you could technically play with two guitars, but it was a curiously unsatisfactory experience), it wasn’t long before someone hypothesized that it would be cool if you could play with all the instruments rather than just the guitars. And so it came to pass, in 2007, with the release of Rock Band and Guitar Hero: World Tour.

But I didn’t get either. The games launched just after Phil and I moved out of the shared flat, and with more work than ever, a mortgage to pay, and a new house shared with a fiancée, rather than a game-loving friend, I found plenty of reasons to look the other way.

Then came the announcement of The Beatles: Rock Band and a price drop to £80, for the Beatles game and a set of wired instruments. That was that. The game is a beautifully crafted piece of work, from the intro's overview of the history of the band, to the recreated locations and studio chatter. As with Rock Band, the camerawork during the songs is excellent, both in terms of the choice of shots (a drum-heavy middle eight might get you a shot of the drummer’s foot tapping) and the psychedelic effects, where chorus and melody literally bloom like flowers.

The note charts seem exceptionally well crafted, satisfying as both impersonations of the music and as levels of a video game, challenging patterns which you need both mental and physical dexterity to negotiate, and which when cracked, yield the same explosive sense of satisfaction as a headshot or a boss kill.

Another difference between now and when I first played a plastic guitar is that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are now mainstream and popular enough for a backlash that says it’s all a bit sad. It’s grown-ups playing with toys. It’s paint-by-numbers for a new generation. Why don’t you learn guitar? Join a real band? Write your own songs?


Well, after a game of football in the park, you don’t read blog posts with snide comments about how your passing play wasn’t a patch on Argentina’s second against Serbia at the last world cup. It doesn’t happen if you play FIFA, either. If you play Tenchu, no-one says “pfft, you should just learn to become a real ninja.” If you play Mario, no-one suggests you go down to Sainsbury’s, get some mushrooms on 3-for-2 and jump on them in the carpark.

Here’s where games and music share a key similarity: while they often look very real, and borrow real situations, they’re fundamentally unreal. As Evan Eisenberg points out in his excellent book on the impact of technology on our idea of music, The Recording Angel: “the word record is misleading. Only live recordings record an event; studio recordings, which are the great majority, record nothing. Pieced together from bits of actual events, they construct an ideal event.” Likewise, however much games dress up as reality, with motion capture and painstakingly researched levels – they're not a form of reality, but rather a form of knowledge of the real world. So the only real question is whether the knowledge is useful, or, if we’re acquiring it for its own sake, if it’s fun.

Which brings me back to the question this article poses: Rock Band is a heck of a lot of fun. And as this article is supposed to be about a specific moment, here is one: my fiancée and I had another couple over for dinner and drinks. We sat around the table drinking wine talking about the price of houses, work and other fascinating topics. Being nearly 30, these are the civilized things you do.

It didn’t last long. These friends had seen the plastic Stratocaster propped up by the TV. He loved Samba Di Amigo on the Dreamcast. She had been the singer in a punk band called Toxic Slut. We abandoned the polite conversation, powered up the Xbox and became a band. It was four in the morning by the time we finished, exhausted, intoxicated and thoroughly exhilarated, having blasted through a set-list of rock classics.