Hey, I'm Hamish and this is Writing on Games.
When I made my last video on Thumper, one thought went through my head the entire time.
Between the abstracted visuals and unsettling atmosphere, the small team wrestling their
way out of a constrictive corporate structure to pursue a purer vision of music, as well
as said team's experience in pushing boundaries in other media, that game is punk as hell.
But what does that sentiment actually mean?
Punk is seemingly one of those words that, when someone says it, you know exactly what
they're getting at and yet it's difficult to quantify.
Partly, this is because it's not a specific genre applied to a specific medium; we perhaps
most commonly associate it with aggressive music, but it has roots in all aspects of
culture from films to books, visual art and fashion.
Even then it's more than just the content of a piece of art, but how the context of
its production affects said content.
Who made it, who funded it (if there was any funding to begin with), what was the impulse
that drove its creation?
More often than not that impulse, as I see it, is one of disruption; of confronting the
way media is typically produced.
It's about realising that if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself,
then proving to everyone that you can do it yourself – regardless of wealth, resources
or even technical ability in a lot of cases; coming up with creative workarounds to whatever
problems might arise from these issues.
In doing so, you create something that might not be perfect or polished, but something
more important for the humanity or new perspective it might bring to the table.
In this regard, however, games find themselves in a weird spot.
They're maybe the most complicated artform of all; on some level, anyone can produce
a sound from a guitar, most people can write words on a page; it takes a certain degree
of technical knowhow to get even the most basic software functioning.
They incorporate visual art, music, literature as well as their own artistic language, and
so usually require teams of specialists in each field.
As such, perhaps moreso than music, games often find themselves placed firmly within
a corporate culture where production costs are inevitably higher than other art and profits
matter even more.
And given its inherently technical nature, we often view the success of a piece of software
as its ease of use and functionality, when the very nature of punk suggests some form
of lo-fi abrasiveness; of removing people from their comfort zone to get them examining
the context of a piece of art more closely.
The production framework is different for games, so where does the confrontation lie?
What makes a game punk?
Well, to begin exploring this, we can examine the works actively posited as such.
Take, for instance, the games of Suda51 – a man lauded by many (including himself) to
be the "punk" of the industry as we currently know it.
As he would explain it, making punk video games seemingly amounts to thinking outside
of the box.
As his early work shows, however, this isn't merely a catchy slogan, embracing the borderline
postmodern deconstruction of meaning some would argue lies at the heart of punk as an
attitude.
Killer7, for example, is a game I rushed out to buy having seen it advertised as some kind
of frenetic, fast-paced shooter, only to stick it in my PS2 and find a comparatively slow
adventure game where its arguably clunky combat became a strange puzzle of prioritising slow-moving
targets before sniping their weak points, all with an utterly incomprehensible narrative.
It's far from perfect, but there's also nothing like it; it's greater than the sum of its
parts and as a result also remains one of my favourite games ever made.
It all stems from Suda's team actively breaking down what he called "standardized control
schemes" in things like camera and movement and building them back up to something that
bore surface level similarities to other styles yet was utterly unique in its execution (for
example, instead of running and shooting freely like you would in most games of this style,
here movement is on rails and shooting can only happen when you stand still).
At first it might feel jarring and restrictive; but then you realise the layer of tension
added to combat scenarios as the Heaven's Smiles march creepily towards you.
Is it an adventure game?
Puzzle?
Horror?
Comedy?
You could make a valid argument for any one of them.
We typically categorise games based on their systems, camera perspective, etc.
It's something we know, something we're comfortable with.
Suda and his team clearly wanted to disrupt that on a mechanical level.
But it's not just mechanics either.
With its near-nonsensical plot, some might say Killer7 is style over substance, but even
in that one can link it to punk's more deconstructionist sensibilities.
It takes disparate chunks of anime, wrestling, Saturday morning cartoons, slasher horror,
50s greasers, etc., inelegantly slams it all together and bombards you with it all to such
an extent as to make it genuinely artful: to get you pontificating over meaning, trying
to find the throughline of this style as if it were high art, when its constituent parts
are generally deemed as lowly.
It's similar to what writer Elizabeth Wilson described in punk fashion as "trash culture
gone avant-garde;" like punk's slapdash look constructed from whatever fabric one could
find acted as a message to the fashion world's elitism, Killer7's trashy style could have
been a response to anything; the gritty, serious tone you were starting to see emerge in games
releasing at the time, the absurdity inherent to playing games, the idea that you couldn't
just slam all this stuff together because you liked it.
In a way, Killer7 pokes fun at everything around it merely by existing.
You could say the same thing about the way The Silver Case's text adventure would sometimes
cut to anime or full motion video seemingly out of the blue.
Maybe Suda just likes this stuff, and in an industry where things need to be streamlined
in order to maximise efficiency, this approach is confrontational in and of itself.
That game was produced when Grasshopper was staffed by five people, its unique windowed
style a direct result of limited resources and having team members fulfil multiple roles;
to paraphrase Penny Rimbaud of the band Crass, a bunch of people saying what they wanted
with whatever they could find.
Far from the garage band-esque roots of The Silver Case, however, Killer7 was published
by none other than Capcom as part of the infamous Capcom 5; a venture between themselves and
Nintendo to champion third-party support for the then-failing Gamecube.
The fact that, in this case, two giant companies took a chance on a small developer to ostensibly
boost sales of a console, only for said developer to produce something so aggressively weird
within this corporate framework, only serves to highlight how defiant a game Killer7 is.
Suda also suggests there was something inherently punk about Japanese games in particular, proclaiming
them the progenitors of a lot of the concepts we see in games worldwide today.
He doesn't specify what exactly made Japanese games punk outside of that, but when you consider
the canon of industry auteurs (your Hideo Kojimas, Yoko Taros and the like), it's
a statement that begins to make a bit more sense.
These people make also make games within larger corporate structures, their budgets are big,
but arguably revolutionised the way games tell their stories; whether it be through
careful cinematography or exploring player culpability through something as trivial as
the way the game handles save data, these are often aggressive statements on the nature
of player control; taking you out of your comfort zone in the same way all punk or experimental
media strives to.
In all, some might say that while punk in other artforms may have proved to be accidental
or a matter of necessity or circumstance, in games, thanks to their more expensive and
complex nature, a developer has to more deliberately examine standards of control and style, the
way other games look and feel, and use that knowledge to subvert people's expectations.
Despite Suda's work post-Killer7 in particular losing that defiant magic due to an abundance
of functional-but-disappointingly standard hack-and-slashers, it's clear that just because
games have higher costs with a higher drive for profit, doesn't stop them from occupying
the same disruptive space as punk works found in other artforms.
But that's clearly not where this discussion ends.
Outside of Japan, the obvious answer to the question "what makes a game punk" would be
the indie games scene that, while always present in some form or other, has exploded in the
last decade or so; with developers finding the means to build their own studios and,
in some cases, make some money doing it.
As I stated before, one of the key goals of punk as I see it is proving that you can do
it yourself in direct opposition to people or a system telling you you can't.
So who was it who empowered these developers to pursue their own development goals?
Who democratised the tools?
Who proved that you could?
To find out more, we have to go further back.
Take something like DOOM, one time referred to as "gaming's punk rock moment".
Now when you think of what got people talking about the game, you might imagine its time
as the poster child of controversy and moral panic in the video game industry.
When I think of what makes DOOM punk, however, I don't necessarily picture the bombast of
its violence or its bestial Satanic imagery (which, as controversial as they originally
were, read as little more than goofy fun now), it's the disruptive attitude behind its development.
Indeed, as the press release penned by the then four-person team at id Software prior
to a single line of code being written, proclaiming that it would be the best game ever would
seem to suggest, there's a distinctly punk swagger to the game's production.
They decided to release the game as a shareware title, encouraging people to copy it and share
it freely.
They made the bold move of allowing stores to sell their own boxed copies of the game
without needing to pay a cut to the team in an attempt to get people talking about it.
They released the files to the public allowing for the first real modding community.
It was true democratisation of the process, the same kind of comradery you see in all
DIY punk communities, where creators and audience on a more equal playing field; handling their
own packaging, distribution and promotion through posters and zines, bootlegging recordings
and the like, all for the sake of having people experience something they may not get through
traditional media channels, financial incentives be damned.
And given that at one point more people had DOOM installed on their computers than Windows
95, the message was clear - "if us four can do it, so can you, and here's everything you
need."
That's about as typically punk an outlook as you can get.
But the idea of video games as punk goes back even further than that, it's less typical
than that; coming not from in your face bravado and wailing guitars; instead, maybe it's a
desolate, geometric hellscape.
Maybe it's a repetitive, incessant beeping.
Indeed, the advent of British home development in the 80s was characterised by games that
are, by modern standards, rudimentary and often inscrutable.
They often saw you repeating mundane tasks like mowing the lawn or tidying up after a
party so you can get past your mum, but in order to do so would have you navigating these
surreal, stark black and grey environments littered with downright Freudian imagery of
your mother and the church and household objects floating around this indeterminate space seemingly
at random but all coming to kill you, all topped off with that specifically British
self-deprecatory humour.
What's that?
You got viciously devoured by a bunch of ants?
Well, better go back in and do better, it's not like there's anything else to do.
There's something positively bleak about it all.
It perhaps makes it difficult reading it from a modern context not to view it as some kind
of satirical representation of the cultural malaise felt by teenagers trying to both escape
from and make the best of it in Thatcher's grey, industrial Britain; dealing with the
same crisis of identity you were starting to see in the weirder, more insular lyrics
of the anarcho-punk bands of the time like Rudimentary Peni, framing the system they
were angrily fighting against as some kind of Lovecraftian beast, trying and failing
to stave off mental anguish and apathy.
But in reality, the disruptive impetus behind these games and their developers was probably
far more simple and optimistic.
With the release of home computers such as the ZX Spectrum and the Electron, companies
like Sinclair and Acorn had shifted the image of the computer from something purely technical,
industrial and inaccessible to a tool for creation and play by lowering the cost of
admission and giving aspiring developers what was at the time a comparatively high amount
of memory to work with.
Through this accessibility, there was no boundary or limit other than the imaginations of this
new groundswell of bedroom developers.
Reading stories of this style of development, a common theme you'll find is physicality.
People had to get their hands dirty almost literally building these games.
There is a struggle, a lack of automated tools to get them through it.
Sandy White, developer of Ant Attack, speaks of a heightened focus on electronics rather
than programming, of wires and written mathematics over assemblers and compilers you'd find in
later programming environments.
Matthew Smith, one of the legends of the early British software scene with his games Jet
Set Willy and Manic Miner, talks about the resourcefulness required due to system limitations
and the fear of burning images into CRT screens at the time: "you either set it underground,
where it was black, or up in space, where it was black."
And it's here we see the notion of a few dweebs starting a band with whatever they could find
being directly paralleled with the lone programmer soldering circuitry and learning the ins and
outs of the hardware as they went along.
And while sophisticated for the time, many of these games were clunky and, shall we say,
heavily influenced by what came before.
But that's what's great about them; the context of their production imbues the games with
humour and charm that goes beyond what you're actually interacting with.
All in, it's this style of development that proved you didn't need a massive studio or
wads of cash in order to create something meaningful, that resonated with people.
And if that doesn't fit some weird, arbitrary definition of what punk is, then I don't know
what does.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on punk in games - it's impossible to cover everything
in a format like this and I apologise for missing stuff out but feel free to discuss
what you think makes a game punk in the comments.
As always, these videos are made possible by your unbelievably generous support over
on Patreon, so if you want to see more of this kind larger scope video, maybe consider
donating – every pledge helps more than you can possibly know.
Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Nico Bleackley, Rob, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Spike Jones, TheNamelessGuy, Chris Wright, Dr. Motorcycle, Harry Fuertes, Ham Migas,
Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Filip Lange, Ana Pimentel,
Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Biggy Smith, Peter, Christian Konemann, Cameltraffic,
Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, I've been Hamish and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time.
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