Rockstar announce a new slew of games, including the promised new version of Grand Theft Auto for the PSP. Also, with an eye perpetually trained on riling Middle England, their new game Bully. Any gossip on that?
Possibly more of interest – to me anyway – is the announcement that they are making a videogame version of the classic early 80s NYC movie, The Warriors, which I speculated about this time last year.
Looking back, I suggested that Rockstar now had an urban form it could ‘re-skin’ for numerous different games.
“Rockstar and others have virtually (pun intended) built the digital infrastructure to generate generic large city forms. All they have to do is drape a particular cultural fabric over it, and the architecture, clothes, music, adverts etc. all just fall into place” [Video Game Flâneur]
And looking at the screenshots on the currently basic Warriors promo site, it would seem that the mis-en-scene is indeed a remix of the dystopia fantasy devised for GTA and Manhunt.
As those games were in turn based on the imaginary cities conjured up by films like The Warriors, it’s no surprise we’re in this increasingly rich symbiotic swirl of fictional cities and histories. Leaving aside the ‘video game flaneur’ aspects, I’m intrigued to find out how good the game will be – whether it’ll capture the sense of ‘broken city’ so evident in the movie (and others of the same time, like Downtown 81, Escape from New York etc), the great sense of an ‘alien’ fashion and music emerging, and yes, the campness of the whole thing too 🙂
Either way, again Rockstar seem streets ahead in terms of building a platform for city-based gaming.
City of Sound 
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