As hip-hop continues to conquer the charts–last year’s best-selling artists were rappers Eminem and Nelly, and 2003 has already been dominated by newcomer 50 Cent–more videogame publishers are looking to give their titles extra flava by bringing the two worlds together. Sony Computer Entertainment America used hip-hop tracks from Run-DMC and Roxanne Shante for its recent music-remixing game, Amplitude. Rockstar Games’ just-released street-racing game, Midnight Club II, features underground hip-hop from artists like Tony Touch and Masta Ace. But no one’s embraced the trend more than EA. In April, EA released Def Jam Vendetta, which includes 12 of Def Jam’s top recording artists–not just as performers on a soundtrack, but as characters in a game. EA is following it up with NBA Street Vol. 2, a basketball game steeped in urban culture, from graffiti-inspired art to a hip-hop soundtrack, with artists beyond those signed to Def Jam.
Anyone who’s glanced at a game on the PlayStation, Xbox or Gamecube knows videogames have come a long way since Pong. “Music always lagged behind the gameplay and the story,” says Rockstar Games COO Terry Donovan, whose Grand Theft Auto franchise has been No. 1 for the past two years. “It was only in the PlayStation era that people started to think of music as a possibility and eventually as a priority.” During the heyday of the original PlayStation, 1995 to 2000, that meant either orchestral scores for games like Final Fantasy VII or a melange of rock and rap for titles like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. And when PlayStation 2 launched in 2000, electronica soundtracks dominated early games like Rockstar Games’ racing title Midnight Club and EA’s snowboarding game SSX. That was largely because electronica tracks, which generally have no vocals, are simpler for a developer’s in-house composers to create.
But when the overuse of electronica produced a string of games that sounded the same, a handful of brave folks started switching over to rap. When C. J. Connoy in 1999 joined 989 Sports, a division of Sony’s PlayStation group, he switched the intro music from funk to classic ’80s hip-hop: songs like Eric B. and Rakim’s “I Ain’t No Joke” and Kool Moe Dee’s “I Go to Work.” “The songs we chose are proclamations of who our players want to be,” says Connoy. Donovan and his partner Sam Houser at Rockstar Games were no strangers to hip-hop, having licensed 10 tracks from the underground rap label Game Recordings for their 2001 smash, Grand Theft Auto 3. But for last year’s follow-up, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Donovan and Houser went retro for the game’s nine-hour soundtrack, using 60 minutes of standards by hip-hop pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow to reflect the game’s ’80s setting. “We couldn’t capture the ’80s without delivering the anthems,” says Donovan. “This is not a marketing tool–it’s a production tool.”
For EA, it’s both. When Schnur joined EA in January 2002, the company had already formed alliances with rappers like Xzibit and Ludacris when they were unknowns. But Schnur, who had risen from a founding employee at MTV to a senior VP at Capitol Records, brought with him an entrepreneurial flair. He formalized in-game music under the name EA Trax, complete with captions to identify the artist, song title and record label for a few seconds whenever a song began to play, just like MTV does with videos. And each copy of last year’s NBA Live included a promotional CD with music from that game. That may not sound like much, but for a record industry desperate to find new ways to publicize its acts amid declining sales and the scourge of file-sharing, Schnur’s moves were proof that someone in the game industry could speak its language. “The music business is in a state of emergency,” says Def Jam president Kevin Liles, citing projections that the game business will grow faster than music or movies. “We’re not a music company, we’re a lifestyle company. Music is just one of the products we sell.”
EA isn’t looking to hip-hop culture just for new concepts, but to revitalize old ones. The company’s 2001 game, NBA Street, had been an enormous hit, but the game’s producer believes it had only scratched the surface. “The first NBA Street was five white guys in Canada making a videogame,” says producer Wil Mozell. “This time, we wanted something relevant and credible, and we knew we couldn’t do it alone.” Since NBA Street Vol. 2 centers around today’s players going against stars of yesteryear, Schnur and Mozell sought not only contemporary tracks from artists like Nelly and Jay-Z, but hip-hop tracks from the early ’90s by Black Sheep and Leaders of the New School. The quest for authenticity went beyond music. Mozell brought in advertising executive Jimmy Smith, who’s long worked on Nike’s ads, as the game’s creative director. Smith pushed for New York City DJ Bobbito Garcia as the game’s announcer. “He actually calls basketball games,” says Smith of Garcia. “He knows New York basketball culture, street culture and hip-hop culture. He gives it that stamp of cool.”
Trends come and go, and EA is smart enough not to place all its eggs in the rap basket. Non-hip-hop artists featured in recent and upcoming EA games range from party rocker Andrew W.K. to punk rockers the Donnas. But Schnur is convinced hip-hop is here to stay. “We’ll take hip-hop deeper into our games, into places where we may have just used rock in the past.” The future of games–and hip-hop– never sounded quite so bright.
