REDUCE & INTENSIFY

It is no overstatement to say that the debut album Scum by the British band Napalm Death is as radical a piece of art as anything produced by Karlheinz Stockhausen. 

In a sense, they ‘finished’ music.  With the intention to reduce and intensify, they stripped from rock music everything they deemed unnecessary, such as structure, verse, chorus, solo, melody, groove and rhythm. 

They played with such speed and intensity that they crushed their songs into the most powerful, immediate and urgent blasts of extreme sound. 

How could a video game feel like this ? 

After watching back our first play test videos, I immediately notice how the sound quality degenerates, decays, distorts, and decomposes over the course of a play through. I have no idea what could be technically causing this, but I love it. It feels as if the tiny speakers in the computer are being pushed to their absolute limits. Sonically It becomes a broken, cacophonous sludge, sporadically punctuated by terrifyingly blown out blast beats. Mission (perhaps accidentally) accomplished.

At the same time, things are boding well on the graphical front. Backgrounds are short , looping, bleak and brutal. The player jumps immediately and unceremoniously from one stage to the next. Surviving obstacles and enemy sprites exit the playfield abruptly, and without unnecessary animations. Every rough and raw edge is painfully exposed. 

And, of course, this is not enough. It won’t do to simply make a game that looks and sounds like Scum. It must feel like Scum.

Much like how (hypothetical but possibly existing) Batman Kart and Paw Patrol Racers  may be differently skinned versions of one game. There is really Nothing Batmanny or Paw Patrolly going on in either. They function indistinguishably, much like their bedspread, backpack and lunchbox counterparts.

Hard-core arcade players talk about ‘playing close to the code’. Well, in this case, you can virtually see the code. Like jagged lines of script poking through the background. It feels as if the game is made up of loose connections of code and is entirely held together with gaffers tape.

SCUM is at the very core of every anachronistic decision in the games design.  Shmups are hard-core by nature. How can we reduce and intensify them further ?