Beatles As Video Game? Let It Be
Posted on: Thursday, 26 June 2008, 03:00 CDT
WE read the news today - actually a couple of days ago - that representatives of the Beatles are in talks to develop a Beatles- themed video game. The commercial logic is impeccable. Guitar Hero, a video game that allows you to play along with a rock band, has been a huge, unexpected hit, and a video game based on the Beatles would be a way to introduce their music to an audience whose parents had not yet been born when the band first came to America.
For fans of a certain age, those of us who literally grew up with the Beatles, the idea produces a certain sense of loss. What made the Beatles matter wasn't only the music. It was also the unfailing sense that they defined the leading edge of a culture that was genuinely ours. These video-game talks remind us that it has been nearly 40 years since that was true.
In some ways, the cultural legacy of the Beatles has been lost in the wilderness ever since the production of their last album as a working band, "Let It Be." The effort to set that legacy apart - the fact, for instance, that their music is still not available for legal download and has still not been properly remastered - feels less strategic than uncertain.
When it comes time to script this new game, we hope the developers will notice that the Beatles' two early movies, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) and "Help!" (1965), came as close to being video games as they could in an era before video games had even been thought of. Those movies embed the band's music in action that's nearly as frenetic and sweetly fun as anything a frenetic kid with a game controller could ask for. We would like to hope that it might also be about the extraordinary musical chemistry of Lennon and McCartney, those long, long hours at Abbey Road and the unreal sense of discovery and freshness that came out of that studio.
The New York Times
(c) 2008 San Gabriel Valley Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune
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