Super Combo

When I was a kid, videogames excited me tremendously. The possibilities. In 1996, anything seemed possible - Nintendo were promising 3D worlds that lived and breathed, as well as connectivity and crossover with the Gameboy (having just received a new, chubby-inducing upgrade into the Gameboy Pocket). Games were poised to become alive and mutable - why, my new NiGHTS game had little conehead dudes who lived in the gameworld and could crossbreed with mutants. Videogames were coming to life, breaking free and becoming plastic.

Then there was Quake.  If you’re in the UK, you may remember CVG, as well as CVG’s legendary hyper-excited enthusiasm for new things, albeit at the cost of content and accuracy. CVG hyped Quake to the extreme, talking about how it contained it’s own programing language (Ed “Pinky” Lomas coded his own sniper scope) as well as an unprecedented level of user modification. Some of this was hyperbole (the “programming language” was the console, a way to modify switches and settings in the guts of the game) but some of it wasn’t - CVG told tales of mods that let you play as monsters, mods that let you explode, mods that added pilotable vehicles. When you’re 13, this sort of thing fires the imagination.

It’s 2009. I’m getting old and I just got Quake, courtesy of the Steam sale. User modification is everywhere, synchronization between consoles is widespread and the living world has become not so much a feature as a genre, but there’s still something about Quake. Birthed as an oddball compromise between three creators, Quake somehow emerged a pure videogame, even more so than spiritual predecessor Doom. It’s got little or no pretensions towards plot beyond a few Lovecraftian overtones, open, abstract design and powerups that float spinning in the air. All of the interesting, intriguing stuff that made videogames grand is alive in Quake, even if it’s been rejected by the development world at large in favour of more realism.

Quake is a blank canvas, dying to be smashed up, modded and rebuilt from the guts up. It’s dying for new weapons, new maps and new mechanics. Unfortunately it debuted in a time when online storage and distribution was patchy and haphazard, and the mod teams moved on to other engines, like Half Life (itself a kind of relative to Quake by way of licensed code).

This shit won’t stand. Quake is still awesome, too awesome to be relegated to the shitcan of history. I’m going to find these mods, I’m going to write about them and I’m going to let you download them and play with them too. These are my adventures with Quake.

Next: Quake on the modern machine

I originally wrote this piece for Tim Roger’s Action Button venture in April of 2007.  The first draft was bashed out in a haze of sleep deprivation and haste since I wasn’t really too into professionalism or redrafting or anything sane like that back then. I’ve taken this opportunity to make some edits and corrections. Most of my AB.net reviews were fairly caustic and I’m not sure if I’m proud of them now, but I still think this one gets to the heart of why I really like the game.

What makes games timeless? This is a business of building simulations, not making recordings or statements of the world around us. A song bashed out with fire, heat and a four track recorder in somebody’s basement will still retain enough of that primal excitement to square up to the bleeding edge of big budget production twenty years later. Conversely, the games of decades past are - largely, not entirely - running into a whole battery of problems only the most hardened of retro survivalists can ignore. What was beautiful once becomes embarrassingly unsightly or worse, forgettable. Twenty years from now the vast majority of Xbox 360 and PS3 titles will have merged into some kind of dreary bloom-drenched homogenate.

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According to one of my more addled friends italo disco is “zeitgeist” now, so what better time to talk about Den Harrow?

Italo Disco is fairly unknown outside of Europe. The conceptual bridge between what was American disco and what would become eurobeat, italo consists largely of futuristic synth-laden dance fronted by pretty boys and pretty girls singing in a language that was not their own. While groups like Laserdance toned down the overt pop elements to create mindbending club music, the majority of Italo is roughly analogous to 2 Unlimited and their early 90s ilk - studio projects with puppet fronts. It is as camp as Christmas and completely fucking brilliant.

Fronted by unsettling Jason Donovan lookalike Stefano Zandri , the Den Harrow project rode this wave of blow and hairspray like kings, notching up hits with titles like “Bad Boy” “Catch the Fox” and “Future Brain”.

Zandri wasn’t merely groomed - foreshadowing infamous non-talents Milli Vanilli, he was hired to lip-sync over studio artists (usually the vocals of one Tom Hooker Beacher), pouting seductively on the sleeve art to sell albums and moisten quims. Scandal! So far, so Wikipedia. What Wikipedia can’t impart is the sheer batshit insanity of the “Future Brain” video which, well, see for yourself:

Manslaughter, forced aging, mind control, cloned sex slaves and time loops - “Future Brain” is like every hateful Marvel Comics fetish rolled into one terrifying Cronenburg-esque narrative.