Back in its wildly experimental period, Sony games asked Masaya Matsuura, the mind behind the legendary Japanese pop band PSY.S, to make a video game. The video game he made was PaRappa the Rapper, a wildly original idea that originated the rhythm game genre. And if you know that, you might also know that the band Journey was involved in the making of its own game, Journey:Escape for the Atari 2600. Here’s more from CDM:
Believe it or not, Journey signed off on not one but two game versions of themselves in the early 80s – 1982’s Atari 2600 title from mighty developer Data Age, and then an unrelated 1983 arcade cabinetfrom Bally Midway that even had digitized band member images.
But the Data Age title was next-level even by the hit-or-miss standards of early home Atari titles. There’s so much to unpack here. Why does the band manager look like the Kool-Aid man? How are you even supposed to get through the game play? (It’s both brutally confusing and brutally difficult.) What… is the music that’s playing? (It isn’t Journey, because of course it’s not – they contribute only one recognizable snippet on the title screen, and then you’re in some very abstract Atari sound world.)
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