(The Cartridge Lit blog.)
GoldenEye, for a generation of millennial gamers, came during the middle school/high school/college years. It’s more violent and gory, obviously, than the cute cartoony SMB3. And yet it also came out just before Columbine and just before 9/11—the sort of last moment of our collective innocence.
A number of Nintendo’s main franchises have roots in horror films. We get Mario via Donkey Kong, which is of course via King Kong. And we get Metroid via Alien: the boss Ridley is a nod to Ridley Scott; Mother Brain is analogous to Mother, the Nostromo’s onboard computer; the parallels between Samus and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are not negligible.
It’s a song of not knowing what to do with what you’ve just encountered. No matter how obviously meaningful the thing in front of you appears, there is no way you can learn its meaning. Not yet. It’s a tease, a feeling Zelda fans at least tolerate and likely love.
Ostensibly, the song is heterosexual: a female singer lusts for the opposite sex, conjuring a world of endlessly disposable dudes. But “So Many Men” in any version is so very gay, the single gayest song I’ve heard on a videogame soundtrack, which might mean I’m not playing the right games. Nevertheless, even in DDR’s 90-second sample of Me & My’s cover of Brown’s original record—whose gayness was veiled, however thinly—the song’s call to my community comes through loud and queer.
Factory songs have many influences: synth, techno, heavy metal, and industrial music. One sure progenitor of the videogame factory song is Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse,” composed in 1937 and used in Looney Tunes as early as 1943. Madcap and sinister, “Powerhouse” has become synonymous with satirical representations of industry. Most videogame factory music strikes a similar tone, though often much darker.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
