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Jeff Gerstmann
Executive Editor, Video Games
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Now Playing: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (PC), Tekken 4
Bad 16-Bit Sega Products That Never Shipped: Sega VR, Virtual VCR: Prince (Sega CD), Cool World (Sega CD)
A Sega CD Game That Never Shipped That I Wish I Had A Copy Of: Penn & Teller's Smoke & Mirrors
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1992. It's hard to believe it, but unless my math is incorrect, 1992 was, like, 10 years ago. While it's feasible to look back at the best games to come out in the 16-bit era of the early '90s and conclude that maybe games really were better back then, it's even easier to put that theory into check with a few well-placed pokes into the seedy underbelly of gaming past. So before you start telling your friends that you're going to abandon the current generation and go play Gaiares for the next four years, I have three words for you: Make My Video.
On paper, Sega's Make Your Own Music Video series must have seemed like a no-brainer: give kids the power to edit their own versions of popular artists' music videos. The artists themselves could get involved, and hey, surely there must be loads of extra footage from the video shoot that wasn't used in the video, right? But there were two key flaws to this plan. First of all, if I remember correctly, video directors from that era were pretty efficient and never really shot a lot of extra footage. Secondly, why in the heck would any musician (other than Billy Idol--that wacky cyberpunk) want to affiliate themselves with some fledgling little movement like multimedia? Back then, it was just a buzzword, and back then, games were big business--but hardly the mainstream phenomenon they're rapidly becoming today. So Sega and the series' developers, Digital Pictures, were left with nine music videos, a mess of lame stock footage, and a basic premise for a game.
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M-M-Make My Videoski! |
Four of the games made it to shelves. The games featured songs from Kris Kross, C&C Music Factory, INXS, and Marky Mark. Of those four games, only the Marky Mark game featured any actual participation from the artist, though that was limited to Marky popping up whenever you'd pick the girls level to say "M-M-Make My Videoski! Peace, I'm out like shout!" or "The video was pha-pha-pha-phat! The video was phat!" The rest of the nonmusic footage was shot with unknowns, and the basic premise consisted of people bickering about how they could make a better video for any of the given songs. Seth Green appeared in the Marky Mark game.
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This is--and I use this term loosely--gameplay. |
The game consisted of listening to the actors' instructions and carrying them out. Sometimes they'd want to see lots of water...but nooooooo monkeys! Other times they'd just show five shots and demand that they be in the edited video. Once instructed, the video would start playing. You had access to three different video sources at any given time. One was the actual music video. The other two had all sorts of lame stock footage, ranging from generic old cartoons to '50s beach scenes. You could also turn on all sorts of color wipe-and-wash effects, though given the Sega CD's already sketchy video quality, any sorts of effects served only to turn whatever video you were viewing into an undecipherable mess. At the end, a video played, either congratulating you or scolding you, and that was that. The most memorable ending was in the INXS game, in which a girl would don a whipped-cream bikini if you did well. The goofy premise coupled with the hysterically awful acting made for a winning combination.
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For the last time...no, there is no nude code for this game. Stop e-mailing me about it. |
I suppose the truly sick thing about this series is how well I remember it. These awful games had almost nothing at all going for them. Fans of the band didn't get any exclusive peek at their favorite acts, the gameplay was atrocious, and if what I heard is true, none of the bands ever got paid their royalties for letting Sega and Digital Pictures experiment with the limits of the human mind. Yet these games, along with most of the other early Sega CD games, stand out in my mind very, very clearly. There simply wasn't anything else like them on the market. Sega, whether it was putting out weirdo music games like these or pitching a Virtual VCR product that would let you watch an entire Prince concert in ugly, grainy compressed video (it never came out, much to the dismay of greedy optometrists everywhere), was doing things that simply hadn't been done before. As history now seems to illustrate, products like these are what started to rattle consumer confidence in the once-bulletproof Sega name...and now it's a third party. Coincidence? No, probably not. As fondly as I may remember some of this stuff, I'd also classify it as the beginning of the end.
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