Pioneer studios youtube simulator#
“Matt Watkins found this driving simulator engine and he had the 3D model that Passion Pictures had made of the Geep,” says Wakeham. In 2020, Final Drive was honoured with an Out Run-inspired driving game to promote the track ‘Aries’, which also featured the band’s iconic vehicle. Final Drive, a goofy driving simulator using “Geep” from ‘19-2000’, has become a beloved part of Gorillaz history - even with (or, perhaps, because of) its wonky physics and primitive graphics. Many of these games reused animation assets from music videos and retooled them for Flash and Shockwave players. The first game released within Kong Studios was Noodle Fight: a 2D side-scroller mash-up between Capcom’s 1985 run-and-gun Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and the visuals from ‘Clint Eastwood’’s music video. Credit: Jamie Hewlett, Zombie Flesh Eaters. At a time when online promotion and social media were in their infancy, Kong Studios was as ahead of the curve as Gorillaz themselves. They led the charge on building the site’s first incarnation, where fans could peek through rooms occupied by the band members, interact with objects like Murdoch’s bookshelf, watch music videos in a designated ‘cinema’ area, and chat with others through message boards. Established next to Albarn’s own Studio 13 in west London, Zombie Flesh Eaters became a base of operations for the visual side of Gorillaz where a small team created artwork for promos, voiced characters in press interviews, and kept up with the website’s expanding scope.Īhead of the band’s debut album in 2001, brothers Matt Watkins and Tim Rockins were brought on for their web design and graphics expertise. That was a way for you to get a little feeling like you were part of the creative process of the band as well.”ĭevelopment on Kong Studios began with an outside company, but the desire to implement ideas on the fly led to the formation of Zombie Flesh Eaters: an in-house studio assembled by Hewlett, named after the 1979 horror film by Lucio Fulci. There were stems to tracks that weren’t released, that weren’t part of the albums. “He loved being able to hand stuff over and fans being able to do stuff with his music. “I pitched the idea to of taking stems from all of the tracks he was writing and have fans be able to remix tracks within Kong Studios. The first “game” Wakeham brainstormed for the experience would become the site’s mixing tool, 5-Track, where players could remix Gorillaz tracks with adjustable sliders and toggles. Inspired by his upbringing with the ZX Spectrum and Atari 2600 consoles, the website was also pitched as an interactive hub filled with bitesize games. Wakeham’s version of Resident Evil’s infamous Spencer Mansion was Kong Studios, an interactive tour with “static pages that gave a feeling of moving through something”.
The first sketch of Kong Studios’ website, named Naverone Studios at the time. “This is 2000, there was nothing like that on the internet whatsoever, so I had to think about what that meant.” “They said, ‘We want it to be like through Resident Evil,’” Wakeham tells NME, referencing Capcom’s ground-breaking third-person horror series. In 2000, he was given an “impossible” brief by Hewlett and Albarn: to build a Gorillaz website in step with developer Capcom’s infamous horror games. This digital push was led by Mat Wakeham, who worked with Hewlett on the comic strip Get The Freebies for Face magazine.
Crucially, their existence coincided with the world wide web boom in the late ‘90s, which gave Gorillaz another platform to pioneer their virtual existence. Their early live performances saw holograms rub shoulders with Madonna and De La Soul, while 2005 hit single ‘Feel Good Inc.’ was briefly synonymous with adverts for Apple’s iPod. READ MORE: Gorillaz – ‘Cracker Island’ review: conventional, but richly satisfyingīetween the genre-hopping albums and iconic artwork, the story of Gorillaz is also defined by technology.Now, characters Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, 2-D and Russel Hobbs occupy the same stages as the biggest, and more earnest, titans of pop. Created by Blur’s Damon Albarn and comic book artist Jamie Hewlett in 1998 as both a send-up and redefinition of the “manufactured” band, the virtual experiment has ascended into a musically robust headline act. After two decades, Gorillaz has grown far beyond its original purpose.
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