Looking Back at DJ Hero, the DJing Game That Wasn't About DJing at All | US | Translation

The last time I was home—really home that is, in the way that home will never really be whatever grotty flat you're holed up in for the next sixth months before shoving your belongings in the back of an Addison Lee van and trudging to the next grotty flat, because home means, for most of us anyway, where we grew up, not where we ended up—I was confronted by the ghost of a past life. Trapped amongst the childish debris of the room in which all my old belongings are left to gather dust, batteries depleted, fur thinning, was an object that hadn't permeated my being for nigh on a decade. They say that the past is a foreign country: it is, and I no longer spoke the language.

The thing I'd been perturbed by, the device that had sent me into a Proustian vortex of half-remembered reveries was, in itself, unremarkable, being nothing more than a lump of polypropene with additional blobs of polypropene affixed to it. In a room full of toys and games, this is, in itself, not unusual. Submerged under abandoned former Action Men—soldiers shorn of uniform, identity, and purpose—and cornerless jigsaws was an old gift that told a story of neglect and missed opportunities. It was not a madeleine that I had espied but the custom controller for the video game DJ Hero.

I had no conscious memory of ever using the thing, and holding it in my hands, cradling it, gently at first like you would an injured chaffinch found at the end of the garden, brought back no muscle memory either. I recognised it for what it was—I remembered the game existing, I remembered seeing the controller in shops, I even vaguely, so I thought, remembered one of my siblings getting it for a birthday—and what it was was an approximation of what you might think DJs used to DJ had you read a technical description of what DJing was but had never seen an actual DJ in action, an eyeless alien's approach to the whole thing.

It is quite possible that DJing could never be turned into a satisfactory game in the way guitar playing or dancing to gabber were because DJing, as showy as it can be, lacks a fundamental kind of performativity inherent to the aforementioned activities. It is, in essence, a person pressing cue and then pushing a fader—it is undramatic, unshowy, resolutely not flashy. OK, being charitable, you might be able to conceive of turntablism as something imbued with a bit more flair but if we're being honest turntabalism is an embarrassing anachronism that doesn't deserve any kind of memorialisation. Especially not in the form of a rhythm game.

For those of you at home with memories like sieves, rhythm games were the video games that asked the player to keep time to a track via a virtual instrument of some sort. The first rhythm games to really break into the cultural conscience was the arcade-based Dance Dance Revolution series. As the name suggests, the DDR titles, developed by legendary Japanese software house Konami, were foot-heavy stompers, that asked gamers to strut their stuff to a demented soundtrack of low-resolution Jpop. Komani, for a few years, ruled the rhythm game roost. And then came Guitar Hero.

You'll have played Guitar Hero at some point; you'll have spent an hour at a family gathering or a lesser-liked friend's dismally attended birthday party clutching a miniature six-string, diligently tapping away at an out-of-time version of "Freebird", stood slap bang in the middle of a living room, filling with frustration before placing the controller down and sitting in stock-still silence, hands stinking of sweat and cheap plastic. You'll have done that because Guitar Hero like Little Britain or Wagamama, was just what people enjoyed at that moment in time—it was there and it wasn't going to go away.

Obviously, it did, because all that is solid melts into air and all that was en vogue becomes a faintly embarrassing memorial device. Our clammy virtual guitars found their way, eventually, into cupboards and lofts, analogue relics of a long lost digital realm, as did our replica drumkits, our not-quite-microphones, and the decks that didn't actually function like decks do in real life at all. What were once objects of affection, portals into a world both like and unlike ours, are now cast-offs that remind us of simpler days, happier times. Which means they're unbearable.

The thing that interested me about the rediscovery of DJ Hero, and led me down a deeper than deep wormhole of YouTube videos, each of which was both exactly the same and oddly, endlessly fascinating, was the sheer unreality of the whole experience. It was flatly, firmly, not about DJing in any way at all.

The Dance Dance Revolution games had, pardon the pun, a foot in the real, even if the kind of moves you needed to cement your status as the best mover at the Peterborough branch of Hollywood Bowl would have seen you chucked out of any half-decent club in the land, having (accidentally, of course) assaulted two or more other punters as a result of your ocotpoid movements.

Guitar Hero got you, you know, doing something approximate to actually playing a guitar, and while it didn't quite let you live out the fretwank fantasies you'd stored away since early adolescence, it at least, felt a bit like playing a guitar does, and it looked a bit like it too. When your mum said you looked a bit like that "Johnny Hendrix bloke," she wasn't just being kind. You really did. A bit. A tiny, tiny bit.

But DJ Hero is an outlier in the genre, a game that for whatever reason—a disjointed inner logic we're not privy to perhaps—decided to abandon any kind of tangible tie to the activity it attempted to emulate. DJing, as anyone who's ever tried to do it knows, requires you to be able to listen to two or more records at once, preferably playing at the same or at least a very similar speed, and knowing when to turn the volume up or down one of of said records. Turning that into a profitable video game that's easy enough for grandmothers' to play after a sherry too many and "cool" enough to appeal to the teenage audience every game publisher relies on, was, it seems, a difficult task.

So, to their credit, the developers FreeStyleGames decided to change tack, and instead of trying to make something that felt a bit like DJing they said, "Fuck it, why don't we just make a totally standard rhythm game that involves hitting a button that corresponds with a coloured bar appearing on the screen in order to trigger the illusion that pressing the button at exactly the right time actually does something off worth…but let's make one of those buttons a scratchable turntable because that is totally what most DJs spent their time doing and it looks really cool and not at all like something you'd seen on a dad's dismal holiday-in-Broadstairs t-shirt."

Everyone agreed, went out, got very, very, very pissed, and a few months later shops started selling the heinously priced end product. What they'd made was nothing like the artform—if we can accurately describe it as that—they'd set out to ape. Instead, they'd created something strangely useless, an inert game that sucks the fun out of the activity, making mixing records feel about as rewarding, and enjoyable, as filling in a timesheet or eating quinoa.

What we're left with in the cold light of 2017, is an oddly admirable misfire, a game unwilling to present DJing for what it is, and perhaps, just perhaps, that's a good thing. After all, it's only DJing after all. It's not meant to be a fun game.

There's something to be said, too, for the perverse pleasure that comes with exploring something that's utterly wrong, broken, unfixable. Mistakes are there to be made; we need not be ashamed of them, even if they do make us look like the kind of DJ who only ever appears in the background of forgotten ITV sitcoms.

And hey, couldn't we all do well to be a little less fawning over the cue-tappers and fader-flippers? Yes. Yes would could.

Josh is on Twitter