When I began digging into this subject, I was sure finding ten games built around musicians would be a tall order. Yet, as Isaac Asimov once quipped, the most thrilling line in any internet‑culture hunt isn’t ‘Eureka!’ but rather ‘That’s funny…’ The sheer volume of titles that marry music legends to interactive experiences is astonishing, baffling, and undeniably quirky.
Why These 10 Strangest Video Games Matter
10 Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel (1995)
Many of these titles sprang from the era of interactive CD‑ROMs. With storage capacities dwarfing floppy disks, developers could pack encyclopedic volumes of video and audio onto a single disc, prompting a brief belief that CD‑ROMs would finally make home computers truly interactive and educational. But what could be done with that extra space? Encyclopedias weren’t exactly a cash cow, so it fell to artists to experiment with the medium, rendering the worlds of their music in three dimensions. Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel stands out as perhaps the most bizarre and fully realized of these musician‑crafted universes. Like Anderson’s own work, it’s simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and unsettlingly surreal. An electrical outlet howls like a wolf, a wall painting bellows, a phantom voice urges, “Get in the car, little girl,” and your guide is Anderson herself, manifested as a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Puppet Motel also drips with sly satire. One mini‑game reduces to a simple word processor where players are invited to pen a novel. Another asks you to leave an answering‑machine message for Anderson—pointlessly pointless but delightfully absurd tasks.
9 Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol (1995)
Devo may be the world’s most accomplished one‑hit wonder, because while they’re universally linked to the massive hit “Whip It,” their catalogue brims with ideas and concepts so singularly odd they border on genius. Their music also carries an impenetrably vague and bizarre lore, forged in surreal short films like The Truth About De‑Evolution, The Men Who Made Music, and We’re All Devo. Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol translates that lore into an interactive world fans can explore via a point‑and‑click adventure, hunting the escaped mutant “Turkey Monkey,” seeking a cure for “osso bucco myelitis,” and battling the evil corporations Big Media and Universal Health Systems, aided by Devo alter‑egos General Boy and Booji Boy. The band scripted the game, composed the soundtrack, and oversaw the graphics.
The title didn’t win critical acclaim, but I suspect it would have been a hit if Devo weren’t pigeonholed as a one‑hit act; witnessing Devo’s neon‑saturated world rendered in ’90s toxic hues is a genuine trip for anyone who recognizes their aesthetic.
8 XPLORA1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World (1992) and EVE (1996)
Peter Gabriel has never met a new technology he didn’t immediately try to bend to his musical will. His first interactive CD‑ROM, XPLORA1, was designed to promote his album Us, featuring behind‑the‑scenes footage, interviews with collaborators, and information about his world‑music project WOMAD and Amnesty International. Naturally, a game element was tacked on, albeit a clunky one. Still, XPLORA1 proved successful enough to earn a sequel four years later.
EVE is almost as bizarre an experience as Puppet Motel, following a dream‑logic structure. The gameplay is more coherent: players hunt for fragments of Gabriel’s songs hidden in “worlds” designed by renowned conceptual artists such as Yayoi Kusama, then remix those fragments. Yet, not all of EVE’s mechanics are straightforward. The adventure begins with you as a single sperm; after fertilizing an egg, you must locate a briefcase inside an abandoned house from which a naked man and woman are born.
7 Highway 61 Interactive (1995; Bob Dylan)
Rolling Stone reports that although Bob Dylan was actively involved in developing Highway 61 Interactive, the team at GraphixZone wasn’t permitted to speak with or meet him until after the game’s completion. This anecdote underscores the oddity that, despite Dylan’s famed eccentricity, Highway 61 Interactive is a straightforward, gamified showcase of his work and music.
The game strings together videos of Dylan performing, alternate takes of his songs, handwritten lyrics, and clips of musicians who influenced him, all hidden across environments tied to “Saint Bob,” such as a Greenwich Village coffee shop, the Columbia Records studio, and backstage at Madison Square Garden. For instance, a hidden track titled “Only a Pawn” lurks beneath a chessboard in the coffee shop (get it?).
Each locale also contains a piece of a concert ticket; collect them all and you’re treated to snippets from the now‑legendary Supper Club bootleg. As a die‑hard Dylanologist, I’d gladly pay $59.99 and spend countless hours hunting a waltz‑time version of “Like a Rolling Stone” or a remix of “House of the Rising Sun,” but casual fans would likely find it a stretch. The most astonishing thing about Highway 61 Interactive is that it exists at all—Bob Dylan is arguably the least likely artist to receive a video‑game tie‑in.
6 Samantha Fox Strip Poker (1986)
(Note: While the game’s content is adult‑oriented, this write‑up remains SFW; many YouTube play‑throughs are not.)
Just under a decade before Dylan was rewarding gamers with music, British pop star and model Samantha Fox was rewarding players… with pixelated breasts.
Samantha Fox Strip Poker is a very simple game—either 5‑card or 7‑card stud poker against Fox. Winning a hand prompts her to remove clothing until she’s topless. Though there’s nothing shown below the belt—“The pants stay on,” as one of Fox’s songs puts it—undressing appears optional for the player.
It’s a game so basic that it was sold on cassette tape. The humble cassette held enough storage for the entire title. In the mid‑80s, it was still common for games and software to be distributed on tape, but 1986 marked the tail‑end of that era, as the shift from 8‑bit to 16‑bit programming rendered cassettes impractically limited. Samantha Fox Strip Poker is essentially an unambitious title released on an obsolete medium.
This may have been intentional. The in‑game version of Fox possesses very little artificial intelligence; after all, what’s the fun in challenging a pixelated pop star’s breasts?
5 The Thompson Twins Adventure (1982)
Speaking of games squeezed onto improbably limited mediums, The Thompson Twins Adventure is one of the few titles ever issued on a vinyl record—and perhaps the only one most people remember. Even more impressive is that it was crammed onto a 7‑inch, 45 RPM flexidisc. Flexidiscs were thin, flexible vinyl sheets that could be slipped between magazine pages and handed out as promotional freebies.
The game is a text‑based adventure featuring the three band members rendered as stick‑figure‑like sprites, each recognizable by their iconic new‑wave hairstyles, on a quest for ingredients needed by a witch‑doctor’s potion. The giveaway challenged players to identify the potion and mail the answer to Computer and Video Games magazine for a chance to win concert tickets.
Although retrospective reviews are uniformly harsh, it’s hard not to be impressed by the feat of squeezing an entire playable game onto a vinyl 45 and the extreme geekery required to connect a turntable to a Commodore 64 via a pre‑amplifier to install the game, then race against time for those tickets.
You can still play The Thompson Twins Adventure yourself at the Internet Archive.
4 Various Michael Jackson Games
When I first started researching this piece, I didn’t anticipate finding more than one video game devoted to the King of Pop. I remembered Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker from my childhood and assumed its existence was a one‑off fluke. Yet, Moonwalker itself turned out to be a series of games, spanning isometric beat‑‘em‑ups and side‑scrolling platformers.
The specific titles are Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (1989), Michael Jackson in Scramble Training (1993), Space Channel 5 (1999), Space Channel 5: Part 2 (2002), and Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 (2000).
This reflects Michael Jackson’s cultural omnipresence prior to, say… 1993. Most of the games featuring Jackson were published by Sega. In 1993, Sega was on the cusp of launching an international chain of arcades. The flagship arcade title was a motion‑simulator game where Jackson took the role of a commander training space cadets on a training mission. However, the sexual‑abuse allegations against Jackson all but scuppered the release of Michael Jackson in Scramble Training.
These allegations also retrospectively made Moonwalker feel a little tasteless, as the game involved Jackson rescuing kidnapped children from a gangster named Mr Big. Still, Jackson appeared in two other Sega games—the dance titles Space Channel 5 and Space Channel 5: Part 2—and bizarrely as a playable character in the boxing game Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2.
3 Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1985)
The history of gaming mirrors the medium’s gradual rise in legitimacy as games grew more advanced and capable of portraying realistic environments. While gamers have often regarded the medium as a legitimate art form, early games—blocky, monochrome, and reminiscent of children’s toys—were easily dismissed.
While Frankie Goes to Hollywood, another cassette‑tape release, is about as rudimentary as they come, the game is imbued with symbolism that elevates it toward art. According to the manual, the player starts as “an amorphous shape in the land of the mundane” (aka Liverpool). The goal is to become a “complete person” by collecting “pleasure points” that feed four facets of your personality—sex, war, love, and faith—as you journey toward the Pleasuredome.
Pleasure points can be earned by completing tasks ranging from feeding a cat to picking flowers, spitting on Margaret Thatcher, or defending a city in a World War II dogfight. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the band, was unapologetically queer, and it’s hard not to read a subtext of queer self‑discovery into the game, even as it remains frequently surreal. This symbolism is astonishingly ambitious for such a rudimentary title.
2 Journey’s Escape (1982) and Journey (1983)
The two titles produced for the band Journey in the ’80s are ideas so simple and perfect they should have been flawless, yet somehow one fell short. Journey, one of the world’s biggest rock acts, had anthemic, bombastic sound that seemed tailor‑made for ’80s arcades.
Their 1981 album Escape even featured a video‑game‑ready insectoid spaceship fleeing a black hole on the cover. The first game, Journey’s Escape, was a perfectly decent title that didn’t overthink its mandate: simply make a fun game about a fun rock band. The following year’s game, simply titled Journey, lost its way. It shares a similar premise—players control the five band members as they retrieve their instruments from alien worlds—but each member is represented by a photograph of their head on a cartoonish body, resulting in a delightfully goofy effect given the era’s technical limits.
Originally, the photograph technology was intended to use an early digital camera embedded in the arcade cabinet to capture players’ faces so they could play as themselves. The idea faltered when some players flashed the camera during trials, leading developers to revert to static headshots.
1 Aerosmith’s Various Games
Aerosmith boasts a surprisingly long gaming history, and to their credit, most of these titles avoid overthinking. The lineup includes Revolution X (1994), Quest for Fame (1995), 9: The Last Resort, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, and Joey Kramer Hit Hard (2010).
Revolution X is a light‑gun shooter where you pilot a helicopter gunship to rescue the band from a leather‑clad dictator named Helga, who has outlawed youth culture across a new world government. It’s silly, but never pretentious. The remaining games are rhythm‑based, letting players jam along to Aerosmith tracks; even drummer Joey Kramer received his own mobile title.
9: The Last Resort is perhaps the strangest rhythm game imaginable. Produced by Hollywood star Robert De Niro, it features voice talent from Cher, Christopher Reeves, Jim Belushi, and Ellen DeGeneres. Players inherit a hotel from a mysterious uncle (Reeves) that once served as a hangout for artists. However, the nine muses who once inhabited it have been displaced by malicious apparitions—Steven Tyler and Joe Perry—who have sapped the hotel’s inspirational power. Players can exorcise Tyler and Perry by solving puzzles based on musical themes supplied by Aerosmith, aided by a fortune‑telling machine (Cher), an octopus (DeGeneres), and a tiny man in a tiny airplane (Belushi).
Aerosmith’s games span the gamut from unpretentiously silly to pretentiously silly, offering a fascinating cross‑section of music‑driven gaming oddities.