The weirdest video games based on bands

polygon.com:

We used to be a society that made video games starring rock bands and rap collectives in all sorts of genres. We used to have Kiss first-person shooters, Def Jam fighting games, and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

Today, the sub-genre of musician-led games barely exists; only the biggest of the biggest pop groups like BTS star in their own games anymore, and those are likely to be for mobile platforms. Musicians in console and PC games are largely relegated to appearing as Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone skins.

The era of band-based games is all but over. Sega’s out of the Make My Video business, we’ll likely never get another Spice Girls-themed game, and, for better or worse, a Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker reboot seems almost impossible. But for a three-decade stretch, we got some fascinating, bewildering, and truly awful video games based on bands.

Here are nine of the most memorable — and frequently dystopian — band-based video games.

In 1983, Bally Midway released Journey, an arcade game based on the then-white-hot rock band of the same name. Journey (the band) was coming off the massive success of its seventh studio album, Escape, which featured classics “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Open Arms,” and “Who’s Crying Now.” (In fact, Journey already had a video game by this point, the far less memorable Journey Escape released in 1982 for the Atari 2600.)

Journey’s arcade outing set a precedent for bizarre justifications for video games based on rock bands. The conceit was that “wild alien Groupoids have seized Journey’s electro-supercharged instruments,” and the player’s mission was to guide each band member back to their gear, which had been spread across five galaxies. Collect it all and there’ll be a big Journey concert at the Galactic Stadium, where a looped cassette tape inside the arcade cabinet would play “Separate Ways” from the 1983 album Frontiers.

Journey stood out for its use of digitized graphics; the playable band members were composed of black-and-white