Shadows on the Screen: What Game Demos Could Learn From Mixtapes

Maybe if Grin had spent a few hours listening to The Mixtape About Nothing or A Rhyming Ape the Bionic Commando demo wouldn’t have been so damned awful. What is Austin even talking about at all? Read on to find out.

In the middle of my existential crisis about writing about video games, I went out for a walk. I needed to clear my head, check out the neighborhood I just moved into, and finally get around to listening to up-and-coming rapper Wale (who is quick to remind listeners that it’s WA-LAY, not WA-LEE.) In the middle of that stroll I acted like a gaming critic even while I was doubting both gaming and criticism, because I realized something about the medium and the methods through which we get a taste of a new game: Most demos suck. And new-school rapper Wale is the guy who taught me that.

Let’s slow down. I have no preconceptions that my readers are into hip hop enough to know what a mixtape is. Something in between a rough demo tape and a full album, mixtapes were five dollar cassettes or CDs you could buy from the locally owned corner store or record shop. Often featuring local talent, the mixtape was an attempt to grow a rapper’s brand without being tied to (or tied down by) a label. This core concept has lasted through today, even though “mixtapes” now come packaged on blogs with Megaupload or Rapidshare links.

There are effectively two types of mixtapes. In some cases they exist to promote a specific album  due out later that season, month, or even week. While the first single or two off of the upcoming album might find its way onto the mixtape, most of the songs won’t ever be found on an official release. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, some of these tracks are not album worthy, but others just don’t fit conceptually, or feature another artist who is appearing on the tape to raise publicity without running into issues about licensing or cross-label promotion. The second type of tape is put together by an artist looking to be picked up  by a major record company, but even in this case the core motive is the same: they’re showing off their talent while neither giving away the radio releases that will go gold on iTunes sales alone, nor those “fan favorite” tracks that are the heart of every piece of an album of contemporary music.

In other words, both pre-label and pre-album hype tapes attempt to give a vertical slice of what the artist is and what he or she will be producing in the future. Compare this to the worst demos you’ve ever played: The multiplayer demo of Bionic Commando was only representative of a type of play that most players would only spend a few minutes with. Red Faction: Guerrilla is a game that I wasn’t too fond of, but the single player demo was a condensed and flate piece of gameplay that makes a fairly explosive game seem boring at best. The problem with these isn’t just that they aren’t fun, it’s that they aren’t what the game is.

Even fun demos often fall into the trap of just giving a section of tutorial or early level gameplay. Bioshock‘s demo is a large part of its incredible success, but it neutered the effect of that game’s intro for me. Ninja Gaiden, DMC4, and other action titles loan themselves to this demo style and while they serve the purpose of introducing a game well enough, they could be even better. The absolute worst outcome is when a demo is more fun than the game. Any horizontal slice of gameplay can be produced to be exciting and attention getting. Like a trailer to a summer blockbuster, it’s bound to impress even when the final product is a waste of time.

In some ways a trailer is a vertical slice: you’re getting clips of a film throughout its full length. But it’s still not a good example of the gameplay from front to back. A good demo should let you experience the breadth of the major gameplay experiences: an 70 hour RPG with 20 hours of required grinding ought not just be an exciting dungeon and boss encounter. A racing title that focuses on car tuning should include at least a limited garage to tool around in. A fighter with only and offline multiplayer mode isn’t exactly usable by everyone (Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 and Super Street Fighter II: HD Remix were both guilty of this.)

So, what’s a good demo? On the highest end I’d desire every demo to be filled with unique content not used in the full game. Heavy Rain‘s early press demo acheived this. It’s a lot to demand though: a developer would have to take time and money out of the full project to maybe sell a few extra games down the line.  Dennis Dyack would hate it. More over, outside of mixtapes, Heavy Rain, and  short films made to introduce or sell a full project like The Customer is Always Right or Hotel Chevalier, this just doesn’t exist.

More reasonable? Make more demos like Crackdown. Realtime World’s produced a timed demo with every element of the game that gamers and critics came to love. By increasing the speed at which the player progressed (but being open about that fact) they even allowed the hour-long segment of game to include top-level play. It even had co-op play, which would end up being the lifeblood of that title. This isn’t new: shareware titles used to be the norm on the PC and plenty of those were able to represent (but not replace) the full play experience. When you purchased the title you were able to continue where you left off, leaving zero overlap in demo and full game play. It seems that EA hasn’t forgotten this model, claiming that the leaked version of The Sims 3 is an extended demo.

Obviously the mixtape is a product closer to a full album than a demo and a full game are. Some of the best mixtapes are longer and better than the official release that would follow, and some are in fact not representative of the forthcoming albums (Chester French’s Jacques Jams Vol. 1 was way more hip-hop heavy then their hip-pop release this year, and thankfully both are pieces of music I’m happy to keep on my harddrive.)

But there are lessons to be learned anyway. Bad demos keep players away. Fun but nonrepresentative demos might create sales, but look for those titles to quickly be traded back in, cutting deep into the longterm sales of the product. Good demos drive good sales to a customer base that really want that product, and more importantly helps to create word-of-mouth advertising. Before Crackdown‘s demo it was the game that was packed in free with the $60 dollar Halo 3 demo, and after the demo it was the flow and vocabulary of play that we couldn’t go without.

Bonus: Like hip-hop? Curious about what a mixtape even is? Try out Wale’s three mixtapes. I’ve hosted them here for free, just as Wale intended.

Double bonus: A fan made Megaman style video for Kanye West’s Robocop. [Story and image via Needledrop]