The game was developed by Revolution after their breakthrough Lure of the Temptress (1992) and before the start of their long-standing series Broken Sword (1996–2014). The game was widely critically acclaimed, both at the time, and since its remaster: it originally received a Golden Joystick Award for ‘Best Adventure’ (Cecil 2016), and is currently found on countless ‘Best Adventure Games’ lists, like Richard Cobbett’s “29 Essential, Must-Play Adventure Games”, under the “Essential Games: The Classics” category.
Directed by Charles Cecil, the game also famously features the art of Dave Gibbons, comic book artist of Watchmen ( 1986–1987), and the design, dialogue, and music of Dave Cummins.
Beneath a steel sky s software#
Footnote 1 This article aims to begin filling these gaps and drawing some clear connections between class, music, and video games, by looking at Revolution Software’s 1994 Beneath a Steel Sky ( 1994).īeneath a Steel Sky is a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game developed by the UK Company Revolution Software in 1994. Moreover, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation, with some notable exceptions. These elements of subversion can, of course, be found throughout video games, both as emergent gameplay, where players take it upon themselves to critique society by taking advantage of game affordances, but also as embedded narrative and procedural elements.ĭiscussions of social classes and power relations are often implied within these broader conversations, but rarely find themselves at the centre of them. An example of this is the analysis of Grant Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) offered by Dyer-Whiteford and de Peuter, in which they note that “Vice City’s lead, Tommy Vercetti, is neoliberal theory incarnate: if the most famous line of the eighties film Wall Street is Gordon Gekko’s ‘greed is good,’ then the equivalent for Vice City’s eighties parody is Tommy Vercetti’s statement ‘I work for money.’” (Dyer-Whiteford and de Peuter 2009) Vice City, however, with its satirical tone, acts as both an agent of the hegemony, and its subverter. While most of these critiques have focused specifically on how these relations are reproduced in MMORPGs, where practices like gold farming quite explicitly mirrored real-life power relations, some have also focused on single-player games, particularly their neoliberal affinities. Virtual economies and virtual worlds have been seen to reproduce both real world economic systems and real-world ideologies (Castronova 2005 Rettberg 2008) and subsequently reproducing social strata and power relations. The representation of class, however, remains underexplored, even amongst critiques of video games as agents of capitalism.
2016), and, to a lesser degree, LGBTQ issues (Consalvo 2003 Ruberg and Shaw 2017), and race (Burgess et al. Issues of representation in video games have been important to video game studies for over two decades, largely focussing on gender (Cassell and Jenkins 1998 Dietz 1998 Kafai et al. Here, music plays an important role in terms of environmental storytelling, both as semiotic shorthand, and as a reflection of the affordances available to the inhabitants of the city. This article draws connections between these two underexplored areas and analyses the musical characterisation of class in the 1994 cyberpunk adventure game, which takes places largely in a literally stratified metropolis where the three levels of the city act as representations of the three social classes.
Furthermore, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation. While other issues of representation have been studied extensively within game studies (gender representation in particular), the representation of class remains an underexplored area. This article proposes Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) as a starting point for the analysis of the relationship between music and social class in video games.
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