Hey, I'm Hamish, this is Writing on Games.
There was a while there where when you thought of music games, chances are you pictured Guitar
Hero and Rock Band and not much else.
While the dominance of those franchises has all but vanished, with reboots of each failing
to set the world on fire, dominant they indeed were.
They gave you the chance to live out your fantasies of being a rockstar without the
need to actually learn an instrument; upping your air-guitar game by giving you a piece
of plastic to hammer on instead.
Those games never spoke to me.
I thought the butt rock aesthetic, hell, the general concept of being a rockstar was lame,
but more importantly the way the artform was gamified here – that you essentially won
art in the eyes of some polygonal audience if you got to the end of a song without messing
up – was so distant from the chaos and danger I so loved about the music I was listening
to.
For me it represented none of the fear and tension of performing to a crowd and as a
result, none of the elation of self-expression either.
Which is why it might seem weird that Drool’s self-proclaimed rhythm-violence game Thumper
continues to speak to me like no other music game before it.
Compared to those previous examples, it’s about as abstract as you can get.
It’s a game pared down to its barest elements - you’re a bug on a highway, get to the
end of the highway, press the button at the right time to make the bad thing go away.
As a result of this abstraction though, you begin to look at things more symbolically,
conceptually; getting rid of the uncanniness associated with simulating the literal act
of playing music, where I would wonder why music was being scored so rigidly or why my
creativity wasn’t being encouraged.
You see this abstraction in the soundtrack.
In typical rock games you’d find a steady pulse providing you a platform to fill in
the more memorable parts of the song – the melody, the solo, what have you – and as
a result, you’d be able to stick out in the same way.
This is your moment, your time to shine.
Thumper, on the other hand, lacks those melodic hooks.
Your role instead, in a musical sense, is to provide the pulse, hammering out sporadic
rhythms underneath a cacophony of industrial sounds and drones, perfectly complimenting
the game’s metallic aesthetic.
And this is where the tension starts to kick in; you legitimately never know what’s going
to come around the next corner; you never know the song, because there is no “song,”
so to speak.
You’re merely navigating the unknown, an amorphous soundscape.
And what’s more, it’s an unknown that’s coming at you at ludicrous speeds, compounded
by the fact that each stage changes the time signature in ways not commonly seen in rhythm
games.
You go from a fairly easy 1-2-3-4 rhythm to something as complicated as 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.
Most people have internalised 4/4 rhythm; something like 9/8 is a lot more difficult
to “feel,” per se.
This is all combined with the fact that there’s a physicality to Thumper that I’ve yet to
see matched by any other game like it.
The speed at which everything moves means you’ll be hammering on the A button with
ludicrous intensity (which famously led to some reports of thumb injuries shortly after
the game’s release).
Every note you hit, every turn you make explodes at you, sold by a wash of visual effects and
sound design that’s so low-end heavy that it never ceases to feel like a sledgehammer
to the face.
And this is why Thumper is so representative of music to me.
Not because it allows you to show off how technically you understand rhythm or whatever
(I actually feel that this game would appeal to non-musicians as much as musicians), but
on a broader conceptual level, it requires legitimate practice, like musicians will practice
their instruments.
You will fuck up, you’ll have to start a level again, probably multiple times.
Mistakes are punished with a sickening judder that, even though it lasts for a fraction
of a second, can completely throw off your rhythm.
Just like playing with a band, however, the highway doesn’t stop just because you messed
up.
It’s up to you to get back into the swing of things, and quickly.
After a while though, you stop thinking about the process as much; you get into the same
zen-like trance musicians do when they perform.
You’ll get to the end of a stage and, amongst the elation of overcoming such an intense
challenge, you’ll wonder how you even got there.
See, musicians don’t carefully picture every note as they play, just like you don’t think
about exactly how you’re going to react to a note coming at you in Thumper; it’s
all happening too fast to picture in that way.
Part of why musicians practice is so they can intuit the process, adapt and improvise
the moment things go wrong, and you do exactly the same in Thumper.
And once you do start to get a more general feel for how the game works, you begin to
realise that there’s a surprising amount of room for player expression.
You maybe pick up on the fact that your jump-and-slam move is not only an opportunity to regain
health, but provides such a glorious, pulverising thud that you start to find ways to work it
in wherever you feel you can.
But as certain level-specific obstacles are quick to remind you, there’s little room
for cockiness here.
What are you, some kind of rockstar?
Just play the song.
It leads to a constant string of risk-reward moments where you weigh up in fractions of
a second whether you can justify the flashy approach; trying to chain together a series
of turns and slams, anticipating the fact it often results in the same kind of slight
judder you get when you make a mistake.
You have to be really confident in your ability to pull this stuff off and not stick out like
a sore thumb.
All in, Thumper is not designed to elevate you Guitar Hero or Rock Band; in most ways
it’s downright hostile.
It feels incredible when you get to the end of a stage, but only because the means of
getting there was so gruelling and fraught with things that could go wrong.
It’s physically and mentally draining in the same way performing can be; it feels dangerous.
On every conceivable level, Thumper gets what it means to play music.
It makes sense too, given that Brian Gibson (one half of developer Drool along with Marc
Flury), is one half of Lightning Bolt, a band whose music focuses on exploring the primal,
physical impact of sound and rhythm over melody or ego.
And while it’s often futile to attribute authorial intent, it’s been incredibly fulfilling
to see my thoughts on the game being mirrored by the people that created it.
Flury and Gibson both used to work at Harmonix, on Rock Band specifically; discussing in interviews
their growing disillusionment with the corporate culture that kept music games at the level
of “rockstar simulator” and how Thumper was largely a response to that.
Essentially there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Thumper was born out of the same
frustration and desire for experimentation that I had felt before I played it, and despite
how intensely draining an experience the game often is, that I wasn’t alone in feeling
that the medium of music could be more earnestly explored in games, and that Thumper exists
specifically to remedy that, is a sentiment I take great comfort in.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Thumper.
If you did, maybe consider doing the things.
As always, these videos are made possible by your unbelievably generous pledges on Patreon
so if you feel like supporting the show directly, maybe check it out.
Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Nico Bleackley, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk, Spike
Jones, TheNamelessGuy, Edward Clayton Andrews, Vasili Hrebinka, Chris Wright, Dr. Motorcycle,
Harry Fuertes, Ham Migas, Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire,
Filip Lange, Rob, Rusty Shackleford, Ana Pimentel, Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness,
Biggy Smith, Peter, Christian Konemann, Cameltraffic, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.