Games are, let's be honest here, rarely cool - not in the widely accepted definition of the term. You won't garner social credibility playing Modern Warfare 2, even if its release is likely to be one of the entertainment events of the year. Although videogame culture is slowly but surely carving a niche for itself in the mainstream consciousness, there is still a hint of shame attached to a weekend-long Killzone 2 marathon.
But once in a while a title comes along that somehow punches the zeitgeist squarely in the face; that it's okay to talk about in public. There are games that pique the interest of lifestyle mags, Newsnight reviews, hot new musicians and other discerning cultural commentators. They're not better or worse for it, they're just 'cool'.
So here are, in my blinkered opinion, the ten coolest games of all time. I've stuck to retail releases; there have probably been countless viral and augmented reality experiences that I've missed – although those tend to be considered cool simply because they're created by the sorts of Hoxton-based creative media agencies that tell us what's cool in the first place. So that's technically cheating.
Anyway, this is a Friday Philosophy entry because, a) it's a bit throwaway (I mean, it doesn't really matter in the end, does it?), and b) I'd like your suggestions in the comments section. Go on, you're cooler than me - what have I missed?
Pac-Man, 1980
Some games are born cool, some games achieve coolness and some have coolness thrust upon them. Pac-Man probably belongs in the latter category. There is nothing intrinsically hip about Namco's maze game, but from the start it was enthusiastically appropriated into popular culture, especially dance music. Early electro classics like Jonzun crew's Pac-Jam, The Pac-Man's I Am a Pac Man and Newcleus' Jam On Revenge (The Wiki Wiki Song) were inspired by the huge success of the game, as well as the electronic age it ushered in and the iconic sound design. The fact that the eponymous character spent his time guzzling energising power-pill also struck a chord with an emerging generation of clubbers for some reason; hence Richard D James' Power-Pill EP. And, of course, there's Marcus Brigstocke's classic quote, "If Pacman had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music."
WipEout, 1995
Alright, it tried too damn hard. That capitalized E was designed to flirt with the ecstasy crowd, the visuals mixed Bladerunner chic with a Ministry of Sound lighting rig. Then there was the soundtrack, filled with mainstream big beat floor fillers, which was released as a CD just as the whole super club fad was kicking off. Sony's marketing department was sponsoring nights at fashionable haunts all over the world, putting demo pods in chill-out rooms, and turning up at festivals like Glastonbury (where the company once famously distributed Playstation flyers on serrated cardboard). Somehow a futuristic spaceship racing game become the poster boy for videogame cultcha. If it is possible to cynically buy coolness, WipEout was cool as fxxk.
PaRappa the Rappa, 1996
The idiosyncratic brainchild of musician Masaya Matsuura and artist Rodney Greenblat, PaRappa was a hippyish rapping sim combining goofy anthropomorphic characters, daft songs and Simon Says-type interaction, and effectively laying the foundations for the rhythm action genre. It arrived on the PlayStation in 1996, but Matsuura and his company NanaOn-Sha had actually been working on it for Sony since before the launch of the console, testing the mechanic using characters from Greenblat's Dazzeloids CD ROM game (don't listen to the revisionists who tell you Nintendo invented inclusive gaming with the Wii - they're wrong). Sony then brought Greenblat in to produce fresh characters with a global appeal and a legend was born. The game was enormously popular with female players in Japan, prompting a similar follow up, Um Jammer Lammy, as well as a sequel. The cute characters can still be seen adorning T-shirts to this day.
Dance, Dance Revolution, 1998
The last time I was in Tokyo a few years ago, you couldn't get into the arcades for the hordes of gyaru – fashion-obsessed school girls – playing Dance Dance Revolution for hours on end. Konami's massively popular coin-op and console series gets you to dance on coloured pads to a series of licensed and in-house tracks – either alone or against friends. Importantly, though, you could always add your own freestyle moves between the mandatory inputs and through this element of self-expression, a thriving culture of 'DDR Freaks' emerged. The whole structure of the rhythm action experience was tweaked and codified here. Along with Guitar Freaks, it is utterly seminal to the genre.
Music, 1998
Yes, yes, more music gaming – there's a theme developing here. This was a sequencer package developed by UK studio Jester Interactive, under the creative guidance of Tim Wright who created a lot of the tracks for WipEout. It allowed PlayStation owners to create reasonably complex dance tracks using a huge library of samples and a riff generator. Several sequels followed, adding more complex sequencing and sampling features, as well as the ability to record and distribute tracks. These cheap, powerful applications were used as a stepping stone into music production by dozens of urban artists. Depending on your music tastes that's reasonably cool – and the baton has been taken up, to some degree, by the excellent Korg DS-10 synth for the Nintendo DS…
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, 1999
Here was a game that actually felt like hanging out at a skate park attempting idiotic tricks with your friends. It was utterly divorced from formalised simulations like FIFA or Madden and this gave it a similar counter-culture aura to the real thing. And of course, it rode the slipstream of the late-nineties extreme sports craze (brought about, in part, by ESPN's aggressive marketing of its X Games events in the US) and also the rise of emo culture. For a while everyone was a skater – even if it was just on their TV.
Jet Set Radio, 2000
Created by Sega's Smilebit team, previously responsible for the cult Saturn shooter Panzer Dragoon, Jet Set Radio was a bewilderingly fluorescent, hyper-kinetic urban adventure, where you had to form skate gangs and tag as many walls as possible to mark out your territory. The funky cell-shaded visuals led to a long-lasting trend which eventually drove everyone bloody mad, but it looked amazing first time round. The graffiti theme of the game garnered objections at the time, which only made it more voguish. The soundtrack was also fantastic, mixing J-pop, funk and grunge to pleasing effect.
Rez, 2001
Created by avid clubber Tetsuya Mizuguchi and inspired by the work of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, this avant-garde shooter is an exploration of the neurological phenomenon synesthesia, in which sensory information is confused so that you hear colours, see sounds, etc. The cool part is the merging of trippy vector visuals with an evolving electronic soundtrack, which responds to the in-game action, allowing players to build a pounding dance track as they go. Also cool was the Trance Vibrator peripheral, packaged with special editions of the game. This vibrating device could be held or sat on during play, ostensibly extending the synesthesia experience to touch. Some users found that the device became the focus of their gameplay experience – as this famed blog post on Game Girl Advance illustrated.
GTA: Vice City, 2002
Grand Theft Auto has always enjoyed a frisson of cool, but Vice City went stratospheric. It arrived reasonably early in the PS2's life cycle – an era in which people were still referring to the PlayStation Generation in a vaguely reverent and corroborative manner. Vice City brilliantly captured the emerging fad for eighties nostalgia via a huge soundtrack filled with ironic retro hits. It was plastered with achingly hip reference points from Scarface and Goodfellas to Boogie Nights and Saturday Night Fever. And it featured sex, drugs, violence and swearing within the context of an amoral universe – those things are always cool. Just ask Brett Easton Ellis's accountant.
Guitar Hero, 2005
I wasn't sure about including this, because it is essentially poncing about in your living room with a plastic instrument pretending to be Jimmy Page. But last month Courtney Love said that she loathed the game, which instantly made it absolutely acceptable. Created by Harmonix Music Systems, the series has become a music industry institution, providing a new channel for unknown bands to reach global audiences and introducing a whole new generation to groups like Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath and Pixies. Which is sort of cool. Ultimately, Guitar Hero is the now the quintessential post-pub game – as long as you can find all the bits, then calibrate the audio after five pints of Stella.
