God of Quote
Last weekend I finally beat God of War 3. The experience (especially the final battle with Zeus) left me panting with exhaustion and Popeye-like forearms (my poor controller sure got a workout), and a desire to play something slow and relaxing for a change, like, dunno … GTA maybe?
I don’t intend to review GOW3 here but I want to touch on something that I noticed during my playthrough, namely the liberal use/citation of gameplay elements from other games.
In literature or music the use of “quotes” is not unusual. Jazz performers insert little snippets of well known tunes into their solos. Authors reference characters or events from famous novels. We call this intertextuality, it’s an established practice and nobody would accuse James Joyce of plagiatism because he “just rewrote” Homer’s Odyssey.
But in a medium like games, where whole genres can be traced back to one specific game that birthed them (most FPS games still labour under the shadow of Doom), people are usually extra-sensitive about rip-offs (perceived or real) and will try to avoid direct citation (with the exception of the developers of Dante’s Inferno, but that’s another story).
So imagine my surprise when between minion slaughtering and QTE decapitations I found some (loving) hommages to the following games:
Star Wars (specifically the Death Star Trench Run)
Guitar Hero
Portal
Echochrome
There may have been more but these were the ones that jumped out at me.
Considering that video games, as a medium, have now some 30-odd years of history under their belt, maybe the canon is now big enough to make intertextuality in games possible. Not as a parody like in Matt Hazard but as legitimate tool of storytelling.
