The first time I heard Rush in an arcade it was Geddy Lee telling me I’d lost a ball. Stern’s Rush pinball machine, announced in January 2022, has custom speech from Lee, Alex Lifeson and Ed Robertson and sixteen of the band’s songs. It sits in a line of Stern tables that reads like a festival bill: AC/DC in 2012, Metallica in 2013, Iron Maiden in 2018 with the player cast as Eddie, Led Zeppelin in 2020, Foo Fighters in 2023. Pinball worked out before most other games that a band is a stage set you can license, and most of what’s happened between music and games since is a version of that deal.
Riffs in the Code
When id Software was making Doom in 1993, John Romero has said, the team handed composer Bobby Prince CDs of Pantera and Slayer, and Prince wasn’t even a metal fan. He wrote the riffs anyway, and a generation of players still hears a demon-filled corridor in a palm-muted chug.
By 2009 the bands were in the games themselves. Brütal Legend cast Jack Black as roadie Eddie Riggs, Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal and Rob Halford, Lemmy and Lita Ford in speaking parts, and shipped with more than a hundred licensed tracks from 75 bands. Metal: Hellsinger, in 2022, made the music the mechanic: you shoot on the beat, the track builds as you keep time, and Serj Tankian, Matt Heafy, Randy Blythe, Alissa White-Gluz and Mikael Stanne are among the vocalists. It won Best Audio at the Golden Joysticks and was nominated at the 2023 BAFTA Games Awards.
Bands Playing the Game
The traffic runs the other way too. Iron Maiden launched a free mobile game, Legacy of the Beast, in July 2016 and later named a tour after it, and Metallica played six songs inside Fortnite in June 2024 to a crowd that paid nothing to get in. On a smaller scale, Blink-182 put out a Pac-Man tie-in in October, game and merch together.
A new game turns up with a logo, a mechanic and no history, and a band walks in with forty or fifty years of it, so the band is the stage set.
The Wheel That Needed No Help
Casino games made the same jump to screens, and most of them had a new game’s problem: nothing of their own that anyone recognised. Roulette was the exception. The wheel is a red and black circle with a ball running round it that you can read from the doorway, and the ritual of spin, pause and call fits on a screen without a riff or a mascot attached. There are two versions of online roulette, and they’re roughly the studio record and the live album: a wheel drawn by software, every spin a clean take, or a real wheel filmed on a studio table with a dealer who talks between spins. Neither lets you influence where the ball lands, which makes roulette the one game where the only skill involved is deciding what you can afford before you sit down. The pace of the game changed when it went online. The furniture didn’t, which is why it moved without a band’s name on the door.
When Slots Hired the Bands
Slots had the opposite problem. Reels aren’t much of a spectacle, so the industry did what Stern did and hired the bands. WMS put a KISS slot machine on the floor at the Las Vegas gaming expo in October 2012, with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons on hand to talk about bringing their classic rock to the casino floor, and Leander Games had released a Megadeth slot a month earlier after signing a licensing deal with the band in 2011. The songs play, the faces spin, and the game underneath is a slot like any other, one that could carry any licence.
Where This Goes
A band’s name has now been sold on a pinball backglass, a game cover, a Fortnite stage and a slot cabinet, and each time the band was what people recognised, which roulette never had to buy. The next interesting crossovers will look more like Hellsinger, where the music is the game and not the wrapping, and whatever follows Hellsinger, my guess is the wheel will still be spinning, unchanged, when it ships.
