Why Aerosmith's Video Games Are Better Than Their Music

Regardless of what you think of their music, there's no denying Aerosmith are nigh unparalleled trend jumping pop-portunists. Starting in the early '70s, they rode from Rolling Stones rip-off rock, to stadium rock, to Huey-Lewis and the News-style soundtrack rock, and clawed their way back to relevance by sucking the blood of Run DMC, and finally arrived at adult-contemporary permanence. To this day, Steven Tyler clings to the last floating detritus of our monoculture, as a judge on American Idol.

But, as it turns out, their savviest trend jump was the one to video games. Activision's chief executive Bobby Kotick was quoted in PC Mag as saying that Aerosmith's “version of Guitar Hero generated far more in revenues than any Aerosmith album ever has.” Not only did 3.6 million copies of the game sell over its first two years on the market, as Matt Novak wrote on Gizmodo's Factually blog, but its given another perky Botox shot to their saggy back catalog. "Merchandising, concert sales, their ability to sign a new contract [have] all been unbelievably influenced by their participation in Guitar Hero,” Kotick said.

I haven't played Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, but I'm 100 percent sure that I would love it. Even though I don't really feel strongly either way about their music, it combines my ardent love of Guitar Hero with my love of Aerosmith-related video games.

As good as it sounds, I can't totally believe this IGN review that says Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is “marginally more necessary than Revolution X ,” because Revolution X is fucking awesome.

Taking place in a dystopian 1996, Revolution X was a rail-gunner where CDs were your bullets, and LPs were your missiles. You mission was to shoot Aerosmith to freedom in order to, I think, save youth culture. It's worth noting that Steven Tyler was 48 in 1996. While I doubt I ever beat the game, I did spend many quarters on it while waiting for my mom to come pick me up from the movie theater or laser tag place.

So you can only imagine my delight to find this documentary on the making of Revolution X on Youtube. It appears to be recorded off of a VHS and includes the guys from Midway Games (RIP) pitching the game to Aerosmith via a video message. It's fantastic; I didn't want to close my eyes for fear of missing a thing while it played.

But just shy of a decade later, a less expensively made game, starring much less popular bands started the counter-revolution and this time the Boston rockers were the villains.

In 2002's the Emo Game, your job was to rescue the Get Up Kids from a Get Up kidnapping and some fairly explicit faux-8-bit sodomizing by Aerosmith. The game's contempt for Aerosmith is topped only by its contempt for Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carraba. In fact, the game overall is pretty contemptuous, but its take on my hometown of Omaha seems pretty affectionate: Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and Cursive's Tim Kasher can only be enticed to help with promises of alcohol.

The creator of the Emo Game has gone on to create an anti-Skrillex game, signaling the passing of music's pariah mantle.

I doubt Aerosmith knows about any of that, and I'm sure they don't care: They're the ones who told everyone to eat the rich, right? Depending on how you feel about Aerosmith, their jump to video games is either just the latest product from a band that's always been making products, even when some were songs, or its proof that their music is well that all generations happily will drink from. Either way, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry and whoever else is in Aerosmith can rest easy knowing that we've taken the admonition to “just push play” to heart.