Somewhere between a beat drop and a PlayStation startup sound, there’s VinceJG — music producer, video game dev, 3D artist, and nostalgia alchemist from Hopkins, South Carolina. His work sits at the triple intersection of PS1/PS2 aesthetics, hip hop culture, and DIY retrofuturism. And he’s reclaiming an era of gaming that really propelled hip hop forward in unprecedented ways.

During the reign of the PS1 & PS2, hip hop was levelling up. Not just through placement on soundtracks like Grand Theft Auto or NBA Street, but through full-blown AAA games centred on the music genre. 50 Cent Bulletproof, Def Jam Fight For NY, Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style - new forms of playable storytelling were emerging from the rap echelon of the day.

VinceJG’s “Press X To Play” series — a low poly revival project where iconic music videos are re-rendered with PS1/PS2-era graphics and narrative logic – isn’t just about nostalgia, it’s some kind of augmented archaeology. Hip hop music videos become their own games - imagining a world where every artist had access to their own PS1/PS2 AAA title. Ludacris bursts through walls like a final boss in Crash Bandicoot. Missy Elliot runs through planets like she’s in a lost Mega Man level (which was indeed the point). J Cole poses in the studio like a secret unlockable character in Tekken 5.

To understand its brilliance, you have to understand the era it’s built from.

The Dedicated Hip Hop Games

The PS1 & PS2 experienced their meteoric rise into mainstream culture at the same time as hip hop throughout the 90’s and 00’s. It was only logical to clash them together. While there are many to mention, these are three that really cut through.

In 1999, the Wu-Tang Clan dropped Shaolin Style — a full-fledged fighting game with every member of the group as playable characters. With its grimy visuals, kung-fu theatrics, and original soundtrack, it was rap mythology turned martial arts fantasy. The game was based on an unreleased game called Thrill Kill, a brutal brawler that was canceled for being too violent. Wu-Tang reskinned the entire thing. It even came with its own Wu-Tang shaped controller - which is a proper grail on the second hand market.

Fast-forward a few years and Def Jam: Fight for NY arrived. A gritty fighter that combined wrestling mechanics with street aesthetics and a who’s-who roster of hip hop royalty: Ghostface Killah, Snoop Dogg, Method Man, Ludacris – even Henry Rollins as your underground fight coach. Style, aggression, and soundtrack were all baked into the mechanics. The game included an in-depth character customisation system, letting players create a fighter with style, tattoos, jewelry, and voice tone, acting out the fantasy of joining Def Jam records that many teens once had.

Then came 50 Cent: Bulletproof — a game that let you play as 50 in a fictional New York underworld, complete with G-Unit sidekicks and a plot of revenge and redemption - a “black James Bond” of sorts (as the developers referred to it themselves). The game was based loosely on 50’s real-life survival of being shot 9 times, which was also released as a movie. ​​The screenplay was partly written by Terence Winter, a writer known for The Sopranos, adding an unusually cinematic storytelling angle for a mid‑2000s licensed title. Eminem and Dr. Dre both provided voice work for characters in the game, adding another layer of actual hip hop presence beyond 50 Cent himself. Despite panned reviews at launch — Metacritic sits in the low 50s — Bulletproof has since gained a cult nostalgic following, with players appreciating it as a time capsule of 2000s rap culture.

These weren’t just games with rappers in them. These were hip hop games. Games about the culture, shaped by the culture, sold to fans who didn’t want to just listen to their icons spit bars — they wanted to steer their stories.

The Soundtracks

If dedicated rap games were one side of the coin, the soundtrack revolution was the other. The PS2 era in particular was overflowing with titles that delivered curated hip hop experiences through in-game sound.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas deserves its own museum wing. With its sprawling open-world map, fictional West Coast lore, and Radio Los Santos pumping tracks from N.W.A., Ice Cube, and 2Pac, the game was a playable mixtape. Even if you didn’t trigger a single mission, you could cruise around in a lowrider, just listening to the antics of the radio hosts and their generationally defining music taste. Rockstar released a real-life multi-disc album of the game’s soundtrack, which charted on Billboard.

NBA Street and NFL Street weren’t just sports sims. They were stylised playground spectacles, each dunk or stiff-arm accompanied by the thump of underground tunes from Xzibit, Nappy Roots, and Lil Jon, capturing the crunk-heavy energy of early 2000s sports culture. The game leaned into street culture with no helmets, customizable gear, and flashy over-the-top play styles — like pulling off a somersault into the end zone, matching the macho energy of hip hop at the time.

SSX Tricky, while technically a snowboarding game, pushed the boundaries further — combining Y2K extreme sports with hip hop’s bravado. The pairing of Run DMC’s - It’s Tricky with SSX Tricky was a masterstroke. The song triggered during special tricks, heightening the adrenaline. It made the joystick feel like a turntable, scratching away as characters transformed into B-Boy’s and B-Girl’s, mid-air on their boards.

And of course, there were games like PaRappa The Rapper and Music 2000 that actually turned the player into the performer, which deservingly, has a whole piece on its own.

VinceJG and the Reboot of a Visual Language

Against this backdrop, VinceJG’s “Press X To Play” feels less like retro fan art and more like cultural restoration. Each PS1/PS2-style music video loop is a playable tribute to that golden fusion of hip hop and gaming. But it doesn’t stop at preservation. His visuals remix timelines, exaggerate tropes, and treat polygons as instruments of expression. Artists like Tyler, The Creator may not have made music videos in this era – but in the world of VinceJG, everyone can be booted up into the PS1/PS2 aesthetic, no matter the timeline.

VinceJG’s world bridges the vibe of Def Jam: Fight for NY, the cinematics of Bulletproof, and the modularity of San Andreas radio into a visual language all his own. The X button isn’t just a prompt to start. It’s a portal to a golden era that “once was” and “could have been” at the same time.

Today as AI engines like Genie3 generates music videos and games in eerily perfect form, VinceJG takes us back to a time when things were gloriously blocky, emotionally raw, and weird in all the right ways. Through his work, the cultural bond between hip hop and gaming isn’t just remembered, it’s reimagined.

So go ahead, Press X, and reboot a memory that’s half lived and half fantasy.

The gaming and style landscape can sometimes feel like a speedrun at 3 in the morning, in a dark room, seven Monster Energy’s deep. It’s forever on the move, but it’s elusive and erratic.

That’s why we’re introducing Save Points; an irregular format that captures recent gaming x style moments that might otherwise circumvent the memory card. In other words, it’s an ICYMI piece. Less analysis, more stock take.

Let’s dig in!

Timothée Chalamet, Modded Controller Merchant?

Timothée Chalamet had an unexpected past resurface as an…Xbox 360 controller modder? For the uninitiated, modding controllers is the gamer talk equivalent of tuning cars at the auto shop or even bedazzling your Motorola Razr at the slumber party. While modding enthusiasts can go deep (changing controller interfaces all together), Timmy kept it to aesthetics. He had his own YouTube channel called ModdedController360 where he sold custom painted Xbox 360 controllers - apparently making $30 bucks during this short lived hustle.

While this little nugget of internet fodder has been known for a while, the hustle mindset of his Marty Mauser character was the perfect moment to resurface this story in full editorialised form for W Magazine. Teaming up with Josh Safdie (director of Marty Supreme), Chalamet reimagined his life as a high stakes modded controller salesman. He goes by the name Shend and resides in Brighton Beach, where he lives with his mother. He has a pet rabbit named Otter and a day job as a doorman. But by night, he modifies controllers, which he sells out of the back of his car. Shend seems to be part fact, part fiction — a strange blend of Chalamet’s take on ping pong god Marty Mauser and Chalamet himself.

“I always like imagining alternate paths for Timmy,” Safdie told W. “Shend is inspired by a younger Timmy. A Timmy who had a YouTube channel where he tried to sell custom mod controllers. He saw money there.”

So you’re happy to talk smack on the opera and ballet - but the modding controller scene is totally fine huh? Interesting priorities Timmy.

Brain Dead x Adidas and the DDR-Inspired Launch

A small but lovely nod by Brain Dead x adidas to the step based rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution. For the release of their FW25 collaboration, the store transformed into an oversized competitive rhythm dance game where players move through custom difficulty modes on exclusive tracks from LA’s favourite sunshine boy, Toro Y Moi - the perfect personality for a DDR homage.

I feel brands have started to play it a bit too safe when it comes to video games. It’s all Roblox this, Fortnite that. Let’s not forget that there’s other games out there with deep fan bases! Dance Dance Revolution is one of these. When it came out in 1998, it ushered in a new era of foot-tapping gamers, fighting to keep rhythm with a soundtrack of pumping dance tracks in front of an arcade of onlookers. So many first dates, friendships and rivalries were experienced on these dance pads. Though the DDR arcade scene in the West has since died down, in Japan it still thrives. There’s a great VICE mini doc on it.

Puma Blue’s PS1 Music Video For Croak Dream

Puma Blue’s Croak Dream was described to GrabMyPepsi (the music video’s animator) as an “ambiguous dream where each member marked their ending without actually revealing if it would happen.” Feeling lost? Same. But the execution of it is a low poly beauty (something we love here at DD). GrabMyPepsi channeled games like Silent Hill, Final Fantasy and GTA from their childhood days on the PS1 to create foggy draw distances, lonely spaces and weird emptiness in this Croak Dream music video. I conducted a short interview over on Drawn Distant’s IG with GrabMyPepsi, go check it out if you’d like!

A$AP Rocky and the PS1 Bootleg Aesthetic

Speaking of low poly inspo, A$AP Rocky’s rollout of Don’t Be Dumb has been gleefully PS1-pilled. We already dove into the PaRappa the Rapper and GTA bootlegs in an earlier write up, but since then we’ve also spotted Syphon Filter-inspired artwork attached to “Stole Ya Flow,” and a Crazy Taxi-esque bootleg for “Black Demarco”. Similarly to Brain Dead’s DDR nod, Rocky’s bootlegs of these cult PS1 titles shows a level of fluency in gaming culture that the deeper fan appreciates. It’s a less “measurable” move than launching a skin on Fortnite or designing a game on Roblox, but that’s kind of the point. Sometimes you gotta just do it for the culture, not just the KPI!

.SWOOSH & The “Touch Grass” Slides

.SWOOSH have been clever in leaning into gamer lore and building products out of it. Just take their “Rage Quit” Total90’s or their “Big Head” Air Max 1’s - the former pokes fun at a poignant part of gamer culture where controllers get tossed at screens after losing, the latter is a niche multiplayer feature in Goldeneye’s 007 on the N64. Their “Touch Grass” ReactX Rejuven8 Slides are yet another nod to the gamer experience. While this term applies to anyone who spends too much time on the screen, the gamer very much overindexes here. As you can see above the pine green slide itself actually mimics the texture of grass, which enables the player to stay glued to their game while touching grass at the same time. Brilliant!.SWOOSH proves that to connect to gaming culture, you don’t always need to create or be inside a game. Great ideas also exists beyond the pixels.

And there you have it! I’ve spared you the lengthy, metaphor minefield of a conclusion on this one - something I tend to over indulge in. I hope you enjoyed it.

Keep a look out for these more casual Save Points pieces ongoing.

Drawn Distant is honoured to welcome its first guest editor - Samir Matanda (@sambuusam - Creative & Art Director at Highsnobiety). We joined up with our old friends at Sabukaru to release this one. Enjoy!

When most hear the word “gaming soundtracks” they’ll probably think about chiptune, FIFA pop hits or GTA underground bangers.

While all are valid, they have a very male centric demeanour to them. It ignores the fact that almost 50% of gamers today are female, and they might in fact be seeking out something different - something from a female perspective. According to Luminate, female gamers are +10% more likely to engage with music compared to males. Enter the female cinematic frontier of gaming OSTs.

THE NEW FRONTIER

Two of the best games of 2025 were led by great female vocalists. Caroline Polachek whispers you through a Death Stranding desert, Alice Duport-Percier draws you into a crypt shadowed hall of Clair Obscur Expedition 33.

Polachek’s voice sits in that uncanny space between opera warm up, club vocal and medieval hymn. In Kojima’s desert of body horror and broken delivery routes, she becomes the guide. When she leans into her vowel-bending runs and wordless lines, it feels like the game world is breathing along with her.

Duport-Percier does something different. Working with composer Lorien Testard, she gives the game a very European, art song energy. Clear diction, almost liturgical delivery, but looped and treated like a spell. Her vocals do not just sit on top of the orchestration. They sit in the stone. In the crypt. In the dust between each turn-based decision.

Where Polachek feels like a mirage, Duport-Percier feels like a curse you willingly walk toward.

Predecessors like Utada Hikaru (Kingdom Hearts) and Emi Evans (Nier: Automata) walked so these games today could run. Hikaru strength is in her clarity. Her melodies are simple, sugar-rush pop, but they smuggle in an emotional payload. Evans gives Nier: Automata a “chaos language” that does not exist, yet somehow feels more emotionally fluent than English or Japanese.

The effect each produces is always striking: surreal, vivid, and hauntingly purposeful. These female voiced OSTs now sit in the same cultural lane as prestige cinema scores and avant classical releases.

But they’re very different in craft.

WHAT GOES INTO CRAFTING A GAME OST

Film or TV scores are written to a locked picture. Once the edit is set, the composer paints between the lines. Gaming is the opposite.

Gaming follows a non-linear path where the player is the director of their character’s story. Rush the main quest, ignore side missions, spend three hours fishing, die ninety times on the same boss. The story stutters. Loops. Breaks.

This unpredictable nature requires scoring to breathe with every decision. Modern game OSTs are built as a system rather than a playlist. Every turn of events brings on a new sound. Layers fade in and out as you move through spaces. Combat cues ramp up as enemies spawn. This is why the lead vocal theme becomes the embodiment of the experience. In all that branching chaos, the lead vocal theme becomes the one fixed point. The soul of the game.

Increasingly, as a game studio wants a world that truly feels alive, emotional, mythic, and a little off-kilter, it enlists female vocalists like Polachek or Duport-Percier who can pull audiences beyond the screen, forging an unbreakable bond with the world itself. These voices become more than musical motifs. They act as the emotional GPS connecting players to lore and compelling fans to revisit OSTs as portals back into beloved worlds.

You might forget exact plot beats, but you remember how that chorus felt when the camera panned out over the ruined city, or closed in on some rare treasure discovered in a deep dungeon. That is why fans replay OSTs on streaming long after they finish the game.

It isn’t just nostalgia. It is re-entry. A way back in without necessarily playing.

HOW WE GOT HERE

This archetype of ethereal, atmospheric vocals is not native to gaming. It finds its origins in avant-pop, dream pop, and experimental electronic music of the late ’80s and ’90s.

Artists like Cocteau Twins and Björk pioneered airy textures and mysticism, layering emotion and a sense of place, qualities now fundamental to the modern interactive world of gaming. Björk pushed this idea even further in 2016 with ‘Björk Digital’ a series of VR inspired works inspired in part by videogames and their ability to let listeners ‘step inside’ sound. She treated music not as a soundtrack but a world, a concept the realm of gaming expands on. Music as space to inhabit, not just sound to hear. Perhaps unintentionally, Björk became an OST composer herself.

Anime then carried this vocal lineage into new heights, layering ethereal female vocals with digital textures and invented languages, crafting emotional narratives beyond game worlds themselves. Akino Arai’s haunting work in Macross Plus stands as an iconic example. As anime becomes one of the world’s most powerful cultural exports its sonic fingerprints travel with it, and naturally those traces flow straight into the inevitable bridge to gaming which is becoming impossible to ignore. Fandoms overlap, platforms are shared and suddenly a Kingdom Hearts theme tune is sitting next to a J-Pop single and an anime ending track on your Spotify daylist.

Gaming gave this sound a new function through narrative-first developers like Hideo Kojima, Yoko Taro, and the teams behind Kingdom Hearts who realized these vocals could activate worlds emotionally. As the SampleFocus Blog explains, research into psychoacoustics and vocal perception shows that our response to certain voices is rooted more in instinct than interpretation, largely because the human ear is naturally most sensitive in the 2–5 kHz band. Many of the harmonics and breathy overtones in these higher vocals land right in that pocket.

These brighter female-led tones carry a shimmer the brain reads as lifted or uncanny, the same quality that runs through sacred traditions from Gregorian and Byzantine chant to Ethiopian humans and Celtic folk songs.

Pure tone slips past analysis and goes straight to feeling.

DON’T BUILD SOUNDTRACKS, BUILD LIVING ECOSYSTEMS

Today’s players are not satisfied with “epic orchestral” wallpaper. They want worlds that feel authored, specific and personal. Games and music sit at the centre of pop culture, not at the edges, so the standards have shifted.

The fusion of ethereal female vocalists with fully realised digital worlds is becoming less of a niche and more of an expectation. For a whole cohort of players, this is what premium feels like.

This new era of female led OSTs isn’t about “soundtrack.” It’s “spellcraft.”

It conjures a world itself.

If you’d like to keep listening, here are some other OSTs with strong female vocals:

A$AP Rocky has been polishing some of his scratched PS1 discs and booting up some bootlegs.

So far for Rocky’s rollout for “Don’t Be Dumb”, we’ve been blessed with a Grand Theft Auto and PaRappa The Rapper spin off on his single cover art for Helicopter and Punky Rocky respectively. The connection between Rocky and GTA is clear (cue the “we got A$AP Rocky’s helicopter before GTA 6” jokes). But PaRappa The Rapper is a more subtle move. A cult classic that runs deep in the hip hop world, but doesn’t quite get granny all flustered like GTA does.

So what’s the significance behind PaRappa?

PaRappa Was a Music Game Before “Music Games” Had a Language

In the mid-90s — around the time A$AP was probably playing his first video games — the idea of console music was mostly about background detail. But as hip hop was really taking global shape, especially in countries like Japan, something new was cooking. Masaya Matsuura (a Japanese hip hop producer turned game-maker) came up with a concept that was deceptively radical at the time: turn sampling in hip hop into an actual game.

Matsuura was fascinated by the culture of sampling in hip-hop, something that was being revolutionised by the likes of DJ Premier, Q-Tip and Pete Rock just to name a few. It was likely influencing A$AP around the same time it was influencing Matsuura - one saw a rap career, the other saw a rap video game.

Hip hop was already teaching the world how to chop, loop, repeat, remix, respond. Matsuura essentially asked: what if the controller could do that too?

PaRappa the Rapper is a rhythm game about an anxious, big-hearted pup in an orange beanie who’s trying to level up in life the only way he knows how: by rapping through it. Across a series of absurd, everyday challenges, like learning karate, baking a cake, and driving, PaRappa trades lines with eccentric “teachers” (like Chop Chop Master Onion) in call-and-response battles, and you have to match their rhythm and cadence to keep the song going. It turned the PS1 controller into an Akai MPC of sorts (the beacon of sampling culture in hip hop).

The PS1 as a Beat Machine (and Why Hip Hop Noticed)

This is where PaRappa becomes more than a cult nostalgia play from A$AP Rocky - the game helped normalise the idea that games could be music tools, not just music containers. Consoles were getting more sophisticated - why couldn’t the next era of producers start on a PlayStation instead of a Roland 808?

You can draw a line from PaRappa’s playful performance loop to later “sampler-style” console creativity, including Music 200/MTV’s Music Generator on PS1.

That matters because those games weren’t just for messing around. They became entry points. Bedroom studios before bedroom studios were a cliché. The kind of software that taught people how to build patterns, structure loops, and think in bars from the familiarity of a PlayStation controller. For a lot of future artists and producers, that was the first moment the screen stopped being a place to watch and became a place to make.

Artists like Skepta, JME, Dizzie Rascal and Big KRIT have all attested to using Music 2000/MTV Music Generator in their early careers to make their first beats.

Why Rocky’s PaRappa Reference Hits Harder Than GTA

GTA reinstates A$AP’s perennial dominance in the mainstream conversation. PaRappa says he’s fluent in the subtext. It’s a deeper cut that signals lineage, not necessarily fandom. It points to the part of gaming culture that didn’t just entertain hip hop, it quietly helped build it: the idea that a controller could turn into a sampler, a console could become a beat machine, that rhythm could be learned through muscle memory, that “making” could start in your bedroom with a controller.

A$AP is tipping his hat to a foundational idea in hip hop: that the tools change, the interface changes, but the mindset stays the same. Chop it up. Make it yours. Always keep them guessing.

If modern cinema is a 4K IMAX thrill ride, then the work of FersetID is the scratched-up bootleg PS1 CD passed around between your cousins. It’s that strange alchemy of lo-fi textures and deep emotion, of jagged nostalgia shaped into new meaning. And it’s all part of a rising subculture best understood through one retro-futurist act of rebellion: the demake.

Demaking is what happens when you don’t upscale, you downplay. You take Elden Ring and squeeze it into a Game Boy cartridge. You give Kratos from God Of War a square jaw so large it could store a save file. And lately, you take classic films, from Spirited Away to Blade Runner, and run them through the PS1/N64 aesthetic like a faulty VHS that’s seen one too many school sleepovers.

It’s more than a gimmick. It’s a growing creative language. One where modders and artists alike use the visual grammar of retro games, low-res textures, polygonal characters and MIDI mood boards to add another layer to stories we’ve heard a thousand times. It’s meme and memory, glitch and homage. And no one is doing it quite like FersetID.

FersetID’s Films Feel Like Booting Up a Memory

A self-proclaimed “beginner” who didn’t touch Blender seriously until 2023, Colombian artist FersetID has quickly become one of the most distinctive voices in the low poly art scene. His work is what happens when cinema goes through puberty in a low poly graphics engine.

He began, humbly, by playing with memes, building short animations that mashed retro stylings with viral culture. But soon, the itch grew deeper: what if the polygonal nostalgia of gaming could be a vessel for cinematic reverence? What if you didn’t just demake games, you demade films?

From Whiplash to Home Alone, Paprika to The Matrix, FersetID recreates iconic scenes with glitchy shadows, blocky stares, and grainy Spanish subtitles. “I’m Colombian, and my native language is Spanish. In old video games, translations were mostly done through text and subtitles, keeping the original audio. When I recreate movies as if they were retro games, I’m simulating that feeling of having the game translated into Spanish,” says FersetID.

These aren’t pixel-perfect re-creations. They’re PS1-daydreams of the films he (and we) love, imagined not with a director’s polish but with a player’s passion.

And that’s the point. “I consider myself a beginner,” he told us, “because I didn’t formally learn animation techniques… Everything I know is self-taught.” This unpolished, intuitive approach bleeds into the work. The camera lingers too long. The lighting flickers. The audio crackles. But this roughness is what makes the work feel.

Where Meme Meets Museum

There’s something undeniably funny about a squashed looking J.K. Simmons yelling at you from a N64-style drum kit. But there’s also something poignant. These low poly remakes live in the uncanny valley between comedy and craft, where Fight Club becomes fan art and Pulp Fiction gains a glitchy tenderness.

Cinematic demakes straddle an unusual space: too sincere to be parodies, too playful to be museum pieces. FersetID asks the question: What if Clockwork Orange was an RPG cutscene? What if Spirited Away was playable on a battered disc found in a Colombian secondhand market stall?

And in doing so, they don’t just remix culture, they revive it. Films that might feel dusty to a younger generation become fresh when re-rendered as playable memories. Akira becomes something you want to click. Paprika gets the low poly start screen it never had.

Demaking the Future

Demakes are not just an act of nostalgia, they’re a creative constraint that births new ideas. And as FersetID pushes further into indie games and short films he’s carving a new path forward for low poly machinima.

In an age of AI photorealism and infinite GPU render farms, the handmade blockiness of demake art feels almost rebellious. It reminds us that imagination doesn’t need 8K photo realism — just a good scene, some Blender hacks, and a deep love for the story.

So, what comes next? More artists may follow in FersetID’s footsteps, applying retro gaming logic to other cultural icons: reality TV, fashion campaigns (see Mowalola), or even music videos (see VinceJG). The demake is becoming a style, not just a subgenre, one that trades gloss for grit, resolution for resonance.

Because sometimes, when everything in this world charades as being real, it’s the blatantly fake stuff that hits hardest.

This article originally appeared as a feature on Sabukaru.

The original article appears here on The Face.

Martine Rose just wandered into a 1999 Counter Strike internet café and turned it into her atelier.

Her new Nike collection looks like something pulled from a dial-up fever dream: comfy tracksuits built for hours of chair swivelling, remixed SS15 clobber from her own brand, new Shox trainer colourways, and of course, reimagined football kits in three colourways to keep things cool in a room of overheated PCs. “We started looking at nineties LAN parties where teenagers would take PCs to each other’s houses for all night gaming sessions, where they would watch each other play. When we were looking at the research images, it was very much tracksuits and comfortable silhouettes,” says Rose. Martine has joined the LAN party, and she’s not the only one on the server.

Earlier this year, Coperni ditched the classic runway and hosted a swathe of gamers for a LAN party instead, where the collection was unveiled and amplified by the screen glow of numerous monitors. Guests were seated between 200 gamers playing Fortnite, as Amelia Gray and Iris Law weaved in and out of players inside the Adidas Arena. Back in 2020, Vetements x Reebok styled an entire drop around the same concept. Somewhere between irony and sincerity, fashion has discovered an unexpected interest: the LAN party.

@thefacemagazineIt’s all to play for at the @coperni show 🎮 #gamingontiktok #coperni #parisfashionweek #fortnite

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The Church of Ethernet

For the uninitiated, a LAN party – short for Local Area Network – was a popular form of multiplayer gaming in the ’90s/’00s. Friends would lug their CRT monitors over, tangled in a web of Ethernet cables, and spend entire weekends connected through spaghetti wiring, sugar highs and mutual sleep deprivation.

LAN parties were equally chaotic and iconic. It gave birth to internet legends like the Duct-Tape Gamer. Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs even threw their own LAN party on the plane flight home from winning the 1999 NBA Finals. Ain’t no party like a LAN party.

In the dim glow of cathode rays, players formed micro-societies. Someone always knew how to troubleshoot the modem. Someone always broke it. Rivalries, alliances, a dozen friends sharing bandwidth and banter, all within the four walls of a living room. It’s easy to see why fashion’s falling for it. The LAN party aesthetic is aggressively unglamorous: towers humming, cords snaking across the carpet, snack debris everywhere, niche jokes. But that’s exactly its allure. These messy environments provide inspiration to brands like Martine Rose, Coperni and Vetements that have always looked to the unexpected corners of culture for source material.

Beyond the visual mess, there’s philosophy in it. A LAN party is built on connection. Literal cables, but also the emotional kind. “It’s this sort of democracy of gaming that I really like, anyone can play; if you’re good enough, you’re just good enough. It doesn’t matter your age, background, gender, there’s no requirement other than that you’re good at your craft. I find that really compelling and inclusive and ultimately inspiring. People find themselves there, they find their people,” says Rose. For fashion houses obsessed with “community” as marketing currency, the metaphor writes itself. Pockets of time spent in less than picture-perfect hangouts have become a rarity in today’s climate of TikTok-perfectly curated videos and aesthetically pleasing social media haunts. What’s a LAN party if not a prototype for an invite-only launch event? Same exclusivity, slightly different snacks perhaps. Although, if anyone is going to turn Cheetos into a small plate dish, it’s Vetements.

Did You Try Turning It Off & On Again?

By the mid-2000s, broadband internet and publisher-hosted servers made the LAN party obsolete. Why haul twenty kilos of hardware when you can just log on from home? The gatherings shrank, the modems stuttered, and the world moved to broadband. Multiplayer went massive, but something was lost. The side-eye glances, the shared lag, the warmth of ten central processing units (the computer’s brain) overheating in unison.

And now, LAN culture is experiencing a renaissance.

In the age of fiber optics and online fatigue, people are nostalgic for proximity. Gamers who grew up on Discord are rediscovering the joy of actually sitting next to someone. Lightweight monitors, gaming laptops, and portable routers mean hosting a LAN party today is as easy as texting “bring Haribo’s.”

On a bigger level, conventions like DreamHack – a renowned global gaming festival – continue to attract tens of thousands of gamers to join one big LAN party annually. And Esports training and competition facilities often use LAN networks to keep their face-offs in house and minimise latency.

It’s no surprise that Martine Rose and Coperni have chosen the LAN Party in 2025 as muse, riding its redemption arc. “I’ve always been interested in finding the corners of mainstream cultures and shining a light on that and this was an opportunity to do that. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot,” says Rose. Forever the subcultural scaler, she has clashed the mass and niche together, pairing Esports titans like Ana (Counter Strike champion) with arcade legends like Billy Mitchell (previous record holder of the highest ever Donkey Kong score). “The casting process was really similar, we worked with Isabel Bush again, and we wanted to get a range of different gamers from all backgrounds and who played different styles of games. We ultimately wanted to represent as many different people as possible.”

The visuals move between gamer-mag cover stars to snaring ethernet cables as shoe displays. She treats the LAN party as both an artifact and allegory. It’s about tech with fingerprints. Human error as aesthetic. A reminder that the best networks aren’t always wireless.

Beyond The Basement: Where to Next for Fashion?

The LAN party could be just one checkpoint in a much bigger game. The idea of multiplayer – couch co-ops, arcade meets – is an under-explored territory.

The industry has done many other things when it comes to games, with Balenciaga perhaps being the best example. The maison creates their own platform runners with BFRND, they’ve turned a runway into a role playing game with Afterworld: The Age Of Tomorrow, they’ve referenced Candy Crush in their lookbooks. But most of these projects exist as isolated experiences. None fully embraced the sweaty, joyful absurdity of people actually playing together. “It’s a new lens of how we view sport, I’m interested in expanding that lens,” says Rose.

Imagine a runway show crossed with a couch co-op session. Or a pop-up built like an Akihabara games arcade, each machine skinned and reimagined to mimic an SS26 show. The logic of multiplayer is simple: participation is the product.

Because honestly, the “drinks and DJ” showcase formula is boring. Audiences want to interact, munch a burger and moan about the jobs they hate but won’t quit with a controller in their clutches. The LAN party’s revival isn’t nostalgia, it’s blueprint. Proof that connection can still be physical, funny, and a bit awkward. In the end, fashion’s latest crush on LAN culture isn’t about the clothes necessarily. It’s about the company it creates. And as any gamer will tell you, the match is much more dynamic when everyone’s in the same room.

Fishstick and Leonardo DiCaprio walk onto an island together… sounds like the start of a bad joke. Or some cursed Reddit fan fiction.

But no, it’s actually a game on Fortnite.

Did anyone expect Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another to appear in Fortnite? Probably not. What about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners? Also no. And yet, there they are. And they’re not going to be the last.

What business does an indie-adjacent film have showing up on Fortnite? A lot of Letterboxd folk are likely screaming ABSOLUTELY NOTHING at their screens right now (I kinda did too).

But things are changing.

Studios like A24 and Mubi have rewritten the rulebook on what counts as “indie” or “mainstream,” blurring the lines to make box-office behemoths that feed both the chin-scratching cinephile and the popcorn crowd. So much so that Marvel films are now borrowing tactics from A24. Meanwhile, indie-adjacent films like One Battle After Another and Sinners are borrowing from juggernauts like Star Wars.

Star Wars and Fortnite make sense: two mega-fandoms, one giant battle, a roster of intergalactic icons — the crossovers make sense. What about Michael B. Jordan shooting zombies alongside a guy in a banana suit? Less obvious, but undeniably scroll-stopping, which is kind of the point.

Fortnite’s plastic avatars and hyper-rendered worlds are a far cry from the layered costumes, heavy lighting, and tonal subtlety of a Coogler or PTA film. But that dissonance becomes the message. Running around as Leo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson somehow brings you closer to the goofiness of the character he plays. Mowing down zombies in Sinners: Survive The Night as Gut Bomb provides the kind of comic relief people crave after the film’s slow-burn dread. In other words, these studios are building worlds around their films for audiences who might have missed them otherwise.

It also shows how fragmented the traditional film-promo circuit has become. Once upon a time, it was simple: trailer → festival → talk-show → interview → release. Now it’s flexing music cred with Nardwuar, bro-ing out with Theo Von, clowning with Brittany Broski, riding a Lime bike onto a red carpet, and somehow calling Ohio’s win over Miami on College Game Day — then a film release (that is, if you’re Timothée Chalamet promoting A Complete Unknown). In this scattershot ecosystem, Fortnite suddenly feels logical

Video-game adaptations of films aren’t new. GoldenEye 007 on the N64, often called one of the best games ever made, was an adaptation. Some games even outshine their films: X-Men Origins: Wolverine scored higher with fans for sticking closer to the comics.

Traditionally, studios rolled these games out as sustain tactics, ways to keep profits rolling after the credits. Now the funnel’s flipped. Games arrive before the films, and it’s not just the blockbusters doing it. A24’s got arcade-style big-button cabinets landing ahead of The Smashing Machine. The energy of the film channeled into one cathartic button-slam. These moves acknowledge a truth: gaming rules the entertainment hierarchy for younger audiences.

And while even I’ll admit that seeing technically brilliant films like One Battle After Another and Sinners rendered in Fortnite feels weird, there’s one silver lining you can always trust games to deliver: responsive exploration. Something static media like film can’t match. On One Battle After Another’s creator island, you can spot nods to Anderson’s entire filmography — Phantom Thread graffiti, Magnolia Drive road signs, a Boogie Nights star, a “Licorice Pie” store (Licorice Pizza). Emerging fans are learning his world through play.

Maybe it wasn’t how PTA envisioned it, but… Goddamn it. Viva la revolución.

Rage quitting in video games is a poignant part of the culture. Controllers take flight, consoles meet their maker, screens go static. The pure drama of these episodes has become somewhat of a genre. And a popular genre at that. Streamers know it. Even Nike knows it.

If anyone can turn a left field genre into a cultural lane, it is A24. They did it in film. They are nosing into music. Now video games feel inevitable. We’ve heard that Elden Ring and Death Stranding are getting their own adaptation, but the spicier play is actually making games. Enter The Smashing Machine 2000, a game built to provoke pride, panic, and the kind of button mashing that makes a room go quiet for a second. It’s A24’s take on rage culture, ported to a flash game and arcade booth (on Canal St in NYC).

Arcade culture persists because it does one thing other gaming formats struggle to deliver: consequence you can feel. Buttons thunk. Time runs out. Someone behind you laughs while counting your last lives. Arcade cabinets force bodies into proximity. The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie) is a film that focuses on the wrestler’s body, and the trials and tribulations it can endure. The Smashing Machine 2000 understands that gravity. It is not only a promo beat. It is an environment where performance, failure, and bravado can be delivered by a one button smash.

Drawn Distant spoke with Maria Vorbjova, Stefan Cohen and Blake Andrews - creators of The Smashing Machine 2000.

What concept was behind the game design for The Smashing Machine?

BLAKE: Training is a large part of The Smashing Machine’s plot. We thought it would be more fun to do something kind of out of left field, but still a representation of the themes of the movie. We also knew we would be focusing on a game both for mobile and a physical cabinet. I love arcade games with unique/iconic controllers, but making something that has to be on both platforms made me consider what could have an iconic feeling. The movie is called The Smashing Machine, which has a brutal and simple feeling, so just having one large button per player is both not too clever, but it also helps the game stand apart from things like Bishi Bashi or the Rhythm Heaven arcade game, which we are fans of.

MARIA: The visual direction is a medley of early internet flash games and late-90s/early-2000s console and arcade aesthetics inspired from the period and location of the movie. We leaned into a kind of intentional mismatch, so that it doesn’t strictly replicate any one platform but instead channels the vibe of that era. I was experimenting with that one-point-perspective faux 3D look. For Mark’s character, we were inspired by blocky low-poly wrestlers in titles like Virtual Pro Wrestling 2, and WWF No Mercy. And in terms of UI, we loved the playful, slightly odd graphics and palettes in games like No One Can Stop Mr. Domino! and Bishi Bashi.

Why did you fixate on this particular style of video game graphics?

STEF: Aside from all of us being massive fans of this art style, the film takes place in the 2000’s Japan so we’re trying to be as authentic to that and the vision Benny and A24 had for the aesthetic. We thought to ourselves, ‘what would this game really look and feel like if it was made by a Japanese game studio in 1999/2000?’

A24 excels at producing films that give a very specific feeling. Did you try and channel a certain feeling when making this game?

BLAKE: I like to think of games situationally, like where will people be playing it and how. While the game is on mobile and web, my intended experience is for the in person event, which is something I am used to. While the game is fun on the phone, I have noticed with some games, people perform while playing them. I’m just imagining fans of The Rock and Mark Kerr trying to hulk out and smash the huge button on the arcade cabinet. I made the game a smidge too hard, to encourage people to rage out. I want someone at the pop-up to completely lose their cool and break the cabinet in competition. Maybe if someone gets salty and loses, they punch the screen. Maybe someone will flip over and break the cabinet. One time, I brought a game to a playtest event at NYU and someone slammed on my keyboard and the computer shut off. I’m not encouraging any of this, I just hope it’s an emergent property of the game.

STEF: Our main goal was also really to try and transport players to the year and setting that the movie takes place in. So from the website design, to the soundtrack and sfx, to the game itself we tried to create an experience so accurate to playing web games in the year 2000 that it causes confusion in people. We want people to genuinely think this is an old game lost to time that has magically resurfaced.

MARIA: The movie is shot on VHS, 16mm, and 65mm. The 16mm has this beautifully grainy, textured quality while the 65mm has more precise, striking clarity. I think our game has a similar kind of juxtaposition - a low-res, low-poly game, designed primarily for modern screens, with VHS filtered cutscenes. For the textures I pulled directly from film environments, reworking backgrounds into the game with dithering and aliasing. I think the grit, pixels, all these analog artifacts are what gives it that emotionally immersive and atmospheric tone.

If you’re in New York on October 2nd or 3rd, check out The Smashing Machine 2000 alongside plenty of other Japanese arcade games at 305 Canal Street.

This is a collaborative piece with Chris Morency of DotDotDot, following on from an original piece with Ana Andjelic on The Sociology of Business.

Gaming is one of the most important cultural territories to be in today - we’ve established this.

But many brands are still sleeping on it. We get it - it’s a confusing space. There are Gorillaz running around in Fortnite. HIDDEN.NY is digging deep into the archives, making a collection around a 25 year old game called Jet Set Radio. Kids are “stealing a brain-rot” on Roblox. Huh?

As a marketing extraordinaire, burying your head in the pixelated sand is no longer an option. Why?

Roblox – the platform “for kids” – has recently reported a 54% YoY growth in the 13+ category, which means the audience is ageing into spend - both digitally and physically. Video game film and TV adaptations are rumoured to be replacing the Marvel Cinematic Universe in budget attention.

Meanwhile, Yu-Gi-Oh x Nike just took over the entire gaming and anime-verse - once again proving that anime is more than just a trend, it’s a mainstay amongst Gen Z and Alpha. All the while side quests continue to make their way off platform into the cultural zeitgeist - just ask those who clamoured and clawed their way to Corteiz’s 24hr Subway take over in New York.

The time to have a gaming strategy was yesterday. But don’t worry, we’ve got you.

Ask an Expert

Now, we could try to convince you ourselves why having a long-term gaming strategy will do more for a brand’s bottom line than almost any campaign, collaboration, or investment into hospitality or design (fields many brands have recently branched into), but we feel you’ll need to hear it from an even bigger expert.

Therefore we spoke with Charles Hambro, Founder of GEEIQ, a data platform and insights provider that empowers brands to create long-term strategies and make data-led investments in virtual worlds.

Hambro has been behind some of the biggest gaming and fashion integrations to date. GEEIQ has ushered Gucci, Versace, Coach and Givenchy through the elusive world of video games. We spoke to him to pressure-test what’s working, what’s waste, and where fashion brands still trip over their own digital dresses.

We’ve broken it across three fault lines:

• Org design: Is it worth building a separate gaming department?

• UGC platforms: Should you join creators inside 3D social, or build your own?

• Collaborations: Central growth engine or just special projects?
  

Spoiler: there’s no cheat code, just better questions, tighter objectives, and the discipline to iterate. You’ve reached the loading screen; now let’s gear up for the long, twisty, highly rewarding main quest.

Read more

By now, you’ve probably heard it all: “Gaming is the new social media.” “Gen Z and Gen Alpha spend more time in games than on TikTok.” “Gaming is bigger than the film and music industry combined.” Cue the headline ticker, cue the CMO nodding cautiously while someone says “metaverse” again hoping that doesn’t mean they have to dust off the half baked NFT strategy from 2021.

And yet, when it comes to actual marketing strategy? Gaming still gets treated like a flashy side quest — a brand stunt, a Q4 wildcard, a “break glass in case” we don’t resonate with those pesky Zoomers. It’s where ideas go when someone wants to try something fun, not drive business impact.

Let’s be clear: gaming isn’t confined to button mashing anymore. It is the moment. Want to join an ICE protest in LA but you live elsewhere? Try Roblox. Dying to see Sabrina Carpenter but her tour doesn’t stop in your home town? Try Fortnite.

Gaming is a fully-fledged media channel with persistent reach, proven conversions, and cultural spillover that would make a Super Bowl ad blush.

So why are brands still acting like it’s a novelty?

Triple-A Games And The Data Desert

While the impact of gaming is undeniable, the measurement of it has historically been elusive. Tracking a campaign through Meta, TikTok or YouTube? Then you have state of the art insights tools at your disposal. Tracking a campaign inside a Triple A video game? Well…not as seamless.

“The Gentle Monster x Tekken collab was a cultural uppercut — but did it hit below the line? Without readily available tracking, it’s hard to say.

Why is this? Deep brand integrations into games is still a relatively recent phenomenon. Of course, we’ve had clunky “advergames” (turned surprising cult classics) like Pepsi Man on the PS1 back in. We even saw Obama ads inside of MADDEN 09, NASCAR and Burnout back in 2009.

Commercials in games is nothing new, but organic brand immersion via skins, mini-games, experiences and collaborations - this has only been happening at scale for the last 5-10 years, so a lot of Triple A games are still playing catch up.

But things are changing.

Roblox – the bellwether of gaming brand integrations – continues to build out a comprehensive suite of tracking tools with major partners like Nielsen, Google and Shopify. Fortnite just recently announced their own open data API - a game that has typically favoured finger in the wind measurement over deep insights. Industry leaders like GEEIQ offer full-funnel marketing dashboards that go beyond standard metrics of clickability and viewership - helping brands make clearer decisions about what games are right for them and why.

Games are reacting to their role as social media platforms, and building the tools to complement. So how do brands boot up?

Building With One Block(buster) At A Time

When it comes to getting started, the proven move is to go direct to Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft. And why wouldn’t you? They’re bonafide ecosystems with loyal fanbases, built-in creator economies, and enough cultural cross-pollination to power the next wave of memes, music and merch. Brands shouldn’t just integrate into these platforms, they should find ways to break them open. Free the NPC!

Take Roblox’s Grow A Garden — a farming sim turned youth culture monolith. In June 2025, it pulled in a record-breaking 21 million concurrent players, more than Fortnite (at the time), and more than the top five games on Steam combined. It has a sea of TikTok content and a thriving secondary marketplace. It’s only a matter of time before we see a BRAT-esque brand integration like we saw last year with Roblox’s game-du-jour of 2024 - Dress To Impress.

Fortnite isn’t just attracting global musicians like Ice Spice and Sabrina Carpenter inside the game, it’s incubating their own. Billboard chart-topping artist D4VD got his first fans inside Fortnite. Now he’s headlining Coachella. Imagine nurturing a creative talent like this as they rise beyond the Battle Royale?

These platforms aren’t self-contained. They echo outwards. What happens in-game doesn’t stay in-game — it hits TikTok, red carpets, runways, and radio. Engaging here isn’t about being in a game — it’s about becoming a catalyst for the culture that forms around it.

Thinking Outside The Blox: Cult Games, Cult Fandoms, Cult Conversions

Much like music and film, gaming has its blockbusters — and its cult classics. The best of the best are both. While Roblox and Fortnite are easy wins for reach, the deeper layers of gaming (and their titles) hold their own marketing power. These aren’t just games — they’re IP incubators.

The Last of Us proved that cinematic storytelling in games can fuel prestige TV. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s soundtrack broke into the Billboard Classical Albums chart with 18M+ streams and a top 15 download debut.

Even A24 — high priest of indie film cool — is getting in on the action, announcing an Elden Ring adaptation with Alex Garland. When the arbiters of niche culture start investing in fantasy dungeon crawlers, it’s a sign that there’s something bigger at play.

These titles have fandoms that run deep, the kind of energy marketers dream of. While they may not have the readily accessible measurement tools that the game-come-social-media-platform types like Roblox and Fortnite do, they offer brands a chance to show up in unexpected, meaningful ways.

Cult Meets Commercial: The Brand Getting It Right

Nike’s .SWOOSH: The Gaming Multiverse

Nike hasn’t just dipped its toe into gaming, it dove in headfirst with its sneakers still on. After sunsetting its NFT experiment RTFKT, Nike repositioned .SWOOSH away from a Web3 project into a cross-platform gaming strategy.

In 2024 alone, Nike:

• Signed Kai Cenat as their first ever gaming streamer, making him the face of the Nike Air Max Low Poly 1’s.

• Partnered with Fortnite as the launch partners of KICKS - their fully fledged footwear marketplace.

• Created a dedicated Nike stadium inside EA FC 25, pushing the boundaries of what a football stadium could be.

• Created the Foamposite One Tekken 8 Jin Kazama for the legacy gamers.

SWOOSH doesn’t treat gaming like a cameo. It takes the lead role. They build presence across multiple titles, using gaming not just for eyeballs — but for storytelling, engagement, and digital wearables that convert. It’s a balance between cult and commercial - something akin to Nike’s overall business strategy.

Don’t Just Game the System. Build One.

It’s understandable why some marketers have hesitated with gaming. Development sounds expensive. Measurement once felt murky. ROI into real world commercial success has been a grey zone. But we’ve come a long way.

Building a creator island in Fortnite now has the same trackability as a YouTube pre-roll or a paid IG post. The metrics are here. The tools exist. The audience is already playing.

A recent McKinsey report shows that console and PC gaming deliver exceptional attention value. It’s the only digital medium that gets close to live levels of focus (high focus: 73%), far higher than other forms of video-based content like streaming video (57%).

So stop treating gaming like a flash-in-the-pan experiment. Build the damn department. Make it a real channel in your marketing mix.

Build a good ad? People might share it for a few weeks.

Build a good game? People might play it for a few years.

So stop hiring the pixel stuntman for that Q4 Hail Mary. Make them the main character.

You could almost call the PlayStation a console with detachment issues.

Born from a very public breakup between Sony and Nintendo in the early ’90s, the PlayStation was forged in corporate betrayal. Originally it was supposed to be CD-ROM hardware feature of the upcoming Nintendo 64. But at the 1991 CES trade show, Nintendo blindsided Sony by announcing it would be partnering with Philips instead.

It was a pixelated soap opera.

Sony, wounded but not defeated, took its prototype home and built the PlayStation from the ashes. The betrayal became the birthmark. Ghosted by its first love, it went solo. And in doing so, it embraced an attitude that was something rare in the world of electronics: a genuine outlaw, seeking revenge.

Apparently revenge is best served plugged in.

When PlayStation finally hit shelves in 1994, it didn’t just offer a different kind of machine—it offered a different kind of fantasy. Where Nintendo sold childhood nostalgia and SEGA leaned into speed and attitude, Sony saw the pixelated pubescent dreams of teens becoming twentysomethings — and they weren’t being served. The industry was still stuck in a rumpus room at their parents house.

Sony saw the vacuum—and lit a match.

Games for Grown-Ups, and Grown-Ups in Games

PlayStation’s launch wasn’t just technical; it was spiritual. It was a rejection of the old guard. The system's grey, angular design looked like alien tech compared to the playful curves of Nintendo’s consoles. But it was the games that really carved out its outlaw image. Gone were the bouncy plumbers and hedgehogs. In came the criminals, the outcasts, the freaks.

Grand Theft Auto, initially a top-down, chaotic sandbox of crime and nihilism, found its home and audience on PlayStation. Fear Effect, with its cel-shaded noir aesthetic and sexually fluid protagonists, was another slap in the face to the safe, kid-friendly status quo. These weren’t just games—they were provocations. And, naturally, they sparked outrage. American parents in the ’90s clutched their pearls and remote controls, panicked by the idea that digital thievery and pixelated promiscuity were melting their children's minds (which was later debunked). The PlayStation became the poster child for moral panic.

But this rebellion wasn’t just about edge. It was also about expression. Sony’s more open developer policy allowed space for weird, wonderful experiments. LSD: Dream Emulator, for example, was less a game and more a guided hallucination, designed by multimedia artist Osamu Sato. Inspired by his actual dream diary—and possibly a few tab drops—it was part Dadaist art piece, part nightmare simulator. It barely made sense, but it made a statement: the PlayStation was a canvas for the strange.

This was the seed of the indie explosion, years before it had a name. The PlayStation showed that games didn’t have to be clean, cute, or coherent to matter.

Sex, Drugs, and Loading Screens

PlayStation’s rogue status wasn’t just in the games—it was in the way it sold itself. Its ads in the late ’90s and early 2000s didn’t whisper; they screamed. They weren’t shy about leaning into counterculture, using glitchy visuals, surreal storytelling, and strong suggestions of altered states. Some ads were down right Lynchian: unsettling, cryptic, oozing with subliminal anxiety. Others were punk manifestos in miniature.

One 1999 commercial featured a disembodied female head talking in a bizarre accent while the camera zoomed into her face like a bad acid trip. Another print ad promised: “Do not underestimate the power of PlayStation” next to a man seemingly mid-orgasm. These weren’t just marketing stunts—they were declarations. PlayStation wasn’t here to babysit. It was here to blow your mind.

This wasn’t just iconoclasm for its own sake — it was targeting. Young adults, freshly independent, fresh off the Super Nintendo, were craving entertainment that felt made for them. Sony delivered with ads that flirted with psychedelia, sexuality, and the surreal. It wasn't just a brand—it was a vibe.

From Console to Cultural Collab King

If the ’90s were about burning down the old house, the 2010s were about buying a bigger one and inviting your coolest friends over. As the PlayStation brand matured, it didn’t lose its edge—it stylized it. No longer just a rebellious teenager, it became a taste-making young adult. And like all good influencers, it started collaborating.

PlayStation’s collabs with fashion and lifestyle brands — Nike, Balenciaga, BAPE and Parisian concept store Colette — weren’t just cash grabs. They were aesthetic extensions of the brand’s outlaw ethos. Streetwear and PlayStation were both rooted in youth rebellion, in curating identity against the mainstream. Whether on a sneaker or a DualShock controller, the PS logo became a symbol of subcultural fluency.

And this wasn’t just marketing synergy. It was legacy. The kids who grew up skipping cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid are now adults buying limited-edition PlayStation x Balenciaga hoodies for the same reason they once bought cheat code books: because it felt like being in on something.

Still Not a Role Model

Now, in a gaming landscape dominated by streaming platforms, algorithmic discoverability, and AI-generated everything, it’s tempting for legacy brands like PlayStation to go corporate. To clean up. To play nice. But if PlayStation wants to remain relevant, it has to stay messy. Stay strange.

The outlaw spirit doesn’t mean always being edgy—it means always being unpredictable. It means continuing to support the oddballs, the dream emulators, the narratives too strange for Netflix. It means finding the new frontier before anyone else realises it’s there—and making it yours.

In an age of content, PlayStation still has the chance to be culture.

And if that means getting into a little more trouble? Well—good.

When I visited the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum last year in Getaria, Spain, it struck me that Cristóbal wasn’t just a couturier, he was a coder in his own right. Not of computers, but of silhouettes. He hacked the silhouette of the 20th-century woman the way a developer might debug a stubborn software system. He treated fabric like source code - refining, reducing, compiling until nothing remained but pure, elegant architecture. He invented volumes that felt as if they were “rendered in 3D” before the saying even existed.

Cristóbal Balenciaga set the house standard for defying convention. And Demna, decades later, would detonate it.

If Cristóbal was the architect of couture’s golden ratio, Demna was its modder—pulling apart the original build, installing new source code, and uploading patch notes in the form of heeled Crocs and Lays crisps handbags. His vision of luxury didn’t just challenge the system; it hacked it from within. And nowhere was this more evident than in his decision to render Balenciaga not just as a brand, but as a playable universe.

Video games became an unexpected tool within Demna’s Pandora's box of luxury fashion at Balenciaga. This is his disc-ography.

Disc One: Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow (2020)

As fashion’s metaverse buzzword era hit warp speed, Demna dropped Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, a browser-based video game that doubled as Balenciaga’s Fall 2021 show and tripled as a sci-fi fever dream set in 2031. Forget livestreams and awkward Zoom runways. Players loaded in, picked a path, and walked through a bleak-but-beautiful universe of chrome-clad forest ravers, dystopian boutiques, and post-apocalyptic Joan of Arcs stomping around in armor boots and NASA-branded carryalls. It was Skyrim, if the quest reward was a sequinned dragon-scale gown.

Built on Unreal Engine and powered by volumetric scans of 50 models, Afterworld wasn’t a gimmick, it was Demna’s playable manifesto. It was a free-to-play fantasy, but with runway logic and ironic PS5 merch drops along the way. It felt less like a lookbook and more like a Death Stranding takeover of SSENSE.

Disc Two: Fortnite Collaboration (2021)

In 2021, Balenciaga became the first luxury house to officially drop into Fortnite, dressing fan-favourite characters in real runway looks, including the infamous spiked boots from Fall ‘21 and a hoodie-sporting Doggo. The designs weren’t just inspired by Balenciaga collections, they were the collections - 3D scanned down to their stitches and ported into Fortnite.

But the partnership didn’t stop at skins. It came with a full in-game retail loop: a Balenciaga-themed hub, dynamic billboards updating in real time, and an IRL capsule line co-branded with Fortnite. Buy the hoodie in-store, rock it in-game — or vice versa. A Balenciaga fit became a cross-platform parade, priced at 1,000 V-Bucks (roughly $8 USD), making high fashion suddenly more accessible than most battle passes. It wasn’t a Travis Scott-level spectacle, it was something cooler: a stealth drop that turned the item shop into a luxury showroom.

Disc Three: BFRND: The Game (2024)

An 8-bit side-scroller starring BFRND - Balenciaga’s longtime composer, sound architect, and low-key muse - reimagined not as a producer, but as a pixelated protagonist. The game sent players bouncing through glitchy recreations of Balenciaga’s most iconic runway sets: think cavernous voids from the dystopian FW shows, and maybe even a certain muddy pit. Each level was a time capsule rendered in charming low-res nostalgia, like if Castlevania was developed by Rick Owens.

Disc Four: Need for Speed Mobile (2024)

As Demna rounded the final lap of his Balenciaga tenure, he drifted into one last digital detour: Need for Speed: Mobile. But this wasn’t just a pitstop collab - it was a full-throttle fusion of fashion and street racing. Over 500 days in the making, the collab injected Balenciaga’s dysto-sleek sensibility into Tencent’s hypermobile racer. The results? A caution-tape-wrapped supercar straight out of Kim K’s Winter ‘22 bondage dreams. Six avatar fits, four liveries, and city maps peppered with Balenciaga flagship stores, from Bond Street’s brutalist cube to a preview of Shanghai IRL.

GG Demna

In modding culture, the goal isn’t to destroy the original game, it’s to extend it. To take what exists and make it speak to the now. That’s what Demna did to Balenciaga.

Demna’s Balenciaga wasn’t interested in pandering to gamers; it was interested in conversing with them. It assumed the gamer might wear Margiela. That they might enjoy Vangelis, not just vaporwave. And crucially, it challenged the gatekeeping of luxury.

While others saw gamers as a marketing segment, Demna saw them as muses. His was a luxury house that wasn’t afraid to get weird with it.

Critics called it gimmicky, derivative, even heretical. But Demna’s Balenciaga wasn’t a Maison, it was a modded server: rewired, rule-bent, and running on its own patch notes.

If Cristóbal crafted the geometry of elegance, Demna didn’t eradicate it - he uploaded its expansion pack. And as he moves on to Gucci, expect fewer heritage homages (ala Sabato de Sarno) and more jailbreaks of the luxury status quo.

You get the sense he’s not closing a chapter, but booting up a new campaign - same engine, different terrain.

Gaming used to be a closed loop. You streamed to your followers, maybe hit a leaderboard, and stayed in your lane — with little more than a GFuel sponsorship to show for it. Style? Optional. Creative ambition? Ambiguous. Cultural cachet? Still loading. Diversity? Rare. But today’s streamers aren't just existing inside virtual worlds — they’re building their own.

Figures like D4VD, Valkyrae, and IShowSpeed have demolished the “dude in a gamer chair” stereotype, replacing it with high-production content, designer fits, and legitimate moves into fashion and music. Collectives like 100 Thieves and FaZe Clan laid the groundwork. Esports teams have typically been game-focused. 100 Thieves and FaZe Clan didn’t just pivot to lifestyle — they invented a new one, blending esports with editorial energy. And now? The next generation isn’t choosing between being a gamer or a creative. They’re both. Simultaneously.

Meet the taste-driven gamers leading the next.

D4VD: Turning His Sister’s Closet Into a Fortnite Hit Factory

Enter D4VD (David Burke) — the “mouthpiece of Gen-Z heartache,” according to GQ — who accidentally built one of the most exciting music careers in the world because Fortnite flagged his streams for using copyrighted songs. Instead of giving up, he took advice from his mom to go for it and start creating his own music. Armed with BandLab and a pair of Apple earbuds, he jumped into his sister's closet to start his musical journey. Years later, he would play at Coachella in 2025.

100 Thieves clocked D4VD’s uniqueness. They brought him into their orbit not as a player, but as an artistic peer. He played games with the 100T squad and did the occasional backflip off a wall upon request — all the while building his music career.

What started as background music for Fortnite montages turned into Romantic Homicide, a viral indie hit that broke the internet by being understated in a hyperpop world. D4VD has since toured with SZA, appeared on Call of Duty and Arcane soundtracks, and turned DIY into a whole aesthetic economy. Even now, with access to top-tier studios, he still prefers the imperfection of his original setup: “I don’t want to make things that sound like they’re lifeless,” he told NME.

Today, D4VD may not stream on the regular, but he is a gamer through and through — and his creative journey is a masterclass in what happens when gaming becomes the jumping-off point.

Valkyrae: The Cosplay Queen-Turned-Creative Mogul

Valkyrae (Rachell Hofstetter) made her name with Among Us, Fortnite, and 100 Thieves, but she’s since expanded into beauty, fashion, and ownership. As Rolling Stone put it, she’s the “queen of YouTube gaming,” but also its most strategic shapeshifter.

Rae is busy. She co-owns 100 Thieves. She sits front row at Gucci. She acts in films like The Family Plan with Mark Wahlberg. She runs anime and gaming-inspired Hihi Studios. But our favourite thing about her is her rolling cosplay couture. Peep her socials and Rae is regularly posting fits that pull directly from game aesthetics: League of Legends looks, anime armour, cyberpunk twists.

That balance between RPG cosplays and red carpets is what makes her the blueprint for many streamers looking to break out of their lane. Whether it’s a latex catsuit or an asymmetrical gothic blouse, she makes gamer style look editorial.

With brands like GODMODE, Gentle Monster, and Mutani embodying the spirit of cosplay throughout their creations, Valkyrae acts as somewhat of a muse, championing looks that feel like Y3K.

iShowSpeed: The Chaos Curator

IShowSpeed is noise. The jump-scare energy. The mid-stream fireworks. The FIFA rage quits. He’s less streamer, more performance artist running a 24/7 carnival of internet emotion.

But underneath the theatrics is someone engineering his way into cultural omnipresence. His streams rack up millions. He’s dropped songs like World Cup that climb charts and sound like a parody for a generation raised on FIFA-style soundtracks and beats. DAZED described him best: “Speed understands the livestream as pure, total spectacle.”

That spectacle might be a slow four-hour burn — a Super Mario Bros. marathon with Kai Cenat. That spectacle might be risking his backbone for a stunt, leaping over a Lamborghini racing toward him at full speed. But it was another global spectacle that catapulted Speed into stardom.

Football didn’t just fuel Speed’s rise — it turbocharged it, one glorious mispronunciation at a time. His player pack openings in EA Sports FC became must-watch content, not because he was building dream squads, but because he was butchering player names with chaotic glee. Forget stats. Forget strategy. Speed’s the kind of guy who’ll pull a Ballon d’Or winner and call him Dave — and the internet can’t get enough, so much so that the Ballon d’Or felt obliged to invite him as a guest. He even got to rub shoulders with Manchester United at the FA Cup Championship after party.

But it’s not just football recognition — Speed is being heralded as a fellow Hollywood upender by cult directors like Harmony Korine. “You’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively — they’re losing a lot of the most talented and creative minds to gaming and to streamers. Like IShowSpeed is a movie,” he said.

Speed is proof you don’t need to follow the script when you can set the whole server on fire.

Hitting Eject On The Gaming Chair

What unites D4VD, Valkyrae, and IShowSpeed isn’t just their reach — it’s their refusal to stay strapped to the gaming chair. They’ve taken gaming from a self-contained practice to a launchpad. Kai Cenat has perhaps proven this better than anyone else, creating his own Streamer University — generating 23 million hours watched in total. These students didn’t just come to learn how to stream games, they came to learn how to capture the internet’s attention. It’s in places like this where the next designers, directors, and musicians are beginning to spawn.

For this new class of taste-driven gaming streamers, their journeys aren’t a linear platform game. They’re an open world, splintered into a thousand side quests — across music, fashion, film, and beyond.

They’re not speedrunning to the final boss.

They’re modding the whole game.

AI Fashion hasn’t quite become the industry disruptor we first thought it might have been - at least for the designer. While there’s been a small cohort of tastemakers combining AI and physical craftsmanship to make truly unique designs (see Robbie Barrat for Acne Studios) - any genuine attempts at using AI as a complementary tool in the design process has been drowned out by slop. We’ve seen a barrage of soulless “singulari-tee’s” on Etsywhere generative design tools are being used—but not necessarily loved. For every progressive move in AI-generated fashion by independent designers, there’s a big corporate like PUMA replacing these creative upstarts with a cheeky text-to-sneaker prompt. The public backlash to such synthetic products reminds us that creativity isn’t a prompt—it’s a process.

When AI is pitched as a backstage assistant—helping with inspiration, search, or styling (as seen in tools like OneOff or Gen Z’s rampant use of ChatGPT as a personal stylist), we still see the same tension. The idea of AI replacing a flesh-and-blood creative still sends shudders through the fashion establishment - just ask H&M. And rightfully so. But is there a chance for it to thrive elsewhere? In worlds which are already uncanny?

Video Games & The Customisation Craze

Step into a video game, and suddenly that AI-generated pink feather suit becomes the talk of the town - for the right reasons. For decades, games like The Sims, Neopets, and Animal Crossing have been bubbling playgrounds of aesthetic experimentation with deep customisation tools at player disposal. Dressing your avatar in many games is considered to hold equal importance to the gameplay itself. Outfits are even tied to game progression or exploration, like in Ghost of Tsushima where you need armour sets like the Samurai Clan Armor to acquire new combat features. Players feel rewarded when earning such attire. In The Sims, entire subcultures of Simstagrammers treat every outfit change like a seasonal lookbook drop.

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Customisation isn’t just a feature in these games—it’s a language. It’s where players experiment with identity, find their taste, or cosplay an aesthetic they can’t access (or confidently wear or afford!) in real life. Entire game formats have spawned from customisation obsession, the most recent success story of this being Roblox’s Dress To Impress - a destination for bit-checking. Games like Destiny 2 even have their own physical fan zines that spawn from grassroots customisation communities within the game. The culture of customisation in video games runs deep - but for the less creatively inclining players, there’s a gap. The skill curve is one thing, but equally, just because everyone can express themselves through customisation, doesn’t mean everyone will go deep.

The Gap Between Customisation & Creativity

For all their customisation options, most games still fall short of true creativity. The tools are there, but the execution is complex.

Take Roblox - Gen Alpha’s biggest playground. It’s hailed as a DIY design hub, but building something truly fresh on the platform often demands 2D/3D software fluency. And while the Marketplace boasts millions of experimental items, the most favourited ones? Basic black hoodies. Chuck Taylor knock offs. Copy-paste fits.

This makes sense when one considers that most people on the platform are young teens, trying to find their voice stylistically. Perhaps they’re looking to fit in rather than stand out. Perhaps not everyone is looking to become the next style icon. Instead, they’re just looking at Roblox as a platform to hang out and try new things. The most popular game on Roblox right now is Grow Your Garden - a simple game about gathering seeds and growing vegetables, with very little do to with fashion. Roblox is effectively Gen Alpha’s version of the shopping mall - some are looking to actually shop and style themselves, others are just there to hang out in the food courts, go to the movies or play at the arcade. But even when we look at style focused games on Roblox, like Dress to Impress, where players compete to fit a theme, the results tend to veer formulaic. “Goth” becomes black lipstick and mesh. “Y2K” turns into butterfly clips and baby tees. It’s not subversion—it’s a moodboard regurgitated. This isn’t to discredit player imagination, but to point out a key bottleneck: the difference between picking from presets and creating something new yourself.

Most customization is remix, not invention. And in games, just like in fashion, remix culture can only go so far before it starts to feel…samey.

When Generative AI Becomes Your In-Game Atelier

This is where generative AI re-enters the chat — not as a threat to designers, but as a democratizing tool.

New games like InZoi (a hyperrealistic competitor to The Sims) have begun to show what happens when players are given intuitive AI tools. The game’s Creator Studio lets users type prompts to generate textures for clothes or accessories. Want a wallpaper covered in rubber ducks wearing cowboy hats? Done. Want to 3D print a neon halo for your avatar’s head based on a JPEG? Go for it. Don’t know how to animate a pose? Feed it a photo and let the AI do the work.

In InZoi, the player becomes the designer without needing to master the software. AI doesn’t replace imagination—it frees it from technical bottlenecks. It helps players jump from vibe to vision faster.

Meanwhile, Roblox is gearing up to introduce its Cube AI model, a game-changer in UGC creation. With Cube, players will be able to generate entire interactive 3D objects—clothing, props, environments—via natural language. It’s like speaking a look into existence. The platform already boasts 97.8 million daily active users, and Cube promises to turn more of them into creators, not just consumers.

This could be the true promise for AI fashion—not as a high-fashion gimmick or corporate stunt, but as a utility in digital worlds where creativity is currency.

Finally Finding The Runway

AI fashion’s real runway might not be Paris or Milan, but in the esoteric minigames of Roblox, the build menus of The Sims, and the chaotic closets of InZoi. Here, AI isn’t being judged against the refined vision and craft of Raf Simons or Rei Kawakubo. It’s being used by kids trying to design an outfit that matches their latest TikTok dance routine or their group chat’s personal joke. Generative AI in video games is a genuine solution for kids to keep up with the calamity of social media “cores” - responding at breakneck speed with the power of a prompt.

In the real world, AI-generated fashion continues to reckon with the evolving perceptions of human creativity. But in video games — where identity is pixelated, aesthetics are fluid, and everything is already non-human — it makes sense.

So maybe AI fashion won’t disrupt the fashion week calendar in ways we might have first thought. But it might just redefine what it means to be a kid with no formal design skills in a video game with a dream to design something straight from their imagination.

This could be AI’s debutante moment. Not in the studio, but in the avatar editor.

Once Upon A Time On…LimeWire?

Before musicians were hijacking TikTok for virality, Soulja Boy was hijacking LimeWire. Back in the mid-2000s, the teenage rapper from Chicago wasn’t just uploading music — he was disguising it. Log into LimeWire, type in “In Da Club” or “Toxic,” and there was a decent chance you'd end up downloading “Crank Dat.” It was SEO before SEO, rap marketing via file-share Trojan horse. And it worked — by the time you realised you’d been baited, you were yuuuuuuu’n (God forbid you were later being hunted by the Crank Dat Killer).

Fast-forward a decade, and Soulja Boy pulled out the same playbook — this time he was controlling the software from the start — with consoles. In 2018, he launched SouljaGame: a knock-off handheld filled with thousands of pirated titles from the PS1, Game Boy, PSP and beyond. Made in partnership with Chinese manufacturer Anbernic, the console sold for $199.99 (USD) on Soulja’s site. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing imploded faster than a boss fight on Elden Ring. It isn’t exactly clear what happened, but publishers like Nintendo and Sony likely kissed a cease & desist thru the phone (sorry).

Interestingly, the SouljaGame wasn’t just a memeable footnote in gaming history. Despite its downfall, it became an unlikely blueprint. It marked the beginning of the “Temu-ification” of handhelds: a rapid-fire explosion of grey-market, nostalgia-fuelled gaming consoles, many powered by open-source emulators, and sold through the same digital bazaars where you buy banana slicers and bootleg Balenciaga.

Emulators: Honest Hobby Turned Black Market

To understand the current wave of pocket-sized pirate machines, you’ve got to understand the backbone: emulation. Emulators are software (and sometimes hardware) that mimic old gaming consoles, allowing modern devices to run retro titles. Whether it's Game Boy's “interpretive” architecture or the complex web of processors inside the SEGA Saturn, emulator devs are essentially digital archaeologists, painstakingly rebuilding the past one line of code at a time.

And while emulation started as a digital preservationist movement — a way to archive and play games no longer in print — it quickly evolved into a bustling black market. ROMs (read-only memory files ripped from game cartridges) are freely shared, downloaded, and bundled into emu-ready handhelds often sold for as little as $10 on Temu or AliExpress.

Anbernic is the kingpin of this new class of device makers. Their products are sleek, functional, and unapologetically pirate-friendly. The RG35XX, one of their most popular units, resembles a Game Boy Pocket on the outside but runs PlayStation, Dreamcast, and even PSP games on the inside - all for $50.

Puff, Puff, Pass The Controller

While Anbernic handhelds shamelessly replicate the products they’re mimicking, some vapes have started to lean into dystopian design of emulators. In a truly cursed fusion of addiction and entertainment, “smart” vapes are now being sold with built-in video games. Yes, that’s right: you can now play Tetris while you blow plumes of cherry bubblegum fog.

Sold under names like Craftbox V-Touch and Posh Pro MAX, these vapes feature full-colour displays, retro games, music players, and even social media notifications. Some reward users with points for each puff. Others contain Tamagotchi-style virtual pets that grow stronger the more you vape (to be fair - this one was an art project). It’s nicotine meets gamification meets childhood nostalgia — a dangerous cocktail being marketed with a nefarious wink and a candy-flavoured smokescreen.

Public health experts have raised the alarm. Not only are these vapes highly addictive and brazenly luring in teenage customers, they also add more battery waste, more environmental damage, and an ever-shortening product lifecycle built on flash, flavour, and throwaway culture.

Vape emulators show just how warped the once hobbyist form of game preservation has become. Instead it’s a competition around how unlicensed games can be stuffed into ever-smaller, cheaper, more morally ambiguous forms. Consoles as collectibles. Consoles as contraband. Consoles as… nicotine delivery systems?

Big IP Strikes Back

For a long time, companies like Nintendo treated emulation the way you’d treat your teenage Facebook statuses: just ignore them and hope they don’t blindside you at some point. After all, many of the games being emulated were long out of print, and in some cases, the rights had quietly expired (hence the practice of emulation in the first place).

But recently, that laissez-faire approach has started to shift. Why? Because retro gaming became an actual market.

Nintendo has begun re-releasing legacy consoles like the SNES Classic, bundling a curated selection of games with modern HDMI ports and collectible flair. Sony followed suit with the PlayStation Classic. And no doubt the recently announced ROG Xbox Ally will give you access to generation one Xbox games.

The retro gaming market is thriving. That means crackdowns. ROM-sharing sites are getting nuked. Emulator devs are facing legal threats. And grey-market handhelds are dancing ever closer to copyright firestorms.

Disposable Nostalgia vs Durable Design

So where do we go from here?

We’re standing at a strange intersection: on one side, the disposable future — gaming embedded into vapes, knock-off handhelds sold for pocket change, retro titles stuffed into systems barely built to last. On the other, a big corporate intervention on retro gaming – which don’t only preserve games, they rejuvenate them with better graphics and better controls (for a price of course). It’s equivalent to the 70mm restoration or the remastered vinyl.

As the Temu consoles and their vape counterparts keep stuffing Sonic The Hedgehog into e-waste for clout and dopamine, the original emulator hobbyists might have finally got what they were hoping for from the big gaming companies - a bonafide archive of retro games.

And while Soulja Boy will likely be remembered for being your $20 ringtone from Jamster in 2005, he may have unknowingly played an even greater role in turning retro gaming into a bustling black, grey and purple dragon market all together.

Written in partnership with Christopher Morency of DotDotDot - an insights brand that doesn’t just report on what’s happening- they shape conversations, anticipate change, and help their audience lead.

The fashion rollout model is starting to glitch.

Imagine a sneaker drop that doesn’t start on SNKRS, or in Soho, or even IRL. Instead, it debuts inside a Fortnite map or a Roblox mini game. Before it hits your favorite boutique, it’s being laced up by a 14-year-old wearing a Sabrina Carpenter Fortnite skin, emoting mid-battle. After this whole song and dance, you finally see it show up in its physical form at Dover Street Market.

In other words, products are being released digitally before they appear physically. That’s not a hypothetical—it could well be the blueprint for the new product lifecycle.

Welcome to the world of digital twins: identical items existing simultaneously in the virtual and physical realms. For the new generation of gamers, particularly Gen Alpha, this isn’t just a novelty but the baseline. If their avatar can’t wear it, they don’t want it. And if they wear it in-game first, they want it IRL second.

According to Roblox’s 2023 Digital Expression Report, 43% of users want to buy “twinning” items that they can wear on both their physical and avatar self. The avatar has become a prototype for selfhood, a low-stakes mirror that eventually leaks into real wardrobes.

Roblox recently announced that they’re offering direct purchases of physical twin items in their marketplace. This is a huge deal. “It’s a no-brainer that Roblox would introduce physical commerce, a major growth lever for a platform with nearly 100 million daily active users. Gen Z and Gen Alpha consider e-mail and e-commerce old fashion, they prefer communicating via virtual worlds, and will prefer shopping in them too; digital assets were a great primer,” says Colby Mugrabi, Founder of Web3 Fashion Platform, mMerch and one of the Vogue Business 100 Innovators.

“With the addition of physical commerce, Roblox is proving itself the closest thing the US has to a super app; a fully-integrated, single application offering a broad range of services.”

With 52% spending on avatar customization each month, culturally savvy brands like Fenty Beauty, Nike and adidas are all bringing digital twin product strategies into their repertoire.

Wait, Haven't We Been Here Before?

Yes, yes we have. The digital twin phenomenon didn’t just start recently. The idea gained attention during the pandemic-era NFT boom. Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Versace have all dabbled with twin products. Back then, they came in the form of minted NFTs that mirrored physical items.

The problem? Most of those digital items had no real utility. For the most part, they weren’t worn, played with, or emotionally bonded to through games. They simply sat in wallets, accumulating speculative dust. Some brands like Louis Vuitton built their own games (Louis, The Game). They were limited by a niche player base and a closed loop linear story (i.e. without any creator features that encourage repeat gameplay).

Sandbox style video games, however, are different. A sandbox game is a game that encourages repeat gameplay through an extensive range of creative features for players to build with. Major games like Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite all have sandbox gameplay features. And as a result, their digital fashion economy is thriving.

“Instead of posting OOTD shots on platforms like Instagram and SnapChat, next-gen gamers need digital fashion as an instrument for individuality amidst a sea of avatars,” says Mugrabi.

In sandbox games, a digital item isn’t just a JPEG image file but a narrative tool. You fight in it. You lose in it. You win in it. That digital sneaker means something because it’s lived in. And when brands give players the chance to own that same sneaker IRL? That’s not just a purchase. That’s a core memory strapped to your feet. This emotional bond between digital and physical draws their worlds closer and closer together.

Twinning: A Rare Win For The Brand, Consumer & Environment Alike

What makes the concept of twinning so attractive? For the brand, it’s an excellent place to test demand or experiment with a new design. The cost of producing a 3D file is a fraction of the cost of producing a sample. Digital products are the prototype and the final product all bundled up into one. If your item hits in-game, there’s a good chance that it’s going to hit IRL. 54% of Gen Z say that they’re “extremely inspired” by what their avatar wears in Roblox.

It’s not just the brand winning, the consumer does as well. A physical Coach Tabby bag might take some time for a teen to save up for, but they can run around with its digital twin in the meantime. Digital items could become the new down payment for the physical item, without the Buy Now, Pay Later trap. It’s an early access pass of sorts, without the heavy financial burden.

With more considered measurements of demand brought on by digital twins, the environment also gets a rare win. Fashion brands could tether order sizes to purchases of their digital items, producing only when necessary. Less deadstock, less waste.

This even enables brands like mMerch by Colby Mugrabi to make one-of-one products that hold clout in the physical and digital space, bound by an NFC tag to validate their authenticity. Taking a more experimental approach to design for digital twins pays dividends.

“Brands should avoid thinking that what works IRL will work virtually, whether it be product, storytelling, or communication. It’s the idea of skeuomorphic versus native design. Instead of mimicking what has worked in the real world and making it digital, brands should focus on leveraging specific features native to virtual platforms and designing for the new and the next.”

Fenty Beauty, ever the market leader in beauty product innovation, has grabbed Roblox’s new physical product integration by the horns. Their new shoppable game offers the latest shade of its popular Gloss Bomb Universal Lip Luminizer, available exclusively in-game. When on Roblox, users can click a digital version of a physical product and buy it right there and then.

Meanwhile in Fortnite, Nike and adidas are experimenting with releasing footwear digitally before it hits shelves. And these aren’t throwaway stunt drops. They’re shaping a new commerce logic where virtual-first doesn’t mean second-rate. Adidas’ Outfit Creator mode lets players customize and test digital merch before cloning it physically. Its digital-to-physical pipeline meets user testing meets hype engine.

From Loot Box to Lunchbox

As Gen Alpha grows up, the expectation won’t be that a brand has a website. It will be that a brand has a playable world. One where the difference between physical and digital is less about format and more about access. One where you try on a hoodie, equip it, and maybe unlock a level. Or where a lipstick shade from Fenty Beauty comes with an emote in GTA VI.

Speaking of which, GTA VI is rumored to be a UGC game. In non-gamer speak, that means a game where creators can actually buy and sell their own items without breaking the code of the game (as they’ve had to in the past). If digital twins are having a moment now, come GTA VI’s release in May 2026 (so we’ve been told), they could well have their big breakthrough.

For now, we’re moving beyond phygital. Into something weirder, wilder, and much more integrated. The digital twin isn’t just a gimmick but a serious gateway. A key to collapsing the gap between "me" and "my avatar" into a single identity.

And in that reality, a drop doesn’t launch in one place. It happens everywhere.

Mugrabi agrees, “The fashion industry must embrace and adapt to next-gen commerce or risk extinction, or even worse, becoming uncool.”

Written in partnership with of SportsVerse.

Let’s get one thing straight: video game ratings aren’t just numbers on a screen—they’re status symbols, sources of pride, and sometimes, absolute scandal. Just ask Jerry Jeudy, the NFL wide receiver who was all set to join the New York Jets late last year, only to have the trade blocked. The reason? Woody Johnson, the Jets’ owner, consulted his teenage sons, who said Jeudy’s MADDEN rating was too low to bother. Ouch. The verdict: video game ratings don’t just affect your in game performance—they influence reality.

Welcome to the bizarre world where virtual assessments have real-world consequences. Whether it’s MADDEN, NBA 2K, EA FC or WWE 2K, these ratings aren’t just game mechanics—they’ve evolved into semi-official declarations of an athlete’s worth. Let’s unravel how these numbers are determined, why they’re such a big deal, and how they’ve impacted athletes, both modern and legendary.

How the Numbers Are Made

Crafting a player’s rating is part math, part art, and part “please don’t @ me.”

In NBA 2K’s case, developers crunch real-world stats, advanced analytics, and sprinkle in a bit of expert opinion. NBA 2K’s ratings team constantly watches games, analyzes statistics (including advanced analytics), and updates ratings throughout the season. Yet even if you’re a cover star, you might not be safe from an ego destroying rating. Kyrie Irving (cover of 2K18) was pissed with his 90 rating - even though it arguably may have turned him into a better player over the following years (currently rated 92 in 2K25).

In MADDEN, it’s about realism. Ratings adjusters like Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson break down game film to gauge players’ speed, power, and agility, trying to ensure their digital selves resemble their on-field counterparts. They draw on analytics services (e.g. Pro Football Focus grades, NFL Next Gen Stats) and extensive scouting reports to grade each skill Still, the process sometimes falters—like when Chicago Bears running back Tarik Cohen found his “catch in traffic” rating insultingly low. Cohen fired back by tweeting a photo of himself making a contested catch, tagging MADDEN with a cheeky “Fix this.”

EA FC’s ratings are a global team effort. With tens of thousands of footballers across global leagues, EA’s soccer games rely on a vast network of talent scouts and data editors. Player data is submitted from every corner of the world, which EA centralizes into one big algorithmic soup. A player’s overall rating in EA FC is an aggregate of key skill ratings (e.g. Pace, Shooting, Passing, etc.) adjusted by the quality of their league and international experience. When Sam Kerr’s EA FC rating hit 91 in 2023, making her one of the top players in the game, she proudly joked that she had finally overtaken some of her male Chelsea teammates.

Meanwhile, The WWE 2K franchise faces a unique challenge: how do you rate athletes when the results are scripted? Typically, ratings reflect the superstar’s kayfabe dominance (storyline prominence and portrayed prowess). This means a fan-favorite champion will have a higher overall not purely for physical skill but because in-story they’re “stronger.” Roman Reigns might be unbeatable because he’s the top draw, while a “jobber” (a wrestler who is routinely defeated by main eventers) gets stuck in the 60s despite real athletic prowess.

Digital Demigods

Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl (1987) was a game-breaking force – he could outrun entire defenses and zig-zag the field at will.. In reality, Jackson’s career was cut short by injury. He never had a Hall-of-Fame stat line in reality, yet “Tecmo Bo” is often called the GOAT of video game athletes for being unbeatable in the game.

Michael Vick in MADDEN 2004 was similarly god-tier. With 95 speed at quarterback, Vick could sprint around and turn broken plays into 80-yard TD runs or launch 60-yard bombs on the move.In real life, Vick was elusive, but not unbeatable. MADDEN developers later admitted they introduced features like the “Hit Stick” (better defensive tackling) and “QB Vision” cone specifically to counteract how Vick had broken the game.

In hockey, NHL 94 gave Mario Lemieux a 100 rating (he was at the peak of his powers then), but interestingly it was Jeremy Roenick – rated slightly lower – who became a fan-favorite in the game due to his combination of size and speed being unstoppable in gameplay. Roenick was a very good NHL player (multiple 50-goal seasons) but not on Lemieux’s level historically; yet in NHL 94 he was a terror.

In PGA Tour 2008, Tiger Woods at his peak was essentially “max stats.” Many editions of EA’s golf game had a scenario dubbed “Sunday Tiger” – the version of Tiger in final rounds, wearing his red shirt, who was near-invincible. One fan video even showed a glitch of Tiger walking on water to hit a shot - which EA later turned into an ad.

When The Numbers Get Personal

Athletes don’t just shrug off low ratings. They tweet. They rant. They even train harder.

Hassan Whiteside once dropped a triple-double after being snubbed by NBA 2K, quipping, “Just trying to get my 2K rating up.” That quote became iconic—a modern player using his digital persona as motivation to dominate reality.

Kevin Durant has been one of the most vocal critics of his NBA 2K rating. Despite consistently being in the mid-90s, Durant feels disrespected if he’s not at the very top. When NBA 2K23 rated him a 96 (with only Giannis Antetokounmpo higher at 97), Durant tweeted directly at 2K’s digital marketing director Ronnie Singh: “Aye @Ronnie2K I’m gonna need an explanation on why I’m not a 99? This has become laughable.”

Beyond the stars themselves, fans and media will regularly reference them – e.g., “Player X got an 87 in Madden, that feels low given his last season,” or “This rookie’s 2K rating is only 78, but he’s already playing above that in real life.” Debates that once were purely about stats or eye test now sometimes invoke game ratings as an extra data point (especially among younger fans). For example, when NBA 2K dropped Phoenix Suns’ Devin Booker and Bradley Beale’s stats, Suns fans and even the team’s social accounts took notice, pushing the narrative that they deserved better.

The Jerry Jeudy Effect - Video Games Will Impact Marketability

As games get smarter and data becomes more precise, expect ratings to reflect deeper insights. Athletes will continue to care—maybe more than ever. After all, as long as a number can shape how fans and even owners perceive them, athletes will fight for that extra digit.

In contract negotiations, call it the Jerry Jeudy effect, agents should know that video games can affect their client’s marketability. For fringe players, a higher rating might marginally help by signaling “hey, this game (with its massive data analysis) sees potential in him.”Bol Bol’s domination in NBA 2K has impacted his vote count for NBA All Star weekend. Last year, his player ranking was 372, yet he was in the top 100 for All Star voting. Could this justify a higher contract negotiation come free agency?

As an athlete, sometimes you’ve got to work with what you have. Or you can just take the Kevin Durant approach and rage tweet on X.

Player’s choice.

Picture this: it's 2006. Paris Hilton is declaring "that's hot" on MTV, YouTube has just hit its first million views with “End of Ze World” and the biggest "downloadable content" in most people's lives is a sketchy LimeWire file mislabeled as the new 50 Cent single.

Into this world galloped a video game on a red-ringed Xbox 360 — The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion — a game that would not just rewire how RPGs felt but infamously change how all games would make money forever.

You’ve spent sixty bucks on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion — a full-priced, complete game, bursting at the seams with quests, spells, and “radiant AI”.

And then you reach the stables.

And a pop-up appears.

Would you like to protect your horse with this exclusive Horse Armour? Just 200 Microsoft Points! (That’s about $1.50 in 2006 money — the price of a can of Cherry Coke or a ringtone of Chamillionaire’s Ridin’.)

You pay. You saddle up. Your horse is now dressed like a knight at a mid-tier Renaissance fair. Congratulations: you’ve just bought one of the first-ever pieces of paid cosmetic DLC in a major console game. The gaming world would never be the same.

The $1.50 Joke That Built a Billion Dollar Industry

Today, spending a few dollars for a virtual skin barely causes a ripple. But in 2006, this felt like heresy. Gamers weren’t just upset about paying extra — they were upset about what they were paying for. Armour, after all, isn’t just window dressing in a fantasy game; it’s a declaration​.

As Polygon's excellent piece on armour design points out, in RPGs, your armour says who you are. It’s your identity, your aspiration, your aesthetic signature. A battered iron cuirass marks you as a scrappy underdog; a set of shimmering daedric plates announces you as a god among mere mortals. In classic games like Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, and Tactics Ogre, armour design isn’t just functional — it’s deeply cultural​.

It’s easy now to mock the outrage that Horse Armour stirred. We live in a world where “Deluxe Editions” are the norm and skins in Fortnite cost more than an indie game. But back when Oblivion was first released, DLC (downloadable content) was new. When you paid $60 (USD) for a game, you thought you owned everything. The Horse Armour wasn’t just a punchline — it was a warning shot.

Horse Armour opened a Pandora's Box of microtransactions that today fuels an entire industry. The “nickel-and-dime” culture — from Call of Duty battle passes to Assassin's Creed deluxe bundles — traces back, in no small way, to a fancy barding for pixelated horses​.

Oblivion Remastered: Nostalgia With a Price Tag

Fast forward to 2025. Oblivion Remastered lands in a shadow drop, no less — like a medieval spell cast onto Steam without warning​. The resurgence is real; fans both old and new have already sunk hours inside the game since its release last week – with one punter even finishing the game in 8 minutes!?

Oblivion is back, but it’s not all magical. The Horse Armour is back as well.

Naturally, it’s tied to the Digital Deluxe Edition​ — about $10 extra than the base, bundled with some shiny swords, another set of horse barding, an artbook and soundtrack.

Bethesda framed it with a wink: a nostalgic in-joke, a knowing nod to history. But for many players, the joke still cuts close to the bone​. Because in this "cute" re-release of the Horse Armour lies a blunt reminder: the practices we mocked became the foundation of modern gaming’s economy.

Some fans laughed. Others seethed. Nostalgia has a funny way of polishing sharp objects until we forget they once cut.

In-Game Cosmetics: The Good, The Bad, and The Very Expensive

It's tempting to see the Horse Armour saga as pure villainy. But the truth, as always, is more complicated.

Without cosmetic microtransactions, games like Fortnite and League of Legends wouldn’t exist in the form they do.

Today, anyone can jump into those worlds — build towers, slay noobs, make bad dance decisions — without spending a single penny. Monetisation through cosmetics allowed these massive, polished, living worlds to exist for free for players​.

The idea that style is optional but accessible — that you can pay to look different, but not to win — has, at its best, made gaming more democratic.

Yet the darker side hasn’t disappeared. EA FC 25, the newest Oblivion Remastered, and countless others still charge base prices and upsell digital extras. They sell Deluxe Editions, Ultimate Passes, Season Passes, Battle Passes — premium content layered atop already premium purchases.

The slow drip that started with a horse’s shiny caparison has, for some players, become a flood of small transactions, turning full-priced games into gated experiences.

The Real Legacy of Horse Armour

In the end, Oblivion remains a marvel — sprawling, flawed, magical​​. Its spirit — of adventure, of wonder — survives beyond the cynical DLC items.

But the Horse Armour was a seed. A seed that grew into a mighty, tangled forest: free-to-play wonders and predatory pricing schemes alike.

When we ride through Cyrodiil today, whether on a regular horse or a $10 upgrade, we ride through the future that shiny saddle built.

Written in partnership with Fashion Tingz.

There’s a certain breed of object that haunts us. Not with horror, but with persistence. The beeping smoke alarm. The buzzy feedback from some old wired earphones. And then there’s Tamagotchi: the clingy digital pet that would collapse in a moment's lapse. Yet its esoteric charm, in all senses of the word, would keep us coming back.

At first glance, it’s just a plastic egg with a screen. But peer closer, and it’s a cultural oracle. Blinking, beeping, and teaching generations that love can be both adorable and wildly inconvenient.

Launched in 1996 by Bandai and born from the mind of Akihiro Yokoi, he found inspiration in a commercial involving a boy who couldn’t bring his pet turtle on vacation. This sparked an idea: what if you could carry a pet with you anywhere you go?

The challenge was to make it fun, portable, and — most critically — affordable. At the time, handheld gaming was dominated by the Game Boy, which was expensive. Yokoi envisioned something much cheaper that still offered interactivity at a fraction of the price. (Interestingly enough in a twisted tale of fate, Tamagotchi would later become a game on the Game Boy.)

Tamagotchi is derived from the Japanese words tamago (egg) and uotchi (watch), and was originally designed to be worn on the wrist. It was later reimagined as the keychain format we now know and recognise, and the device exploded into global pop culture almost instantly. Within a year, over 13 million units had been sold​.

More than just a toy, owning a Tamagotchi became a rite of passage. Part digital companion, part emotional landmine, every beep demanded your attention. Every poop symbol reminded you of your failings. And yet, it was clipped proudly to belt loops across the globe.

And on today’s fashion scene? It’s the poster pet of the Y2K aesthetic revival.

The Hypebeastification of Tamagotchi

Once a mall-rack staple and playground currency, Tamagotchi has ascended to a new realm: limited-edition, logo-splashed, drop culture darling. Streetwear’s hunger for nostalgia has given Tamagotchi an entirely new lease of life, one secured by clout and curated currency.

Supreme gave it the streetwear crucifixion treatment: three Tamagotchis, three camo patterns, each branded with the box logo and released as part of its SS23 accessories line​. This wasn’t just merch, it was a resurrection, engineered for resale and built for grid-fodder. The once-humble egg was now a grail.

BAPE followed up with an all-out pixel parade. Their collaboration swathed Tamagotchis in electric camo prints, matched them with branded lanyards, and dropped accompanying apparel with lenticular graphics which made the design shift as you move, like some kind of post-digital lentil soup for the soul​. It was loud, maximalist, and undeniably Y2K.

Even BTS — the global pop-industrial complex masquerading as a boy band — joined the fray with custom Tamagotchi collabs that bridged K-pop and kawaii. These weren’t just co-branded novelties. They were pieces of a fandom economy where the accessory becomes the avatar.

But what makes Tamagotchi the ideal canvas for collaborations? It’s the rare cultural object that hits every quadrant. Retro, but relevant. Cute, but uncanny. Tangible, but tech-y. The device comes with built-in storytelling — a lifecycle, a personality, a death — all in 32x30 pixels. In a fashion landscape obsessed with narrative, Tamagotchi is the rare accessory that tells one by default.

Tamagotchi as A Muse

Beyond fashion collabs, Tamagotchi has become an artistic medium.

Enter Takashi Murakami, the crown prince of kawaii-meets-contemporary. In 2022, he unveiled a Tamagotchi-style handheld digital pet draped in his signature flower iconography​. It wasn’t a simple skin job. It was Murakami importing the logic of the Tamagotchi into the language of contemporary art and collectable culture.

The result? A hybrid novelty: part console, part shrine, part toy from a lost utopia.

But the remixing doesn’t stop with the blue-chip class.

On the DIY side of the spectrum, Tamagotchi has become a blank canvas for fan-driven customisation with Tamagotchi mirrors popping up all over shopping platforms Etsy, complete with glimmering pearls and a screen that reflects not your pet, but yourself.

And the Tamagotchi as a tool for self-worship doesn’t end there. A$AP Rocky was seen performing at Lollapalooza with a custom Tamagotchi necklace by a DIY designer named Monogotchi. Coi Leray has even been seen creating entire outfits out of wearable Tamagotchi’s, cementing their place in high fashion relevancy.

The Future is Tiny, Blinking, and Demands to Be Fed

Tamagotchi sits comfortably at the intersection of tech, toy, and taste.

Its symbolism is instantly recognisable, its scale is perfectly portable, and its emotional charge — somewhere between cuteness and existential dread — makes it the perfect fashion accessory for our times.

Which brings us to bag charms. Once an afterthought, these tiny trinkets have become status symbols in their own right. Tamagotchi fits here not as a novelty, but as a pioneer. A charm before the charm boom.

@cazevedorTamagochi is backkkk #trendalert #bagcharms #styleinspo

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And then, of course, there’s Coperni. It wasn’t enough for Tamagotchi to be a bag charm; it needed to become the bag itself. Known for their tech-tinged provocation, they fused a working Tamagotchi into their SS24 Swipe Bag​. It has become a signal of fashion’s next obsession: anti-tech tech.

In the world of useless wearable tech — think Louis Vuitton’s fake iPod purse — the Tamagotchi reigns supreme​. Because it does something. It feels.

Tamagotchi has outlasted trends, formats, and probably your childhood best friend’s hamster. It’s not just nostalgia…it’s fashion, sculpture, meme, mirror. It’s an object lesson in how design, culture, and cuteness can converge into something mythic yet tangible.

When people think of the Super Mario Bros. movie, they’re probably picturing the slick, billion-dollar juggernaut from 2023. But it was actually 1993 when Mario and Luigi first crawled out of the console and into cinemas. It should’ve been a pipe dream. Instead, it was a fungus-soaked dystopia featuring Dennis Hopper and Goombas with linebacker bodies and shrunken heads.That was the moment game adaptations became a punchline.

For years, the idea of turning a video game into a film meant inviting confusion, cringey CGI, and a complete misunderstanding of the source material. Games were seen as too juvenile, too fragmented, too interactive to adapt. So they weren’t translated—they were flattened.

But something changed.

Over the last few years, a cultural gear shift occurred. The Last of Us, Arcane, and Fallout didn’t just buck the trend—they rewrote the formula. These adaptations weren’t just passable. They were good. Awards-season good. Critical darling good. Your-mum-has-an-opinion-on-Pedro-Pascal good.

And the secret wasn’t just money or better casting. It was style. These shows didn’t just adapt narrative—they adapted vibe. They borrowed the aesthetic and emotional grammar of games and used it to reshape the medium they were entering.

And now, in the most unexpected crossover event of all, A24 is adapting Death Stranding—a sprawling, baby-in-a-jar courier sim with ghost whales and existential dread—as a prestige arthouse film.

So: when did game adaptations stop sucking?

And more importantly—where could they go next?

From Glitchy Gimmicks to Prestige Pixel Perfect

For decades, adapting a game into a movie was a bit like trying to port a VR experience onto a calculator. Studios would grab the character names, toss out the story, and slap together something vaguely familiar, yet totally hollow.

Doom (2005) gave us five minutes of first-person shooter fanservice and 100 minutes of Rosamund Pike trying not to look embarrassed. Super Mario Bros. (1993) took the joyfully surreal Mushroom Kingdom and re-skinned it as a grunge apocalypse. These films didn’t translate the feel of games—they mangled them.

Then came HBO’s The Last of Us (2023). Showrunners Neil Druckmann (of Naughty Dog) and Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) didn't just lift the game’s plot—they slow-cooked its melancholy. The show traded in bombast for intimacy, showing us a world still twitching with leftover life. And most importantly, it refused to be ashamed of its roots. Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) weren’t reimagined—they were reinhabited.

Meanwhile, Arcane (2021) redefined what game-to-screen could look like. Rather than explain the entire League of Legends universe, it zoomed in on the relationship between two sisters—Vi and Jinx—then dialed the style to eleven. The show layered painterly animation, steampunk sprawl, and glitchy montages into a world that felt alive and dangerous. Arcane wasn’t afraid to go full expressionist, flooding each scene with exaggerated shadows, fractured perspectives, and kinetic editing. In short: it put style first—and found emotional weight in the spectacle.

Fallout (2024) took a different path. It didn’t rehash a storyline from the games—it crafted a new narrative that still dripped with retro-futurist dread and Vault-Tec satire. It felt like watching a player’s journey through a save file you didn’t create but instantly recognized. Less plot dump, more lore osmosis.

The connective tissue between these hits? These creators understand that the logic of a game world—its tone, visual language, sense of space and agency—is the real story. That’s what adaptation means in 2025. Not just retelling, but re-experiencing.

Which brings us to the most surreal adaptation of all: A24’s upcoming Death Stranding.

It’s a game where you play a lone post-apocalyptic delivery guy, carrying corpses and care packages across a fractured America, all while tethered to a fetus in a capsule. It’s deeply weird. It’s barely a game. It’s also a cultural touchstone.

Why adapt it? Hideo Kojima, creator of Death Stranding is regarded as somewhat of an auteur himself in the gaming industry. It only made sense that his work would find its way to the screen.
Death Stranding is already cinematic without being a movie. The visuals already feel like arthouse sci-fi. And recently announced director Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One) knows that sometimes the vibe is the plot. Combine all of this with A24’s unique ability to turn a film into a full universe – with merch and other marketing manifestations – then Death Stranding could be the boldest adaptation yet.

Choose Your Own Adaptation

When The Last of Us aired in 2023, something wild happened: people didn’t just watch the show—they fired up the game. Sales of Part I jumped 238% on PS5. The Remastered version surged 322% on PS4. Not because of nostalgia—but because the story wasn’t done for them until they played it.

The same thing happened with Fallout in 2024. Steam recorded nearly 160,000 concurrent players in Fallout 4—a game that came out in 2015. It was like opening an old save file to explore the world while watching it burn on TV.

This raises a question no one in Hollywood seems to have properly asked: if we’re watching and playing in parallel, why aren’t those experiences talking to each other?

Picture this: You’re watching The Last of Us Season 2. A mysterious side faction appears in Episode 3. The same week, a new playable quest drops in The Last of Us—an interactive thread that adds layers to the show's subplot. Of course, Naughty Dog would need to make a Part 3 to realise this since they’re not giving us an online version of Part 2. But let’s fantasise here for a minute. Maybe the show teases the outcome, but your actions in-game shape the way it's resolved.

That’s not sci-fi. That’s how people already interact with entertainment now. TikTok users break down lore like it's the Dead Sea Scrolls. Kids mod GTA V to recreate Shakespeare productions. Players wear Rick Owens in Roblox and stream full films inside Fortnite. The medium isn’t just the message anymore—it’s a sandbox.

In short: the audience isn’t passive. It’s playing.

So what if game adaptations aren’t the end product at all?

What if they’re the connective tissue for a new kind of storytelling—one that unfolds across screens, consoles, and servers? One where watching is playing, and your next mission starts when the episode ends?

With the positive trajectory that game adaptations are having, it’s only a matter of time before film and game studios start connecting the dots.

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