We caught up with Randy Nakajima, VP of Brand & Marketing at 100 Thieves (co-owned by Drake) on the state of gaming merch.

GTA VI is on fire with its rollout.

Last month, it released a 27-minute extended look on Netflix, ranking as the #1 film in 87 of 93 countries and 31.1M views in three days. It followed up with a Miami Heat x Vice City link-up, to be debuted on the night they host the Milwaukee Bucks, which feels perfectly timed with Giannis Antetokounmpo’s arrival. Then there’s the music, with original tracks from Travis Scott, Yung Lean and PinkPantheress among the names attached – GTA VI radio already feels lived in without one minute of logged gameplay.

Then came the merch. And yeah…cue the “wasted” kill screen.

What happened? How did the most culturally relevant game of all time arrive at something so corporate? Actually, the problem runs much deeper than GTA VI alone. Publishers have worlds full of extraordinary art, devoted audiences and mountains of information about how people play. Yet so much official merch arrives as the same printed t-shirt, the same crest hoodie, the same cautious colour palette, built for scale not substance.

Meanwhile, independents like HIDDEN.NY, Happy99 and WWESH are taking gaming references and folding them into worlds of their own. Familiar logos, characters and visual languages become part of a bigger story. Some of these brand worlds feel like they should come with their own playable disc. You could happily get stuck in them for 100+ hours.

Publishers & The Default Inventory Dilemma

Playing it safe has become the playbook.

“Have you ever worked with a licensor or IP partner on a collaboration before? It’s typically not the most creatively liberating process in that you have extremely strict brand and style guidelines to follow, along with multiple rounds of feedback from everyone from the partner’s brand, marketing, and legal teams - often leading to an uninspiring product,” says Nakajima. 100 Thieves and Mike Sunday dive deep into this conundrum below.

Beyond this, licensing expenses have shot through the roof, backing quality into a corner with 5% on its health bar. Additionally, player data has acted as more of a bottom-line justifier, less an imaginative catalyst.

Industry analysts and financial estimates place the total development budget for GTA VI between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. That would make it the most expensive video game ever produced and live servicing hasn’t even started yet. So when Take-Two (GTA VI’s parent company) licenses the game to a merch manufacturer, it’s fair to assume that the right to use its characters and branding comes with astronomical costs. Then comes royalties, guarantees, production, distribution: everyone needs their cut before the customer gets to even inspect the stitching. Those pressures can encourage cheaper blanks, simpler construction, cost-effective fabrics and common templates that are easy to produce at scale. “I think merch that comes from publishers directly is usually overtly safe and generally for mass markets,” says Nakajima.

Keeping the collection low cost for AAA video games isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity. That’s why a survival-horror T-shirt might require its own survival strategy after a few washes.

On the creative side, swathes of player data has become a predictability trap for gaming merch. The ally turned foe.

Knowing your audience can help you make something they already buy. It can also make it harder to justify something they haven’t already bought. If players in GTA V have always bought the same fitted black cap in-game, there’s a calculated bet that a physical version of that fitted cap would work for a GTA VI collection with a logo slapped on the front. It seems logical, but it’s not necessarily the correct answer.

As a result, the collection follows what’s already legible, rather than offering something worth developing a taste for. It then assumes the audience will be happy with just wearing a billboard-come-t-shirt. The depth of in-game lore, character styles and player stories that could serve as exciting merch canvases are ignored in lieu of lifeless logic that speedruns through internal approval rounds.

It hasn’t always been this way.

There’s plenty of vintage gaming merch that cuts deeper. And not just for “nostalgia” sake. Owen Hyatt, one of the internet’s most devoted vintage gaming merch aficionados has a knack for finding such pieces. Recently, he pulled a Halo 3 ODST tee that referenced the film Apocalypto in its graphic treatment. This niche nod by Xbox came from an intuitive understanding of the fan crossover between the film and game – not a spreadsheet.

Examples like this carry a counter-culture perspective – don’t just rip, recontextualise. And that’s why the bootleg scene is winning.

Boot Up The Bootlegs

The best gaming bootlegs carry a spirit that streetwear has understood for decades: take something familiar and make it surprising.

“We’ve seen apparel brands take cues from gaming from the very genesis of graphic tees’ popularity, particularly in streetwear. Think about Stussy’s “StussyInt.2” nod to PlayStation in the early 2000’s,” says Nakajima.

A small adjustment can produce a huge shift in meaning. A Nintendo 64-style mark or Final Fantasy-like title treatment already carries years of associations. When HIDDEN.NY reworks these, it feels like the game has been modded. New meanings, new worlds. Collecting these bootlegs signal affection for a game, but also a particular taste within that affection.

Gaming fandom is enormous; our relationships with games are usually much more specific. A visual gag, a menu screen or an obscure NPC might mean more to someone than the franchise logo ever could. PES 4 referee action figure anyone?

“What I find particularly interesting is that these brands aren’t necessarily treating gaming as a category of merchandise, but as a legitimate cultural reference point. Just the same as music, art, or subcultures like graffiti or skateboarding,” says Nakajima. The most compelling bootleggers push their game source material into spaces they couldn’t occupy themselves. Take Innomata’s Nintendo inspired sushi creations. What does a Game Boy look like reimagined through lunch? Why shouldn’t Mario’s Thwomp become a box of rice? These ideas pull details out of the screen and let them behave differently. They connect gaming to toy collecting, cooking and the small rituals of everyday life.

Publishers can’t do this alone. Creatives outside the organisation may spot a connection that an internal team has never considered, precisely because their relationship with the game runs through other interests. 2K have clocked this. For its recent NBA 2K release, the grocery-store concept designed by independent studio WWESH took the game into an unexpected aisle. Washing detergent. Pasta sauce. Potato crisps. Everyday packaging recast as a world of 2K products. Basketball already offers an obvious merchandise vocabulary: jerseys, sneakers, warm-up gear. A grocery store asks you to engage with the game differently. It gives the launch a setting, a sense of humour and something to discover.

That’s the value that the bootleg perspective can bring. It asks a stranger, more interesting set of questions that were never intended for the game manual.

Where Things Need To Go

Today’s bootleg scene is showing publishers which details people care about, which connections they’re making and which parts of a game still have room for surprise.

“Bootlegs will generally come from the perspective of counter-culture; very much working against those guardrails and often from brands who value cultural cache more so than mass market sell-through” says Nakajima.

For official gaming merch to break out its funk, it needs to look at bootlegs for inspiration, not a mandate to send a cease and desist. And ultimately, when they can’t beat them, they should join them. SEGA brought on HIDDEN.NY for its Jet Set Radio anniversary – and yes we got hoodies and caps (tastefully executed). But we also got these glitzy AirPod chains that SEGA couldn’t have cooked up alone.

“As we see movie studios, sports teams, and music labels continue to innovate and work with more forward thinking designers from actual apparel and fashion backgrounds, I can only hope that gaming publishers follow suit” says Nakajima

Let the people who love your games take them somewhere new.
There could well be a culturally altering unlock waiting on the other end.

Fashion has always sold us a character. A suit promises success. Underwear promises sex appeal. Get dressed and unlock a new version of yourself, even if your only quest is a Tesco meal deal on a Tuesday evening. For that one, we recommend equipping more than underwear.

But fashion’s current fascination with role-playing games (RPGs) goes deeper than dressing like a character. RPGs ask what happens to that character after they get dressed.

In games like Final Fantasy, Fallout and Pokémon, the person or creature you start with rarely resembles the one you finish with. They gain abilities, make questionable decisions and survive things they probably shouldn’t have. Along the way we fill up something called an “inventory log,” with items that are ever changing. A sword might enter a dungeon as basic equipment and leave it upgraded, battle-worn and impossible to replace emotionally.

That is what makes the RPG such a compelling reference for fashion.

It gives designers a language for clothes that can acquire meaning, bodies that can be reconfigured and worlds that extend beyond a single collection.

A generation raised on RPGs is bringing that logic into fashion. You can see it across the world from South Korea’s FFFPOSTALSERVICE to Paris’ Rohan Mirza. Three creatives, though, are playing on expert mode: YAKU builds the quests, Kai Ghattaura considers what happens to clothes inside it, and EOMZIE builds her character one equipment slot at a time.

Speaking with J’Nae Phillips from Fashion Tingz, she agrees:

“From a fashion perspective, I think what feels most exciting here is the shift from clothing as a finished object to clothing as a form of progression. We’re increasingly seeing designers treat garments less like static statements and more like pieces of a character’s evolving identity — layered, customised, collected, upgraded and sometimes deliberately worn out. In that sense, the RPG isn’t just a visual reference; it mirrors how younger generations actually think about getting dressed. Your wardrobe becomes an inventory, styling becomes world-building, and every piece can signal where your character has been and where they’re going next. Fashion has always been about constructing identity, but RPG logic gives that process a new vocabulary… one where the outfit is never really finished.”

Make some room in your inventory. These are worth picking up.

YAKU: Collection as revolving quests

Yaku Stapleton’s label YAKU treats new collections as new quests for his ongoing universe: The ImPossible Family Reunion in RPG Space. Members of his family are reimagined as characters in a story that unfolds from season-to-season. The clothes belong to that story, alongside its settings, props, performances and character histories. Fashion week becomes a way to enter the world for a while.

For AW25, the family occupied Tutorial Island, a training ground familiar to anyone who has played RuneScape and spent their first hour learning which button does what. YAKU’s version contained a library, a forest, swordplay and moments of self-reflection. SS26, titled A Ground to Stand On, took them into a wider world and drew on histories of pre-colonial Caribbean resistance. AW26’s Evolution of Combat then followed two brothers whose identities begin to diverge under pressure. Every collection, a new quest. “What draws me towards YAKU’s work is how he turns the collection cycle into something closer to character development than seasonal product delivery, which creates a much richer relationship between the wearer and the clothes: you’re not simply buying into a look, you’re entering a chapter of a world that already has memory, mythology and consequence,” says Phillips.

Each collection, YAKU draws in references from the games he was inspired by like BioShock, Die Hard and Soul Calibur. Fabric swords, axes and pics stay fastened to shorts or hang from bags. Reptilian-like adornments and prints line the chests and spines of jackets and hoodies. Wearing each collection of YAKU’s feels like unlocking a new set of skins in some expansion pack. He then weaves in unexpected items like Wiimote Swords, oversized GameCube’s and spikey skinned Game Boy Advance’s that are akin to secret unlocks you might find on a side quest.

YAKU uses the seasonal fashion calendar to do what an RPG does well: let a world change as its characters encounter it. The clothes gain context from what came before. A piece from Tutorial Island and a piece from Evolution of Combat may share a visual language.

But they belong to different save points in the characters’ lives. “The idea of garments carrying different “save points” challenges fashion’s obsession with newness, as each collection doesn’t have to replace the last. Instead, it can add another layer to it. YAKU is using the fashion calendar less as a commercial deadline and more as a narrative device, allowing clothes to accumulate meaning as the universe evolves.”

Kai Ghattaura: Clothes that evolve with gameplay

Where YAKU builds quests around the garment, Kai Ghattaura’s garments change based on the quests they’ve been on. The designer has long embraced wear, damage and transformation in his clothes. They are made to fray, tear and collect evidence of use, allowing the wearer to participate in how a piece eventually looks. It mimics the mechanics of popular games like Final Fantasy XIV, where items deteriorate and change from use.

Ghattaura’s earlier show A Scattered Dream sent models through the space in distressed, mud-smeared garments, carrying swords and gauntlets. Medieval grime collided with very online jokes, including a concrete crying-laughing emoji handbag. His February 2026 MA collection, Seminomadic, pushed his interest in improvised, travelling silhouettes through upturned pike shoes, wrapped fabric, elaborate headwear and long textile trails. Ghattaura has named Minecraft, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy among the games he played growing up – and it’s no surprise.

What connects these projects is a willingness to let clothes look as though something has happened. Ghattaura’s work has room for dirt, humour and the wearer’s own bad decisions. “So much of contemporary fashion is built around preserving an image (the perfect finish, the perfect styling, the perfect campaign), whereas his clothes are more interesting because they are lived in. The damage isn’t a flaw in the garment; it’s a form of authorship shared between designer and wearer,” says Phillips.

Once a piece leaves the studio, its story can progress without him. “Ghattaura makes a compelling case for fashion that gets better when something actually happens to it.”

EOMZIE: Build the character, piece by piece

EOMZIE, also known as EZ, takes the idea of character-building somewhere more bodily. The South-Korea-born artist and model describes herself as a “mecha doll,” a persona that brings together her physical body and digital identity. Her practice moves through augmented reality, costume and wearable objects, with each new element offering another way to construct that character. “EOMZIE’s work taps into something fundamental about why we dress in the first place: the body is never as fixed as it appears.”

Wing rigs, masks, armour and weapon-like accessories can feel as though they have been added to the equipment menu over time as EZ’s character moves through her own game. A crystalline gauntlet changes the arm beneath it; a wing rig changes the shape of the entire body. These are objects with the visual weight of tools, even when their purpose is expressive rather than practical.

EOMZIE’s influences extend well beyond RPGs, particularly into anime, film and cyborg imagery. That breadth is part of what makes her work interesting here. She shows how the RPG idea of equipping a character can become a way of thinking about identity in real life. Add an object, alter the silhouette, discover another version of yourself. “EOMZIE’s work suggests that getting dressed can be less about expressing who you already are and more about building who you might become.”

Save the build, then change it again.

Why are RPG’s a thing now?

Gaming language has already escaped the screen. We go on “side quests,” call people “NPCs” and try to “maxx” various parts of our lives. We have become fluent in the terms, whether or not we’ve ever spent a weekend trudging through an open-world-RPG.

The work of YAKU, Ghattaura and EOMZIE suggests an interest in what comes after the vocabulary. Each treats identity as something that develops through action. YAKU’s collections evolve with every new quest. Ghattaura’s garments change through wear. EOMZIE assembles and revises a body that can exist both on screen and off it.

RPGs offer fashion a compelling thought: the most interesting version of a character is rarely the one you meet at the start.

Maybe the same is true of an outfit. You acquire it, you live in it, you damage it, you add to it. Eventually, it starts to look like something only you could have made.

UPDATE: ALL SPOTS HAVE BEEN FILLED. THANK YOU!!

Got a Substack concept that’s stuck on the loading screen? A piece the feels harder to finish than Dark Souls? Or maybe you’ve advanced a few levels with your writing but you’re suddenly clambering for a cheat code?

Come talk it through with me.

I’ll be at the Dr. Martens Brewer St. store in London (Soho) on Thursday 1 October, from 11am to 4pm. You can book in for a 45 minute one-to-one session. Bring a draft, a question, or just an idea that’s sitting in your memory card, waiting to be played with.

Dr Martens is all about encouraging people to seek out “what makes their sole bounce.” Over my 10 year career, I’ve been lucky enough to bounce about places like Highsnobiety and Vice, whilst working with names and brands like Virgil Abloh, Martine Rose, Nike, Xbox and Gucci, all in some kind of act of “sole searching”.

Let’s unlock what makes your sole bounce too.

Book in a session here: https://link.dice.fm/k6f7e3d200a7?dice_id=k6f7e3d200a7

Please use the code: WITHBOUNCINGSOLES

We’re back with a shorter video format to give you a quick download on pop music in gaming. If you’re liking these, then there’s even more over on Drawn Distant’s Instagram. Enjoy!

Pop music in games used to equate to soundtracks and occasionally a self titled game.

Now it equates to everything.

Artists like Billie Eilish, KATSEYE, Zara Larsson, Tyler, The Creator, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and Bruno Mars are using Roblox and Fortnite to launch music, perform, release skins and create digital collectibles.

The strongest gaming x artist collaborations translate the artist’s identity into something fans can play, wear, collect and share.

And the upside can be massive. Bruno Mars issued over 5 million collectibles in Roblox during his concert on Steal A Brainrot. Sabrina Carpenter appeared in over 6 million matches where every member on the team has a Sabrina Carpenter skin equipped.

We’ve come a long way from artist published games like 50 Cent’s “Bulletproof” or Brittney Spears’ “Dance Beat”. But those places will still hold a place in my heart regardless!

Hey everyone! I’m trying out a new, shorter video format today. Something more palatable for your Monday. If you like these shorter stories, you can find plenty over on Drawn Distant’s IG. Enjoy!

The camera roll has become playable.

From Dior shows to Nike cages to football stands, PSPs, Nintendo DSs and Game Boy Cameras are being used less as consoles, more as cultural lenses. Not because they are technically better. Because they are technically worse. The blur, the grain, the pixels, the clunky little flash. It all gives the image a point of view.

In an age where every device is designed to make things look perfect, old gaming cameras make the moment feel stranger, softer and harder to fake.

This is an original story featured in Kepler Interactive’s RESET magazine. Check it out here! If you would like the TL:DR - then check that out here.

“Do you think people will ever try and copy the looks of their gaming avatars?”

Before you think to yourself “Yeah that’s cosplay…idiot.” Indulge me.

It’s a question I asked Dani Loftus of This Outfit Doesn’t Exist and Ellen Atlanta, author of Pixel Flesh one warm evening at Somerset House back in 2025. They’d just finished a talk on the evolution of beauty in a post-internet world, the porous border between face and filter, skin and screen.

After some discussion, it was clear. Video game looks are already everywhere on a mainstream level.

Grown ass men have painted their faces in block form, hoisting pixelated swords and throwing popcorn all over the cinema during Minecraft: The Movie. Super Mario costumes are everywhere from stag doo’s to five year old birthday parties. Then of course - there’s legitimate cosplay communities. You’ll find them at fan conventions, on Twitch streams and not to mention, a little day every year called Halloween…

But the real shift isn’t in the literal recreations. It’s in the mutations.

Cosplay used to be about replication. An act of devotion. Now, it’s about translation. Yes, one could take 350 hours to recreate Moxxi from Borderlands 3 and rock up to Gamescom - and hats off to them. But what about taking the cel shading style of Borderlands and converting it into your own look?

We’ve entered The Age of Codified Cosplay, where the goal isn’t to become your favourite character but to borrow the aesthetic code — the shader, the silhouette, the glint in the lighting — and remix it into your own reflection.

This translates into a fashion point of view as well. A recent study by virtual-to-reality fashion brand Mutani, found that 83% of their community is buying gaming inspired fashion to wear at home which now eclipses the 77% that are buying gaming inspired fashion for conventions. Moreover, 47% have bought accessories that relate to gaming (i.e. bags, sunglasses) – showing that more and more people are encoding the details of gaming into their looks rather than the full outfit.

Many walks of life are leaning into this phenomenon. But most noticeably across Twitch, TikTok and YouTube, it’s the non-male gamers who are really leading the charge here. These days, 46% of gamers in the US are female according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). And while only 1% of gamers claim to be non-binary - they’re clearly present within the codified cosplay space. Taking the gendered character out of cosplay and inserting their own presents a safe and exciting place to experiment. Communities like Mutani are particularly strong with over half identifying as LGBTQIA+.

The Age Of Codified Cosplay has many forces to thank for its existence. One that can’t go unmentioned is the life simulation classic, The Sims. This is a game that ushered many non-males into gaming, where no one protagonist reigned. Rather, it was made up of a collection of quirky avatars invented by the player. This began to teach gamers that they could project themselves onto their games – imagining their own storylines.

Then came the Nintendo DS – a console that took the non-male market by storm. Novel game formats in beauty and fashion found their way onto the DS, opening up a new style of play. Games like Style Savvy, Sally’s Salon and many others were hyper-targeted towards a growing demographic of gamers that wanted to style avatars from the ground up – no AAA character arc, just personal curation. The Nintendo DS became a literal canvas of expression itself, with many bedazzling and sticker slapping their consoles to mimic something of a trinket or accessory that dangled from bags and sat by make up dressers.

The Nintendo DS became a vessel for individuality, both through form and function - training a new generation of gamers not to mimic their game characters, but to morph them into something for themselves. The screen was less portal, more mirror.

As the barriers for gaming began to break down and the stigma behind who plays games diluted, the communities that grew up on these simulation games and cosy consoles also began playing other gaming classics like Final Fantasy and Resident Evil with more concrete characters.

The ongoing mix of these gaming experiences pulls us into The Age of Codified Cosplay. Sitting at the juncture between character-as-me driven games (i.e. Animal Crossing, Nintendogs) and character-as-them games (i.e. The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hour, Kirby: Super Star Ultra) – cosplay is becoming codified, borrowing from iconic characters to create idiosyncratic looks.

The Horror Game Girl movement on TikTok represents this better than anything. The white faced, deep eyed, softly illuminated horror protagonists of games like Silent Hill, Alice: Madness Returns and Fatal Frame become muses for new beauty expressions. Creators like @Merveystar use these visual cues not to mimic characters, but to channel the emotional syntax of survival horror: trauma, beauty, fear, and defiance, rendered through blush placement and contour. The Horror Game Girl’s face is not about being scared, it’s about being seen through the static. In this codified mode of cosplay, lashes are thick enough to cast their own shadows, eyes are rimmed with an alluring exhaustion – the energy is distorted yet personal, beautiful yet glitchy.

This same energy courses through GODMODE, the new beauty brand from Rina Sawayama and Chloë Grace Moretz. Unlike the countless celebrity lines before it, GODMODE doesn’t sell products as extensions of the founders’ egos. Instead, it offers a shared sandbox: both Rina and Chloë have built characters within the GODMODE universe, but everyone who wears it is invited to invent their own. It’s beauty as gameplay, a brand built not on mimicry but modding. The first drop — Genesis Glow highlighter (in an egg-shaped metallic casing), is designed to make your face look like it’s emanating from screen glow. The Genesis Glow embodies codified cosplay perfectly. Rather than pulling from any particular character, it pulls from the esoteric experience of gaming in a blue light bath, and turns it into beauty.

The Merge of Mirror and Monitor.

The Age of Codified Cosplay isn’t about escape; it’s about return. What started with titles like The Sims — those early games of self-projection — has evolved into something sharper, more self-aware. The same players who once styled avatars on the Nintendo DS are now styling themselves with the same intent. The tools have changed, but the instinct hasn’t.

The Horror Game Girl takes the petrified look and gives it an everyday platform. GODMODE turns foundation into a form of code, a character builder for the real world. Each of these moments reflects the same impulse: to see ourselves more clearly by remixing the unreal.

The mirror and the monitor are finally one surface. In this age of codified cosplay, we’re no longer asking how to look like game characters. We’re learning how to become our own.

If you’re looking for a shorter take, here’s the TL;DR. For all those looking to go deep, you’ve come to the right place!

Cult fashion brand, Nude Project, had their store opening in LA last month. But instead of giving us the typical slate of high res store visuals, they kinda went the opposite way. Everything got rendered through a low poly gaming filter as a nod to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – a game that’s heavily inspired by the antics of coastal-Cali-culture. Coinbase did something similar for their “Your Way Out” ad – where they designed an entire story, set and cast of characters via a low poly lens. What’s going on here?

There was a time when video games were treated as a break from real life. You clocked off, loaded in, escaped the day and became someone else for a while. A plumber with a red hat. An elf with a mythical sword. A Sim trapped in a house with no doors because someone, somewhere, had a god complex and only 15 minutes left on the family computer before their sibling took over.

But then the pandemic changed all that (I know, “not this again…” but indulge me for a second).

When we couldn’t go outside, we started to live vicariously through the games we played. Avatars became mirrors to the soul. We partied in hyperreal environments. We were building lifestyles in lieu of our own.

When we finally came out of lockdown, games had broken out of the box, latched onto our psyche and started running its own servers. NPC culture began to take over TikTok. Language like “side quest”, “OP (overpowered)” and “loot” continues to pulse through our everyday vernacular. PS1 & 2 covers took over pop music – with the final boss of sorts being A$AP Rocky with his run of bootlegs for Don’t Be Dumb earlier this year.

Games are no longer just places we go to leave reality behind. Increasingly, they are where reality gets rehearsed, styled, glitched, performed and then exported back into the world.

But why?

We No Longer Want Our Avatars To Be Like Us, We Want To Be Like Them

For years, avatars were about representation. It was about making a digital version of yourself. Pick the hair. Pick the face. Pick the outfit. Try to get the nose vaguely right, fail, accept your fate, learn to love it and move on. Now, the relationship has flipped. Avatars are not just mirrors. They are aspiration engines.

Roblox found that 84% of Gen Z say their physical style is at least somewhat inspired by what avatars wear, while 54% say they are very or extremely inspired. In other words, the avatar is no longer simply reflecting the player. The player is starting to chase the avatar.

Nowadays, we’re looking at the avatar to guide us. 87% of Roblox players feel more comfortable expressing themselves in real life after experiencing it in immersive digital spaces.

Games have become low-risk testing grounds for identity. Players can try on aesthetics before they try them on physically. The avatar becomes the first draft of the self.

That’s why this shift is bigger than digital fashion. It speaks to a new order of taste formation. Young people are not only being influenced by celebrities, stylists, magazines or TikTok creators. They are being influenced by their own playable alter egos.

In Our Picture Perfect World Of AI, Games Offer Charming Clunkiness

We are living through an era of synthetic polish. AI images are getting smoother, cleaner and more suspiciously perfect by the week. We’re looksmaxxing in a world that’s hyperfocused on the screen and the currency it gives to our face. We’re swapping out real meals for processed Huel shakes to make sure we hit our protein and vitamin goals in one monstrous gulp.

Against that, certain games can offer something oddly precious: jank.

Glitches. Lag. Low-res textures. NPCs walking into walls. Characters speaking in nonsense. I’m talking about The Sims, Tomodachi Life, Runescape, Steal A Brainrot on Roblox or even a recently modded version of Skyrim that probably should’ve stayed buried in some niche sub-Reddit.

The Sims rules the roost here. A keen community of “Simstagrammers” can be seen across social media trying to recreate scenes and scenarios that could only ever take place in a game like this. In fact, 75% of Sims fans go to TikTok for just this. The appeal of The Sims has never just been that it lets us simulate life. It is that it lets us simulate life badly, beautifully and absurdly.

That awkwardness is becoming culturally valuable because it cuts against the sterile perfection of our feeds. In a world where everything is being made smoother, games remind us that rough edges are often where the personality lives.

Retro Gaming Is Becoming A Creative Canvas As Slow Tech Returns

Retro gaming is having a new kind of moment. Not just as nostalgia, but as an aesthetic resource. Old consoles, cartridges, clamshell devices and pixelated characters are being revalued as design objects. A recent report by Backmarket found that 25% of recent retro console purchases in the UK are being bought for aesthetic appeal.

But it’s not just the consoles that are coming back, the old characters are coming along with them as well. Cooking Mama is not just a DS character. She is a domestic icon with Y2K kitchen finesse. These niche gaming references feel newly stylish.

Cooking Mama, PaRappa, Nintendogs, WarioWare, Mii avatars, Wii Sports instructors, Pokémon sprites all belong to a shared memory bank. They are not obvious “fashion references” in the traditional sense, which is exactly why they feel fresh. They come from the strange corners of childhood culture, the bits that were never supposed to become moodboards.

Retro gaming has become a creative canvas because it offers a visual language full of friction, humour and emotional residue.

Games Are No Longer Games, They’re Social Infrastructure

The phrase “video game” now feels slightly inadequate. It is like calling a nightclub “a room with speakers.” Practically true. Spiritually useless. Games are now places where people hang out, shop, attend concerts, watch previews, meet artists, roleplay, dress up and build communities. What was once IRL-only is increasingly happening in between.

Concerts are particularly hot with Gen Z with 38% saying they find virtual concerts and exciting ways to engage with music. Billie Eilish recently used Roblox’s The Block as an extension of her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour world, with fans able to enter a virtual recreation of her performance setting and interact inside the environment. KATSEYE have also used The Block for an interactive fan Q&A, showing how Roblox is becoming less like a single game and more like a persistent entertainment venue.

You don’t always log in to win. Sometimes you log in to be seen. To try on an outfit. To catch a moment. To hang out with friends. To feel part of a release, a tour, a fandom or a world. This is why gaming has become so attractive to music, fashion and entertainment. These worlds don’t just broadcast culture. They let people inhabit it

Video Game Paraphernalia Has Become IRL Cultural Souvenirs

As gaming culture spills into the real world, it is not only the games themselves that matter. It is the stuff around them. Controllers. Cases. Cover art. Bootleg figures. Memory cards. These are becoming cultural souvenirs, pulled from the console and remade as objects people can own, wear, collect or display.

Now we have up and coming designers like Yaku turning retro accessories into cultural collectibles. Over the last months, he has turned Wii-mote’s into swords and Game Boy Advance’s into their own spikey characters. In the football realm, we’ve seen A Store Like 94 transform the magic of Pro Evolution Soccer into collectible figurines.

This kind of work understands that old games were not just entertainment. They were emotional archives. That is why gaming paraphernalia is becoming collectable. These objects are not simply props. They are portals. They carry the atmosphere around the game, not just the game itself.

Games Have Become Cultures Most Flexible Reality Engine.

Real life now feels increasingly mediated, curated and algorithmic, while games feel strangely alive: social, expressive, imperfect, playful and full of objects people actually care about.

This is the strange inversion at the heart of it all. Games were once dismissed as artificial worlds, yet now they often feel more real than the platforms built to document reality. You can build. Dress up. perform. fail. glitch. collect. wander. gather. become. The grammar of gaming is active, not passive. That is why it keeps leaking into everything else.

The old cliché was that games let us escape from reality. Now games are escaping into reality.

Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream has not so much arrived as waddled onto an island alongside Walter White and the cast of Breaking Bad to play Twister with Michael Jackson whilst wearing a cursed Garfield sweater. Excuse me?

No, this isn’t peak brain rot. It’s actually Nintendo’s biggest game of the year. And it’s only existed for the best part of a month. Before we dive in, let’s set the scene with a few flabbergasting numbers:

Released on April 16, 2026, the game sold over 3.8 million units globally. It’s already No. 42 in the Nintendo Switch’s best-selling games of all time, beating out other juggernauts like Paper Mario: The Origami King and Pikmin 4. It’s already outsold Mario Kart World on Switch 2, which sits at 2.9 million copies sold, including digital copies bundled with Switch 2 hardware when first sold. Japan in particular has gone full Tomodachi fever dream. In its debut week, the game sold 565,405 physical copies, while the second-place title, Pragmata on PS5, sold 36,470. That is roughly 15.5 times higher than the next best-selling game. TikTok has become a rolling theatre of Mii melodrama, with 78.2 million posts tied to “Tomodachi Life” at the time of writing.

Not a bad debut.

So what does this have to do with fashion? As we know well, fashion goes where culture is. Everything from the Super Bowl to Coachella have become vessels for some of fashion’s biggest moments. So as Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream becomes the new “it” game, it’s only a matter of time before they come flocking.

But first, what is it?

Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream is a life simulation game about placing Mii characters (more on this below) on an island and watching them form friendships, fall in love, fight, perform, gossip, eat, dress up and generally behave like tiny unlicensed reality TV contestants. Anything is possible and almost anything is customisable.

It sits somewhere between The Sims, Animal Crossing and Tamagotchi – but supercharged. In a surprising move, the normally conservative Nintendo decided to leave next to no restrictions to how players can express themselves on the game. This has helped set the internet alight with everything from David Lynch Mii’s to and entire New York Knicks island takeover.

Where did it all come from?

While Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream has had games on the Nintendo DS, the emotional origin is really the Nintendo Wii. That is where Mii’s first came into existence as playable avatars. But they became more than that. They became family members, celebrity bootlegs, villains or botched versions of your school teachers. By 2011, 213.8 million Mii characters had been created worldwide. If Mii’s formed a country they would have had the fifth largest population in the world, above Brazil, Nigeria and Pakistan at the time.

Mii’s are one of the earliest mainstream examples of avatar culture becoming personal, social and weirdly intimate. Before Minecraft, Roblox or even Bitmoji, there was the Mii with low fidelity yet high attachment. Some of them have become cult-like figures. Matt - one of the default Mii’s on Wii Sports series, became legendary for his role as the nearly unbeatable boxing champion and swordplay master. His status grew from an impossible boss into an ongoing meme today where he’s depicted as a “god-tier” entity.

Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream understands the Mii-thology and the power of user generated content (UGC). Games like Roblox and Minecraft have built entire ecosystems around UGC. Ryutaro Takahashi, the developer behind the game, wanted to create “the ultimate inside joke game”, where everyone had the freedom to build whatever they pleased. And that they did.

The game thrives on social casting. Players fill islands with friends, exes, celebrities, fictional characters, streamers, pop stars, footballers and sprinkles in a layer of reality TV. It adds proximity and waits for chaos. A Mii version of Zara Larsson can date a Mii version of your dog, if you truly wish. It is lore in the group chat sense: stupid, specific, and somehow unforgettable.

This is where it goes beyond predecessors like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This became the pandemic’s digital village square because it let people decorate, gather and perform taste when the real world had been put on pause. Meanwhile, Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream feels built for a different cultural moment: we aren’t collectively dreaming of a life outside, we’re questioning the very idea of a dream state in a world full of colliding narratives.

And that collision course is the perfect place for fashion to foster.

Nintendo understood this. The custom clothing tools run deep. And the players are already running with it. TikTok is already filled with tutorials on how to make the most of these tools. This all rings a bell. Animal Crossing: New Horizons started the same way, and then suddenly everyone from Valentino to Marc Jacobs made an appearance in the game, turning it into “fashion’s new catwalk” during the pandemic.

That is why fashion brands should be paying attention.The first-mover advantage here is wide open. No brand has properly jumped on Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream yet. Imagine matching Sandy Liang bows for your first romantic picnic between Mii-Handsome-Squidward and Mii-Tung-Tung-Tung-Sahur and then swapping them into some Palace tracksuits for a 4AM warehouse rave. Deranged, yet fitting.

Fashion brands are always looking for the next place where identity is being performed. Right now, one of those places is in fact a virtual island.

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.

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.