Nintendon’t: Make My Video – Marky Mark (Sega CD)
Below is a “final draft” version of the entry for Make My Video: Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch as it is scheduled to appear in the book Nintendon’t: 25 of the Worst Video Games Ever Made.
I have a love/hate relationship not just with this Sega CD game series but with Mark Wahlberg in general. I’d like to say that he’s simply yet another generic rapper-turned-actor, an actor whose entire career started because he refused to join New Kids On The Block and instead chose to rap about Sunkist orange soda without a shirt on, but I’m pretty sure if I said that aloud and actually meant it “Marky” Mark Wahlberg himself would hunt me down and beat my ass. Mark Walhberg’s rap career is something he flaunted like crazy when his debut album Music for the People was selling like hotcakes but now that he’s admittedly “grown up” Wahlberg has actually gone on the record to express his disdain for his previous musical endeavors, and for that I commend him. He lived like everything he was not in the 1990’s (or rather, in his words, “nineteen ninety motherfucking two”) and once he pulled his head out of his ass he admitted his wrong doings, starred in a few movies, and then threatened to beat up Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg because of his Mark Wahlberg impressions. Great guy all around.
Digital Pictures, the evil company mastermind behind the Make My Video series, was a key player in creating a large portion of the Sega CD console’s content lineup. Among their other completely not-Gary-Busey-level-crazy ventures was Slam City with Scottie Pippen, a full motion video basketball game that required a staggering FOUR CDs to play; that’s more discs than a generic 80’s Greatest Hitz compilation from Wal-Mart, more discs than This Is It (the tribute to that dead guy who owned Neverland Ranch), and megabyte for megabyte almost as much content as a modern day DVD. For all we know Slam City may not actually have been a game but an elaborate and interactive set of drink coasters. I’m not a sports fan myself but I am a big supporter of common sense and using four discs for a basketball game is pretty excessive; considering the depth and content attached to most multi-disc games Slam City, which as of this publication I have not yet played, had better be some kind of massive NBA-based role playing game complete with cutscenes and elemental summons. Those who believe in numerology will probably start drawing bizarre associations when I mention that the Make My Video line of games had, you guessed it, four installments. The other three music groups who sacrificed their careers to the gods of shitty video compression and shameless stock footage included Kriss Kross, C+C Music Factory, and INXS; I only chose to pick on Mark Wahlberg because he’s my favorite out of the four, although Kriss Kross was a very close nostalgic second. It’s worth noting when Digital Pictures was working on this project they obviously had to find performers who reflected true American culture… and the fruits of their research landed them on an underwear model with anger management issues, two kids who wore their clothes backwards, a dance group who specialized in exercise music, and a rock group whose lead singer would eventually fill his daily planner with “being dead”. Tasteless humor aside out of the four groups chosen for the series only INXS really possessed the merits to be considered for a place in a video game and that’s coming from me doing my best not to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
In the past I’ve made jokes about the following observation both for various video and textual projects I’ve done over the years, but I can’t help but wonder if Marky Mark ever looks back on his time with The Funky Bunch and says “man, I was in a VIDEO GAME”. I like to wonder if at the time of the game’s release Wahlberg pretended he was on par with Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog or if he just let it go to his head and thought his appearance in Make My Video would eventually lead to a side scrolling fighting game where he gets to beat up Vanilla Ice for having the stupidest haircut since the god awful fade Christopher “Kid” Reid sported. Calling Make My Video a “game” is pretty generous since it actually plays more like the bastard offspring of a “create your own YouTube Poop mash-up” sim and an anime music video creation suite but nonetheless Mark Walhberg was allowed to let his bad boy image seep into the Sega CD library of crap wherein his musical adventures on the console would eventually be liquidated at Kay-Bee Toy outlet stores for $0.99 a copy. Aerosmith suffered a similar bout of shame when Revolution X made its way to consoles but at least the developers had some semblance of an idea of what a video game actually was and despite all of its flaws Aerosmith’s “MUSIC IS THE WEAPON” title is more of a game than the Make My Video series would ever end up being. Also unlike Marky Mark the boys in Aerosmith were given a rare second chance at becoming video game heroes when Activision created an Aerosmith-themed installment to the Guitar Hero franchise; the best Mark Wahlberg can hope for is a shitty “Good Vibrations” versus Jay-Z’s rendition of “It’s A Hard Knock Life” mash-up sold through the downloadable content store of DJ Hero.
The gameplay of Make My Video: Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch, or any Make My Video title actually, is tedious at best. Although the “plot” and scenario of each title varies among the installments in the series all four of them center on you being put in charge of creating a music video for the “hot new single” from (insert band here). Without much more explanation you’re thrown into the mix where your song of choice starts playing and you’re given the option to start choosing your clips; yes, you cut a music video in real-time as the song plays. There are no pause menus or other convenient options, you are bombarded with grainy footage and told to make the best of it. In some bizarre kind of meta video-in-a-video twist the actual music video for your song of choice just so happens to be a selectable option from your pool of trash meaning that the music video you’re supposed to be making already exists which undermines your sole purpose in the game, and in especially significant cases, rips a hole in the space/time continuum. At its heart Make My Video is nothing more than a dumbed-down video switchboard similar to how a television broadcast studio works, you’re given three streams of video and you choose which one to “broadcast” by means of the A, B, or C button, however unlike real TV where there’s Nielsen ratings, demographics, and other nonsense to worry about your Make My Video program is guaranteed to bring in a total viewership of zero. The game is worth exactly one play before its gimmick wears off and you’re left with a cumbersome shotgun of video clips that look like they were somehow stored on a record.
The footage chosen for use in the Make My Video games is just as bizarre as the premise of the game itself. Most of the time the footage will have absolutely no relevance to the theme or message of the song, and if it does it will quickly be replaced by something impossible to categorize such as astronauts doing jumping jacks in zero gravity followed by the singing Warner Brothers frog riding a tractor. No, I am not making this up; 100% of the stock footage chosen for the game is literally whatever the developers could get under royalty-free licenses with the exception of the actual record label music videos that accompany some of the songs. All Digital Pictures had to do was go to a large media library and ask for a copy of everything from the public domain section then somehow apply their new plethora of crap to a game design that was already completely broken from the start. Making a “create your own music video” game using only stock footage from 1970’s educational films and imitation Popeye cartoons nobody wants to assume credit for is a horrendous idea in the first place; the best possible game you could make with a crapshoot of snippets from royalty-free videos is a point-and-click adventure game where the protagonist has the worst case of amnesia in recorded medical history.
Alongside the 600MB of random will.i.am video remix fodder there actually is a small collection of footage shot specifically for the game. This footage consists entirely of Marky Mark’s “fans” from whom you can select to hear their opinions and thoughts about what they want in the new video. In the case of Wahlberg’s installment in the series his fans consist of the completely reasonable social network of the two sibling kids that “host” the game: their parents, the brother’s friends, the sister’s friends, and a large black boxer who vaguely resembles Bob “I’m HUGE In Japan, Literally” Sapp. Across all of the scenarios Mark Wahlberg is represented by about ten fans, a number that I believe may be slightly exaggerated. Choosing the clique of girls doing their makeup in a high school bathroom as your scenario results in the only Easter egg in the Make My Video series: “Marky Mark” Wahlberg himself appears, surrounded by girls to imply an image of forced masculinity, and tells you to “Make My (stuttering effect) Video, skate. Peace, I’m out like shout.” Speaking as somebody who grew up largely in the 1990’s, and I’m not sure if this reflects poorly on me or not, but I have absolutely no idea what the hell this joker just said.
Perhaps the biggest flaw with Make My Video: Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch, and any of the other installments in the series, is the lack of replay value and challenge. You can make the worst possible video imaginable – you can choose a clip of a guy taking a dump in reverse, scramble it up, and make it bright purple – and the “fans” you created the video for will mindlessly eat it up like it’s the latest episode of American Idol. It doesn’t matter if you try or not because as long as you retain consciousness through one round of Make My Video you win and your name goes straight to the top of the “Top 10 Videos” list. There’s no criteria on which your video is judged; your audience might mention they want to see “clips of the guy in the boat” but their demands are so purposefully vague that you can get away with a shot of anything and still impress the masses.
Make My Video wasn’t just another “rushed out the door” title like most other schlock that saw release on the Sega CD, no; Digital Pictures was a company dead serious in their ideology and methods of game production. When they weren’t screwing up the Sega CD library with four-too-many versions of Make My Video they were pioneering new video codecs and other multimedia applications that would further the development of the full motion video genre. Sure, the idea of FMV games today is pretty stupid but back in the early 1990’s this was seen as The Next Big Thing and Digital Pictures didn’t screw around. To make my point two successful actors (who were only moderately successful at the time) were featured in the series: Seth “The Ginger Kid Who Made Robot Chicken” Green (Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch) and Phil “I Was On MADTV” LaMarr (C+C Music Factory). They should consider themselves lucky their appearances in Digital Picture’s games didn’t utterly decimate their acting careers like it did for virtually everybody else who showed up on the set of these ill-fated titles. For them Make My Video is just another notch on their resumés, but to us it’s an awful video game experience we’d much rather soon forget.
- Dracophile
