How New York’s Punk Scene Influenced Gaming
Punk has its heart in New York. A musical genre, it has also influenced gaming. We discuss it in the article below.
New York is now a gentrified, financially rich city. However, it was not always that way, and in the seventies and eighties, it was a hard place to live. From that chaos spawned several music scenes that would influence popular culture and gaming forever more. One of those was punk.
CBGBs and the Seventies Punk Scene
This club opened in 1973 and was where punk was born. It was a haven for bands situated in the East Village. While it was originally intended as a place for country and bluegrass, it changed when it saw that local bands needed a place to play. Once it started to get noticed, it became a haven for the who’s who visiting New York like Mick Jagger.
The list of bands to play there is vast. While The Ramones were the poster boys, who came to epitomise what punk would be, so many other varied bands emerged from that scene. Talking Heads, Patti Smith and even Madonna all played there.
Punks’ Influence on Gaming
The influence of New York punk can be found in many games. Chaos Crew 2 is a perfect example of this. One of a new wave of slot games that is pushing against the traditional fruit and bar formula, it does so by adding gameplay elements and sleek animations. This title takes its style from New York punk and also blends it with the emerging graffiti-style art of Hip Hop culture. Cranky the street cat is one of the main characters and acts as a wild symbol, looking like an NYC tenement block janitor. You can even try the game at an instant casino using a bonus, so you don’t have to dip into your bankroll to test it out.
There have been hundreds of console and PC games set in New York, and plenty that blended punk aesthetics. However, one of the best that crossed over with movies was The Warriors, created by Rockstar Games. This studio is most famous for Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto. However, with this, it took the license from a cult movie about battling gangs in a punk, post-apocalypse New York and made it into a free-roaming, narrative classic.
Punk has influenced more than just gaming. It seeped into fashion, branched into different musical genres and into film. Its impact, like most youth cultures, is still being felt today. Punk may have been born in the seventies, but it is still alive and kicking today.