Rez

I recently wrote an 8-page analysis on Rez as part of my Video Game History class. Rez, for those who are new here, is my favorite game ever made and is a rail-shooter from the dreamcast era with trippy graphics and trance music, with more trance music instead of sound effects. The game is basically a sensory spectacle and very short - you can watch the whole game here. It is one hour long.

Writing the analysis was a fun job, which involved watching a lot of footage of Rez HD. I learned a few things about the game in the process, namely that Rez is the missing link between games and movies. Looking at the entirety of Area 5, the game completely controls the pacing of the player's experience - the player does not get to decide when something happens. He is completely railroaded into scripted events, always moving to the next level on schedule. And yet no one would say that Rez is not a game.

Rez basically exploits the mandatory movement of the rail shooter genre to turn the game into something very close to a music video, taking advantage of the fact that trance music can afford to be looped for a few more seconds than intended and still sound natural. The result is that Rez is a step-up from QTE-filled "interactive movies", replacing the QTE gameplay with the much meatier "point at things to kill them" gameplay, while still giving the developers nearly all the power they'd have making a movie.

Can this idea be exploited to create more movie/game hybrids? Probably, if you can find a game genre other than rail shooter that still has this property of automatically controlling player movement and giving him instead timing windows to do certain actions. So far the game industry only has QTEs to fill that category, but I'm fairly confident more can be found. Or we could just start making rail shooters again.

What follows is a copy paste of the whole paper I wrote about the game. It's ~2000 words long and is mostly about video game history, and less about game design.

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Begin Paper

It’s a well-known fact that 20% of people are auditory learners, meaning that they are more sensitive to aural stimuli. It’s a lesser known fact that 15% of people are kinesthetic learners – they learn by touching and doing. And yet, if one were to look at the games released in the last decade, one could think that the entire video game industry only cares about the remaining 65%. Almost all technological innovations since Pong were used to improve graphics to appease this visual majority. Kinesthetic people have recently gotten their big break with the Wii and are about to receive a few more toys from Sony and Microsoft. Auditory people can be happy with all the music games out there, which may or may not involve the use of plastic guitars. Quite rare are the games that can pull off a hat trick and hit all three sensory demographics.

Rez is a unique game that simultaneously touches three aspects of the human perception to create an experience of synesthesia. In this paper, I will focus more on the audio aspect of Rez and will show the innovations that this game has brought to game audio in order to demonstrate its importance in video game history. I will explain what makes Rez’s music system special and noteworthy.

First, I will do my best to describe the game, attempting to put into words the quasi-ineffable experience that is Rez. Then, I will look at the historical context surrounding it in order to see how it measured up to other games from that period. Then, I will examine how Rez’s unique music system attempts to create this feeling of synesthesia.

Rez is a game by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, a Japanese video game designer known for his music-flavored games. The game was developed by the United Game Artists division of Sega, a development team which later merged with Sonic Team. A large portion of the team working on Rez were developers of the Panzer Dragoon series, another rail shooter.

Rez was released in Japan in 2001 and in 2002 in North America. The game was available for Dreamcast and PS2. In 2008, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, having since then left Sega, bought back the rights to Rez to release an HD port of the game for Xbox Live Arcade, named Rez HD. It was purely a graphical upgrade – gameplay was unchanged.

Rez, at its core, is a rail shooter. Gameplay is mainly about aiming at enemies and destroying them before they can destroy you. In Rez, shooting is done with a lock-on system where the player presses a button, moves the crosshair over enemies then releases it to launch a salvo of projectiles to destroy the targeted enemies. The game has two power-ups: the first is “Overdrive”, which destroys all enemies on screen. The second is “Upgrade”, which changes the avatar’s appearance and functions as a Hit Point system.

A description of Rez would not be complete without mentioning its visual style, which draws inspiration from wireframe graphics and evokes a very futuristic atmosphere. This ties into the game’s story, which says that the player is a hacker infiltrating a highly advanced computer network in order to fix an AI which began to doubt its own existence after being overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge on the network. The whole thing is set to electronic dance music, with drum beats and synth loops filling in for sound effects.

Rez was released in Japan just as Sega was withdrawing from the console hardware market to become a company focused solely on software. This was at the end of the Dreamcast era, as the Xbox and Gamecube had just been released in North America. Meanwhile, the PS2 was fairly well established as one of the sixth generation consoles, having been released a year ago. This was known as the “128-bit” era, a spectacular misnomer if there ever was one (128-bit CPUs do not exist yet!).

At the time of Rez’s Japan release, gamers were hard at work playing Metal Gear Solid 2, the original Halo or perhaps Super Monkey Ball. PC gamers were enjoying Civilization 3 and Empire Earth. Ico had made people cry a month ago, and Harmonix were shipping their first title, FreQuency. By the time Rez made it to North America, gamers had moved on to Pikmin, Final Fantasy X and Super Smash Bros. Melee. Note that in all these titles, the only one which could be said to resemble Rez is FreQuency. Rez was an outlier, a weird new thing that gamers could not compare to anything. It was a hard sell – a shooter with wireframe graphics, a primitive looking game with no textures. Rez, at first glance, looked like an old arcade game; it did not have the photorealistic graphics of the time.

What does all this mean for Rez? Rez was released on two platforms, one of which was in its death throes and another very successful one which was still getting new releases as of three months ago. It is an understatement to say that Rez was not a mainstream title – the game deviated hugely from the norm. The game’s visuals were unfamiliar, its music was unusual for a video game and gamers back then, as they are today, were not eager to spend $60 on a game that was allegedly very short and packaged with a vibrator.

The game was marketed by Sega by placing emphasis on the game’s feeling of synesthesia, with TV commercials featuring the game’s music at the forefront. Promotional events were held in Shibuya, with Mizuguchi himself playing the game live on stage as some sort of rock-star-from-the-future. Despite these efforts, Rez was a commercial underperformer and never became anything more than a cult classic.

The main selling point of Rez, and the focus of this paper, is the game’s feeling of synesthesia. Synesthesia is, in a nutshell, stimulation of one sense triggering a perception in another sense. Synesthetes are people who “hear” colors, “taste” words or “see” music. This unusual “fusion of the senses” was the main goal of Rez and is achieved by giving the player very similar experiences through different senses. What this means concretely is that the controller’s vibration is made to pulse in time with the beat and the game’s music is always tightly related to what is happening on-screen.

The game follows a structure similar to music videos in that each level is modeled around a song, instead of the other way around. Each level is set to electronic trance music. One important characteristic of trance music is that it builds up over the course of a song – starting with simple rhythm sections and progressively layering track after track of drum beats, melodies and vocals as the tempo changes to fit the mood of the song, creating periods of tension and release. Rez beautifully exploits this property of trance music for its synesthetic purposes. Each level is composed of ten “layers”, each one linked to a track in that level’s background song. The player starts on the first layer, where only one track of music plays and can progress to the next layer by shooting a very important object – the “network opening”, a glowing wireframe cube featured prominently on the game’s box art. Once the player shoots this object, a new track is added to the background music and new elements are added to the game’s scenery to go along with it.

A particularly striking use of this is in the game’s first area. The player starts out in mostly black empty space, with red wireframe “terrain” under the player’s floating avatar. The game is perfectly silent – and as you hear the first sound, two enemies appear on the horizon. The game’s music is almost non-existent, with only a quiet loop playing in the background. The first few enemies are lined up horizontally and very easy to dispatch. Then, a network opening appears. Shooting it yields beams of light, numbers counting down and a chorus of voices going “Ahhhh”. Suddenly, the landscape morphs around you and you transition into the second layer with a blast of light and sound. The music has picked up speed and a drum track. Walls that look like circuit boards have appeared. Shortly after, you run into a second network opening – this one causes the scenery to shift again, the music picks up even more speed and now has a note playing on every fourth beat. As the visuals and sound grow more complex, more and more enemies come at you. Yet another network opening brings you flashing walls and a more complex drum track. Another network opening appears – this one brings in the melody and new scenery elements such as pyramids and sphinxes. Immediately, a new opening appears to develop this melody even more. And the next opening makes this melody disappear temporarily, as the player enters a new, more visually subdued part of the network. Two openings later, the melody has been brought back; the music is in full swing, as are the visuals and the game. This all happens over the course of four minutes.

The noteworthy thing here is that every element of the level has been tailored to fit the game’s music. The flow of enemies is dictated by the flow of the music, which quite naturally creates a difficulty curve that starts out easy and moves into more intense territory. The layer where the melody temporarily disappears introduces a new, tougher enemy type that attacks alone instead of the waves of enemies encountered earlier in the level, demanding less frantic movement from the player. The synesthesia comes not only from the fact that the visuals mimic the music, but also from the fact that the player’s involvement mimics the music. Periods of tension and release in the game’s music will be reflected by tension and release in the gameplay. No other game can claim to have songs that evolve at the same speed as the player.

Matching the game’s events with audio events is nothing new. Games that do this dynamically are said to have adaptive audio. For instance, Shadow of the Colossus has two songs for every fight; a more ominous one when the player is on the ground, and a more intense one when the player is climbing the colossus. However, the transition between the two happens with an inelegant cross-fade, abruptly breaking one song into the other. Moreover, this transition can happen a dozen times during the fight, and will sometimes happen twice in rapid succession if you jump onto the colossus and then immediately fall off, leaving you with two seconds of one song breaking up the other. While Rez’s system forces the player to follow a somewhat strict level structure, the end result is music that flows naturally as though it was mixed for your playing session. Rez’s sound effects, which are bits of electronic music quantized to the game’s beat, reinforce this feeling. Each time you play Rez, it mixes new music together for your play style.

Games will generally try to use fitting music. Horror games will go for music that reinforces the horror feel. Yet very few games can claim to have gameplay that matches their music down to the tempo changes.

In conclusion, Rez brought us innovation in music by making an experience tailored to the music, instead of the other way around. By combining the build-up elements of trance music and the automatic movement of the rail shooter genre, Rez manages to create gameplay that flows with music. It provides gameplay, visuals and even vibration that match the game’s music to give the player a feeling of synesthesia.

This innovation in making music for games inspired many game developers, though you can’t look for them. You have to listen for them. Some games were directly inspired by Rez, such as Synaesthete, which incorporates a music system similar to Rez’s. Other games, like Ookibloks, use a generative music system like Rez, using quantized music notes as sound effects, effectively turning the gameplay into a musical instrument. Rez set the bar quite high for adaptive music systems in games, and while many have attempted to replicate the experience, no one has come close so far.

End Paper

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