I’m not normally one for anniversaries – there’s already enough to remind me how old I’m getting every time I look in the mirror, thank you very much – but this one hit hard. Rez, originally the work of Sega’s United Games Artists that first launched on PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast back in the winter of 2001, has turned 20 years old. Old enough, it turns out, to spend a night on the tiles chewing its face off to some sweet tunes.
Rez isn’t exactly one of the most successful of games, or the most revered, but for people of a certain age it was a deeply formative thing. I’d just turned 20 upon its release, harbouring artistic pretensions at Goldsmiths and going through one of those phases where I’d briefly fallen out of love with video games, passing them over for other more hedonistic pursuits. Rez sort of snapped everything back into sharp focus, a convergence of high art with club culture, delivered with the arcade chops of Sega in its pomp. It was Kandinsky refracted through a ketamine prism, playing out like a perfectly quantised Afterburner where your missiles scattered like high hats and each explosion was a ground pounding 808 beat.
So yes, Rez made me sit up and take notice. It opened my eyes to what video games could be, and made me want to poke around a bit more at the people and ideas behind them. It made me start picking up that enjoyably pretentious mag Edge again, and start wondering how I might get to be pretentious about video games myself for a living some day. So I guess it led me here, in its own funny way. Sorry about that.