Rolling Stone: How Psychedelic Games ‘Rez Infinite,’ ‘Thumper’ Fuse Electronic Music With Virtual Reality
“Next month’s launch of PlayStation VR marks the debut of the two most impressive products of this synergy to date: Enhance Games’ blissed-out Rez Infinite, and Drool’s gnarled, menacing Thumper.
For the uninitiated: Rez began its life in 2001 on the Sega Dreamcast console, and has since become a seminal title in the history of modern audiovisual experience. Essentially a shooter set inside a futuristic computer simulation, the player’s avatar is propelled through a neon metaverse in an attempt to destroy and outmaneuver a stream of AI data clusters. Among other things, the game was remarkable for its blending of music and visual elements to create a psychedelic symphony of interactive sound and imagery, all in creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s relentless pursuit of synesthesia – the phenomenon where the stimulation of one sense triggers a response from another (some people, who experience it involuntarily in daily life, describe ‘seeing’ sounds)…”
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