On September 3, 2004, I received my subscriber copy of issue 13 of ReadyMade magazine, and something caught my eye: in an article about refurbishing arcade games, rapper Thes One of The People Under The Stairs said
“There’s an illegally made Beastie Boys game, from when License To Ill came out,” [Thes] says with a sigh. “That’s the rarest and coolest [game] I can think of.”
Really? I’d never heard of such a thing. I quickly searched the web, turned up nothing, and forgot all about it until yesterday. But it turns out there was a prototype of a Beastie Boys arcade game produced, by Kaneko. According to the Beastiemania video games page,
A prototype cabinet was made using the ‘Check Your Head’ logo on one side and a white picture of the Beastie Boys on the other. The control panel had each of the Beastie’s names next to each joystick. A CD player inside the cabinet plays tracks from “Paul’s Boutique” and “Check Your Head” and as expected any swearing is beeped out. The different levels consisted of:
- Dodging eggs being thrown at them for 30 seconds
- Standing on a giant moving turntable while avoiding “The Turntable King”
- Get their microphones back
- Get their instruments back
- Get back to PJ’s for their live performance
When all these levels are complete you win the RIAA Award and it all starts again.
Sounds awesome!! It turns out that this was to be a sequel to Kaneko’s 1989
side-scrolling, possibly racist DJ Boy ((DJ Boy unquestionably employed unpleasant racial tropes - like the boss of the first level, “Big Mama,” who was significantly altered for US version.)). DJ Boy did have a celebrity connection - the US version had voices by radio DJ Wolfman Jack. Witness:
(images from Emustatus)
Kaneko brought their prototype sequel to the Beastie Boys, who declined to grant them licensing. The Beasties know video games ((”and if you play Defender I could be your hyper space,” is a lyric from 1998’s Body Movin‘, and it refers to the fact that Defender’s hyper space button, which can potentially save your in-game life, is hard to reach from the joystick and you sort of need a second person to push it for you when you ask, that is, ‘be your hyper space.’)), and maybe they recognized the game as just another sub-par, facile side-scrolling beat-em-up. For whatever reason, it didn’t happen.
In my opinion, Kaneko made a mistake: presenting the game to the Beastie Boys as a near-finished product. This might have worked with J-Pop artists in Japan, but the Beasties have always been creative and hands-on - an entire brand-child, Grand Royal, was supported by this impulse. If Kaneko had come in early in the spirit of collaboration, who knows how things could have turned out. Alas! The Beastie Boys game was given new, generic player sprites, different music, and released as B. Rap Boys!
(images from Emustatus)
As far as I know, the location of the Beastie Boys prototype cabinet is unknown. These things are often destroyed or repurposed, so it may not even exist. If you know anything about the fate of the prototype or what really happened between Kaneko and the Beasties, please please email me and I’ll update this page.