Rock Star Ate My Hamster

You started with money and a list of people. Each one had a price and a rough idea of what they were good at, and the first real decision of the game was made before a note was played: four expensive players and no budget left for promotion, or four cheap ones and a war chest.

After that it was a diary. Rehearse, record a single, book a gig, and — the part everybody remembers — commission a publicity stunt. The stunts were the game's engine and its punchline: a story in the right paper moved more records than a better record did, and a story that went wrong moved the band backwards. The chart was where you found out which it had been.

It is a satire with a thesis, which is unusual for a budget title. The thesis is that the music is a secondary input. You can feel the game arguing it: the quality of a single mattered, but it mattered less than the campaign around it, and a manager who concentrated on the songs was a manager who lost to one who concentrated on the press.

That was a fair reading of the British industry in 1988 and it has not stopped being one. The channel has changed several times since — the tabloids gave way to the weeklies, the weeklies to the internet, the internet to whatever is running the feed this year — but the shape of the argument has survived every one of them.

The management game as comedy. Most of the genre before and since has been earnest: run the club, run the railway, run the empire. Rock Star Ate My Hamster ran an industry it plainly thought was ridiculous, and let you win by being ridiculous back — which is a design position, not just a tone of voice.

It also fixed the loop that any band game has to answer to: hire, produce, promote, chart, and live with the personalities in between. Anything built in this lineage is arguing with that loop whether it means to or not.