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.
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