14 DAY TRIAL // The future is now: Linkin Park's newest music video, "Guily All the Same," is an interactive six-minute long video game created in Project Spark, the Windows/Xbox One game making tool.
Project Spark entered open beta on Microsoft's home entertainment system Xbox One only a week ago and is still in closed beta for PC, for now. The tool is being developed by a 70-person team located in Redmond, Washington.
The program allows users to put together their own games by using simple, modular drag and drop tools using an intuitive interface. Entire worlds can be drawn in Project spark in only a few minutes by using the extended toolset, players being able to simply "paint" environments and textures and drop in objects with customizable properties wherever they want.
Linkin Park band members Mike Shinoda and Joe Hahn revealed that the idea to use Project Spark came to them after Hahn attended E3 2013 in June. They wanted their fans to be able to "play" with their music, granting them the ability and encouraging them to remix both the song and the game in any way they desire.
"I saw this cool demo for Project Spark, and it just blew my mind. For me, the next step was to see if we could showcase our next song as a game instead of a video," Hahn shared.
The video is freely available on Project Spark and the band offered their blessings to any fan who wishes to mess around with it.
Linkin Park's version of the game features a protagonist who is haunted by guilt, and the player navigates a sinister environment where his own guilt threatens to devour him unless he can make his escape.
From a mechanical point of view, the level consists of a mashup between Temple Run and the gloomy aesthetic of Limbo.
Shinoda said that they did their part, taken their turn, and now it's up to the fans to take the next step, stating that as long as it makes him laugh, he doesn't mind what people do with it.
Although Project Spark has not been in beta for too long, its Windows 8 closed beta debuting in December last year, its users have already put together an impressive amount of content, its more than 500k players posting around 1300 new creations on the platform every day.
Some people have even created animated movies using the software's art and animation tools, such as those on the Xbox One, where native support for Kinect allows them to track their movements and record speech and breathe life into in-game characters.
Developer Team Dakota aims to deliver the robust game-making game as a free-to-play title on Microsoft's platforms (it will not require an Xbox Live Gold subscription), the full version of the program being scheduled for full release sometime later this year.