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This was likely due to licensing issues between labels or potentially out of a desire to keep the album down to a single CD. Unfortunately, not every band on the soundtrack made it to the compilation album. If you didn’t own the game or a PlayStation, a soundtrack album was released on CD. Say you owned the game and learned you couldn’t play it to save your life, you could always use the Jukebox mode of the game to switch between all the tracks to listen to them in their entirety without the game sound effects getting in the way. The chosen bands and songs were selected from hundreds of submissions throughout North America.” I’m not sure if that responsibility fell to Kennedy, or who else in the development of this game deserves any further, possibly bigger cut of the credit, but the artist featured here are ultimately the ones that are worthy of the recognition, which is the main target of my focus.Īs much as I love the game play of Jailbreak, you don’t even need to play the game to peruse the soundtrack.
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For Road Rash Jailbreak, Electronic Arts again pushed the envelope by holding a first-ever, nationwide music search for unsigned and independent label bands to supply the game’s raw, in-your-face soundtrack. The original press release lists as a selling point that “Music has always played an important part of Road Rash history.
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To license some of those bigger label names, how many songs could they have realistically put on the game for equal money? Half as many?īusiness Affairs for Music and Video for Jailbreak was credited to Jim Kennedy, who (assuming I have the right man based on his resume) has since gone on to a Senior Vice President role with Pixar, so he’s to be given at least a portion of the credit for the compilation of talent as far as I can tell. As long as the music is hard-hitting, it was going to work, and this soundtrack manages to pack not only eighteen songs, but they are eighteen songs that contribute wonderfully in their own way to provide a great atmosphere. But in this case I’d argue the exception breaks the rule. Some may argue quality over quantity is the way to go, and I’m usually inclined to agree. Second, which goes in hand with cost, is volume. To grant exposure for lower-tier bands to a potentially massive worldwide audience seemed like such a forward-thinking idea to me, and they weighed the risk correctly that big names wouldn’t make or break the game. We have here a stable of bands that provide a similar energy or possibly higher energy considering their hunger to expand their respective fan bases at what was likely a fraction of the price tag. The first of these surely must have been cost. This shift to independent and lesser-known artists was smart on several factors. The follow-up Road Rash 3D also included notable major-label talents such as The Tea Party, Sugar Ray, and Kid Rock. In fact, they did do this on the 3DO version of Road Rash with the likes of Soundgarden, Therapy?, and Monster Magnet. Electronic Arts could have made it easy on themselves and brought in some bigger bands to potentially draw more eyes on the game. The soundtrack as a whole doesn’t get enough of a spotlight since for the most part, none of these bands really broke out. All of these bands were independent or lesser-known that were mostly in the early phase of their music careers.
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The cool thing about the featured songs is that they didn’t pick from established major label acts at all. In total, there were eighteen different songs included in the game by various artists.
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With Road Rash: Jailbreak, they took advantage of the next-generation of gaming technology to raise not just the graphics to a higher level, but the sound and music as well.
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What’s not to like about the Road Rash series of video games? They contain the thrill of speed, the competition of a sports game, and satisfy your blood-lust with the ability to take out opponents with a punch, kick, or bludgeoning with weapons.
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