Well, here’s a dose of weirdness for your day. In the Summer of 2011, Gordon Calleja started to mull over the idea of how to adapt a song into a video game. Hey, why not? Hollywood makes movies based on song titles all the time. He eventually decided to develop the idea around on the legendary Joy Division song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, and its theme of a relationship on the event horizon of collapse. With the help of Mighty Box Games (based out of Malta) and the backing of the Malta Arts Fund, Calleja eventually came up with the finished, browser-based title, named Will Love Tear Us Apart?, and released it online last week.
Like the song it is based on, Will Love Tear Us Apart? focuses on the darkness of a relationship irreversibly falling apart, and trying to come to grips with that realization. Each level is focused around a verse from the famous tune, and gives the player a sense of both confusion as to how to proceed and certainty as to what the outcome must be. A quote from an article on UK-based music site Fact Magazine quotes Calleja’s emphasis on the graphical design as, “rendered in his mind’s eye as Dürer woodcuts.”
As a game, WLTUA is short, but playable. There is some Italian (Maltese? Is that a language?) audio dialogue, but the text translates across to English, and the tone of the non-translated dialogue is delivered well enough to get the point of what they are saying. It is worth checking out, and definitely piques the curiosity as to what other song-to-game adaptations could come out of the minds of enterprising game developers.
Will Love Tear Us Apart? is playable on their own website, located here.
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