“One of the strangest experiences”: The psychedelic video game Radiohead made for PlayStation
For some of us, getting back home from a tough day at work means one thing: slapping on the PlayStation and playing a cathartic video game, often involving decapitating alien hordes or scoring a goal at Wembley. Rarely do gamers want to be psychologically tested after a long day, however, and who can blame them? Yet, this is precisely what Radiohead aimed to do back in 2021 when they released Kid A Mnesia Exhibition.
Initially intended to be a physical art installation before the Covid-19 pandemic forced the project to go digital, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is an exploration game with no real aim or objective other than to simply traverse the peculiar landscapes inspired by the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac. Presented as a bizarre, nightmarish hellscape of sorts, the exhibition is not the kind of hum-drum everyday Tate installation.
With the empty echo of any gallery worth it’s salt filling the space, you, the player, walk through tight corridors with eerie messages scribbled on the walls before squeezing into hidden doorways that conceal colossal cathedrals dedicated to the work of Radiohead. Not the only guest of the space, you are joined by faceless stick figures who blindly march into walls, as well as jagged monochrome creatures who slink into the darkness.
Elsewhere, endless chasms splashed with paint provide the pit of darkness anyone high on narcotics would shudder at the sight of, with the space being perfectly paired with the music of Radiohead, just like how a glass of milk goes perfectly with Beethoven’s ‘Ninth Symphony’. Certainly not a half-arsed project, any ardent Radiohead lover could spend well over two hours exploring the secrets of the game’s existence, peeking behind every seemingly closed curtain while interacting with each and every stick figure.
Made by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and the band’s producer Nigel Godrich, alongside video game developers Epic Games, who are better known for their multi-billion dollar asset Fortnite, the exhibition was made available in 2021 on PlayStation, Windows and MacOS. Certainly in line with the creative innovation of the band in question, the exhibition manages to capture the contemporary existentialism that the band exudes throughout the course of both Kid A and Amnesiac.
“Everything that we built came directly from what we made 20 years ago, in one way or another,” Yorke said of the project in an interview with PlayStation upon the release of the game, with the singer making it a priority that new work was pumped into the taxing project.
Continuing, he added: “We had all the multitrack recordings from the albums so we were able to rebuild the audio from the original elements in a new controlled space which wasn’t just stereo…Working on something as strange as this over long Zoom calls with a large team of technicians all around the world has been one of the strangest experiences we have ever had…it’s something like a mutant re-engineering of Kid A and Amnesiac”.
Validating video games as a platform where art can thrive, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition can be experienced right now for free for anyone wishing to immerse themselves in a world specifically engineered by Radiohead for lovers of hypnotising work.
