Def Jam - Fight For NY: The Definitive Review
Hip-Hop dreams can come true
If you had told the 14-year-old me, in 1988, when I was listening to Cold Lampin’ With Flavor1, that 26 years later I would be able to have Flavor Flav as a tag-team partner in one of the best wrestling games ever designed, I wouldn’t believe you. And, even after actually using Flavor Flav as a tag team partner in one of the best wrestling games ever designed, I still can’t quite believe that it was actually possible. But then, this is one of the most unbelievable games ever produced. 2004’s Def Jam - Fight For NY has an early-on ‘boss fight’ of sorts, wherein your hero partners with Ice-T to fight none other than a difficulty-spiking Sean Paul. As I recall at the time, I hated Sean Paul because he shouted too much and wasn’t fit to kiss someone like Ice-T’s boots, let alone win in simulated combat against him. Thus, you can imagine my joy when I had beaten Mr Paul to such an extent that he was vulnerable to a KO and hence crawling around on the floor, only for Ice-T to issue his finisher; a savage kick up the arse. Sean Paul took it right in the crown jewels, was launched fully into the air with a 180 flip to land, utterly humiliated and defeated, on the floor. 20 years later. One has to wonder what degree of control over digital likenesses the Def Jam contract had in its smallprint, as the one thing missing from its staggering roster of contemporary rappers and hip-hop associates is any sort of egotism. Beyond the swagger and braggadocio of their entry and victory animations, all rappers are equal, something that seems entirely contrary to that era’s Hip-Hop raison d’etre.
In 2004, we were still very much in the grip of a kind of post-millennial cultural madness. Dressing like a jockey was de rigueur on the right red carpets, you could wear jeans and a dress at the same time, the pop charts were full of rappers and rap crossovers and reality TV2 was embarking on its bewildering takeover of the music channels. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that Electronic Arts thought its second collaboration with Def Jam could do with being ludicrously over the top. The storyline is a cartoonish crime caper based around the control of Hip-Hop clubs in New York. For starters, the chief baddie in Def Jam - Fight For NY is Snoop Dogg, but playing a gangland mastermind pimp called Crow. Busta Rhymes also plays a character, as do Fat Joe and Method Man. Curiously, for followers of the Wu Tang, Ghostface Killah3 plays himself. What’s weirder is that many of the rappers who play characterised roles in Fight For NY were themselves in the original Vendetta, not to mention that some big names from Vendetta, like DMX and Funkmaster Flex, don’t appear in the sequel. Odder still (and utterly plagued with offensive levels of objectification) are the female cast for Def Jam - Fight For NY. They’re merely girlfriends of the male cast, yet they still fight. One utterly perplexing arrangement sees the possibility of having Def Jam founder Russell Simmons’ actual wife at the time, Kimora Lee Simmons, being your girlfriend and having to play as her to fight model-actor Carmen Electra. The player then gets to decide if you’re staying with Kimora or swapping to Carmen! Extraordinary.
What really sticks out with the characterisation and story is its sheer archness. It’s far too silly to be some naïve, serious attempt at drama4, despite how earnestly it plays. It’s almost a Hip-Hop pantomime of sorts, and seems to have something vaguely in common with indescribable monster R Kelly’s equally bewildering In The Closet5, released in 2005. Where In The Closet is a soap opera sung as an actual opera in a 2000s R’n’B style, Def Jam - Fight for NY is a crime comic mashed with WWE-style drama to manufacture opportunities to fight. It’s reasonable to surmise that the lack of care and attention the featured artists give to their own narrative and/or in-combat outcomes is likely due to the lack of seriousness that videogames were treated with in that decade. The medium was too frivolous to be seen as reputationally risky. As mentioned earlier, I’m sure it would be very different now. I can’t imagine Kendrick Lamar allowing himself to be kicked in the testicles by Drake, or Doja Cat and Cardi B fighting it out to impress you into choosing one as your girlfriend. Perhaps it plays to the cartoonish and grandiose public personae of rappers in a pre-socials age, just before the era when Rhianna would tweet c-bombs to her legions of teen girl fans. The modern star’s personality is betrayed across a suite of exposing social channels, leaving much less wiggle-room to settle into roles ‘just for fun’. And that’s not to mention the fundamental changes in the relationship between artist and label, where contracts are much more precise and concepts of ownership in terms of persona, likeness and reputation are claimed far more ardently by artists that exploit them. Fortnite and Modern Warfare seem to be the modern carriers of celebrity, but perhaps only as premium DLC and in small numbers - a Timothee Chalamet here, a Snoop Dogg there, maybe Eminem. Certainly not the bulging roster6 of Def Jam - Fight for NY, and its requisite lists of specially-recorded voice lines7.
Def Jam - Fight for NY isn’t notable only for its wild cultural expression but because it’s the last in a wonderful lineage of exemplary wrestling games. Developed by AKI Corporation, Fight for NY links back to a legendary run of Nintendo 64 titles, most famous in the west for Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF: No Mercy. I played a colossal amount of both of these games thanks to their fabulous create-a-wrestler modes and wonderful degrees of match configuration. No Mercy is, in many ways, the pinnacle of the wrestling game8. It’s certainly never been topped for my money. Consider that you could set up a battle royale with 50 entrants, wherein the KO/win condition was to start bleeding. You can then construct a custom character with moves that carry a ‘chance to cause bleeding’ trait. If your friend does the same, you have the setting for an absolutely hilarious half-hour of frenzied and chaotic combat that, if played skillfully, ends in a stupendously tense face-off between you both9. I distinctly remember losing my bananas when Andre the Giant ran to the ring and I’d coincidentally timed a bleed move to land on him as soon as Andre came into play, with the RNG giving the claret in one punch. This coincided with a camera zoom to a new contender entering the ring, and with Andre’s massive model in the way, it zoomed in on a Nintendo 64-quality sad-face texture for far longer than any developer would have intended. But WWF: No Mercy had so much more to offer in terms of ring-based 4-way violence. Setting the win condition to ‘pins only’ meant you could beat enemy characters into a KO state without the match ending, meaning you could carry on abusing them way past any reasonably safe boundary. A favourite was to keep picking weapons from the crowd until you got a ring bell, and then dragging an unconscious character so their head lay on the bell and then executing a head-bash ground attack, resulting in ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding and yet another KO animation. With the create-a-wrestler being versatile enough to allow facsimiles of hated celebrities and politicians of the day, it made No Mercy a catharsis simulator par excellence10. But this infantile slapstick belies the greater depths of the wrestling engine. Playing on actual difficulties demanded good control and strategy, especially in terms of finding a pace to the match that feels analogous to the real thing, getting the rhythms and execution just right to build spirit to allow signature finishing moves on appropriately weakened enemies. Naturally, this was even more fun in co-op, with the Nintendo 64’s four-player capabilities offering seriously dogged tag-team matches between sufficiently skilled foursomes11.
Def Jam - Fight for NY took away a lot of the more subtler aspects of driving spirit by introducing bling. By adorning yourself with enough jewels, you could HYPE THE CROWD to such an extent that you’re triggering finishers within a couple of moves from kick-off. Not to worry, though. If you’ve chosen the ‘Streetfighter’ fighting style, you can plough in with a glorious freight-train right-hander for rapid KOs that somehow carry more oomph and inspire more ‘oooof’ facial expressions than the theatrically over-complicated finishers of other fighting styles. Like Vendetta, Def Jam - Fight for NY has a fun set of contextual moves to spark pleasure, including electrocution and train-based complex trauma should you master the darker arts of enemy positioning found in the Nintendo 64 titles. What it lacks in wrassslin’ purity, it makes up for in nastiness and edge. But ultimately, Fight for NY is a fun game and very deliberately so. A marriage of lineage and IP that is as crazy as it sounds, but nonetheless works. However in the modern golden age of offensively horrific media rights laws, it’s nigh on impossible to have Def Jam - Fight for NY re-released or remastered. A real shame, as on modern hardware and bringing in more artists, we could have the Big Daddy Kane vs Rakim showdown we always wanted to see. ODB vs Canibus? Kanye vs Jay Z for the real owner of the throne? Thing is, Electronic Arts completely fucked it by abandoning AKI and using the Fight Night engine to make the astoundingly shit Def Jam Icon. Like, don’t even look at a YouTube video of it. It’s that stupid. The real kicker? According to Vice, eventual Kinect evangelist (and then-producer for EA) Kudo Tsunoda reckoned that Hip-Hop and wrestling simply didn’t go together. How incredibly fucking wrong he was. As for Def Jam in videogames, my fondest memory after Fight for NY was getting pulled into a street-based promo event for Def Jam Rap Star in Covent Garden and delivering a peerless performance of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s It Takes Two, only I changed the immortal lines to “I can stand Buddha and I do like cess, yes”.
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The third track on side A of Public Enemy's second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Best rhyme is: “live lyrics from the bank of reality, I kick a fly dope manoeuvre technicality”. Released on Def Jam, it cemented the label's reputation for cutting-edge, hardcore Hip-Hop that had seen crossover success with Run DMC's Aerosmith collab, Walk This Way. Founded by Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons, Def Jam also hosted the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and EPMD, pioneering the golden era of Hip-Hop. Def Jam floated between giant conglomerates during the 90s but still launched the careers of many crossover rap luminaries. By the 2000s it had embraced the raw commerciality of the pop charts and was seen by original fans as a shadow of its former self, with this latitude and eye for $$$$ presumably being one of the reasons it partnered with EA for a wrestling game.
My favourite chain of MTV reality shows sees Flavor Flav looking for a romantic partner in two seasons which leads to the rise to stardom of Tiffany "New York" Pollard, who fails to woo Flav and instead gets her own dating show, I Love New York. Season two of that sees the arrival of Frank the Entertainer who fails to woo New York, but gets his own show in Frank the Entertainer In A Basement Affair, which was infiltrated by a performance artist who was covered by Decoder Ring here: https://slate.com/culture/2018/07/decoder-ring-explores-the-right-reasons-to-go-on-a-tv-dating-show.html
Tiffany Pollard, of course, ends up on the UK Celebrity Big Brother, where she famously called UK reality star Gemma Collins a "fat c**t".
“No one could get iller”.
I suspect, however, that EA execs probably did think it was an expertly-crafted masterpiece of narrative fiction, targeted specifically for the ‘urban’ demographic.
Seriously, it's R Kelly's most fascinating work. He is a fucking hideous human being but In The Closet is genuinely astonishing. You really need to see it. It's heavily strike-camouflaged here:
Special mentions must go to Danny Trejo, Rocksteady B-Boy Crazy Legs, Henry fucking Rollins and Jacob the actual jeweller. This must be the biggest celebrity cast in any videogame, right?
Realistically, trying to think how you schedule 10+ rappers, all with active careers, to record their voice lines fries my brain. This alone is perhaps the game's greatest achievement.
A serious purist will cite Dreamcast Fire Pro Wrestling here and I would bow to them if it wasn't for the fact I'm extremely bitter with myself about lending it to a friend 23 years ago and then never seeing them again.
Imagine Divekick, but with far higher stakes and being actually fun.
Hated wrestlers were a common target. In my episode of Declan Dineen's lovely Checkpoints podcast, he mentions failed star Buff Bagwell getting the brunt of the punishment in his circle and, funnily enough, he was a popular target in ours. Along with X-Pac, the fucking prick.
Serious matches between experienced players also had a use for taunts, which we would deploy in extremely risky idle periods to actually infuriate each other. Timing was key as different taunts had different durations and you could get caught out.