Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure - The Definitive Review

Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure Under Pressure. That's not an echo.

In my youth, I was a fairly ardent graffiti writer. To be brutally honest, I worked at the more unpopular end of the graffiti spectrum, but it gave me a passionate grounding in the culture and that unique experience of the city in the dead of night. The witching hours where an entirely different population is occupying the spaces, and playing the real-life stealth game of plotting and dodging your visibility while carrying out beautiful crimes, not to mention plotting and dodging the dangerously ill and the opportunist criminals of the early hours. I did most of my dubious work in the 1990s, under the increasingly wide gaze of CCTV¹. We were jealous of the generation before us, who had so little to fear from overseeing eyes, where the audacious and bold could upset local newspaper letter pages with a few hours’ work. It’s a time I remember fondly, of the sheer rush of it, the plastering of your chosen name in your chosen style over the urban environment. That which so often seeks to diminish and conform the individual becomes a canvas to illegally promote it. Never mind the scrawl, who asked your permission to be bombarded with branding and advertising?² So common a defiant credo for the youthful and motivated, the infamy gained amongst peer groups for marking every surface along a popular street offered so much more than traditional, socially-acceptable status incentives. Naturally, this handwritten affliction across urban surfaces maintains a cachet that’s always carried a particular counter-cultural capital; before the US graffiti of the 1970s was the Chad, or the enigma of Killroy. To claim ownership of a name that everyone has seen generates currency in social situations where such affluence is hard to earn. What the post-modern US flavour brought was the competition for aesthetic excellence, that one not only needed to write a name, but had to make it look cool. Therein lay the challenge, the development of style. And there lay the avenue for talent, for dedication, for practice. Modern graffiti, even in its most basic form, is an art to be mastered.

We’ve seen it so many times. Graffiti in videogames. It appears everywhere. In open-world cityscapes, on car liveries, on extreme sports outfits. We also know the games that made it gameplay, from Counter Strike to Jet Set Radio to GTA San Andreas and through to Watch Dogs 2³. But they all got it wrong. Even the game that made graffiti so central to its identity that it aspired to make household names of famous writers got it wrong. Of course, that game was Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, and it’s not a controversial opinion that it got a fair few things wrong besides its presentation of graffiti. The problem I have with Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was that it made the act of doing graffiti a series of stick wobbles. That is not what doing graffiti is. Mark Ecko should have known (and in fact does know) better, as he presumably had plenty of creative control given that his game was named Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.

Where every single graffiti game ever has gone wrong is that they skip the difficult part of implementing technique to instead present the highly skilled criminal act of artistic vandalism as applying a magic sticker via the medium of mime. Noted, this isn’t the only criminal act that videogames trivialise, but there is a simple process to follow when doing graffiti and it should be also noted that the most fun aspects of graffiti are often the simplest and quickest. Real graffiti is about being out in the urban environment in the depths of night, doing damage and then doing it again and again and again until you run out of pens or paint. It’s about the skills of wrist and elbow and pushing your personal style through the pigments. And this is what games have missed. Every videogame graffitist is seemingly ultra-skilled from the first spray. There’s no development in style, despite the obvious progression structure a graffiti game could easily accommodate, and there is little choice in which aesthetic strand you wish to follow. For the uninitiated, graffiti developed many stylistic lineages before the mainstream debuts of Banksy⁴ and ‘street art’ as a saleable commodity⁵. There are national, regional and even borough-specific styles. Games tend to offer you a desperately narrow catalogue to choose from, and set you up as a wild jack of all trades, offering choices from an incoherent and impersonal palette of styles. And the graffiti spots in JSR and Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure are always signposted. There’s no sketchy urban exploration, no slipping into trainyards or finding the access tunnel that gets you to some juicy parked-up carriages. No requirement to work out the most visible spot, no risks to be taken trying to reach some lofty rooftop that oversees crowded footfalls. No whispered swapping of secret ins and outs with allies and rivals, or purloined access keys to forbidden doorways and underground tunnel networks. All this juice and detail is skipped for a 30-second animation to apply a piece that could take hours in real life. It cheapens the culture, no matter what lip service Mark Ecko paid in Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure to the graffiti luminaries of the 80s and 90s.

What I actually need is a game about the grubbiest archetype of graffiti culture - the hardcore tags-and-throwups⁶ bomber. They are the writers the public hates. They don’t do gorgeous, elaborate typography in curated spaces. They don’t make pithy social commentary through stencils. They don’t paint slightly wonky memorial portraits or easily-monetised cartoon characters. They just destroy urban surfaces with their names and affiliations. But they are also the most suited to the modern open-world videogame. It’s all too easy to imagine how the real-world culture of classical graffiti can fall neatly into an open-world design. Even down to racking the Buntlacks and Eddings⁷. Once you have the city, the mechanics of graffiti slip beautifully into place - complete with day/night cycles and factional zone control. But the missing dimension is one so rarely implemented it’s almost a crime of its own: the management of fear.

The earnest and eager debutant toy is full of contradictory fear and bravado, and management of both comes with experience. I often visualise a virtual writer gingerly perched amidst some high-up bridge girders in the night-time rain. It’s 1981, Brooklyn, and you’re trying to finish that last outline as a police car approaches and the fear meter peaks. Do you drop the can or yourself, or carry on and risk the game choosing an outcome for you? Given that my dream graffiti game is a roguelike, it’s a serious choice - and one that might make you wish you put more points into speedy execution and done a lot more bridge climbing to level up your vertigo resilience. It would be so much fun. The goal is to celebrate and educate with the culture and the personal experience of graffiti as the enduring social phenomenon, not as the slap-it-on commodity it commonly appears as.

Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure fell into the slap-it-on approach. It’s actually a fairly middling 3rd-person adventure with fairly middling combat and fairly middling stealth, set in a near-future authoritarian dystopia that comes together as some hubristic bullet-point list of things Mark Ecko thinks would make a great videogame. The graffiti is almost secondary to the template. You could substitute its spraying with political postering, or even guerrilla sabotage. The game merely features graffiti. It isn’t actually about it. I wonder if a doomed project from a few years later, APB⁸ would have supported a population of urb-ex graffiti-writing players within its ambitious cops-and-robbers milieu. It would seem an ideal base for such things, but again it would have been like all the rest; using graffiti as some adjunct to the game’s actual gameplay, rather than being a defining goal for it. Certainly, the vogue for AR would seem to be virtual graffiti’s natural home, and it’s easy to plot out how it could work, but where would the game be? And would it encourage way too much ill-advised clambering in a real world with very real consequences? Of course, apps already exist for this. I don’t fancy the prospect of trying to make my own game, though. I think we’re a couple of decades off AI-prompting our own bullet-pointed lists for virtual worlds, but when it comes, I’m definitely making that AI watch Style Wars. Because everyone should watch Style Wars. Interestingly, Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure⁹ included a pretty good graffiti documentary in its deluxe edition. To be honest, it was better than the game. And maybe that’s the point¹⁰.

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1. In a canvas competition for graffiti in my home town, run by a skate shop, we all pitched in with gaudy pieces with as much complexity as we could muster. My town’s most notable artist submitted a line drawing of a CCTV camera.

2. It’s always fun to note how we accept advertising and brand signage in the urban environment as acceptable visual noise, but so often see tags on a wall as a visual pollutant. Behind each advert is a product asking to be bought. Behind each tag is a human asking to be seen.

3. A particularly trite implementation, as one should always expect from Ubisoft at its most ‘cool’.

4. In an article for a hipster fashion monthly, I once wrote that traditional graffiti was writers photographing hundreds of pieces of their own work for themselves, whereas Banksy was one piece of work being photographed thousands of times by other people for social media clout.

5. It’s important to note that graffiti has always been commodified, particularly in the early ‘80s when it rubbed shoulders with Basquiat and Haring in NYC gallery circles. There was something new and perversely boring about the Banksy revolution, something reassuringly art-school about its common fare that made it palatable in a way that wild graffiti should never be.

6. A throwup is ‘thrown up’ in two colours; a bubble outline that can be drawn with the minimum number of strokes and a contrasting fill, normally white or silver with back or red outlines. The lettering form is unique to the category and can be extremely demanding to master, should you give enough of a shit to develop your own style. But its fluidity is beautiful to draw, a real joy to express.

7. Spray paint and marker pens. If you immediately think ‘Montana’, you’re nothing but a johnny-come-lately trustifarian posho who buys the entire spectrum from overpriced art shops and thinks flared tags are the best and that the Beastie Boys are the greatest rappers ever.

8. I still wonder sometimes if APB was just too ahead of its time to ever succeed. Is there an alternate timeline where it was so fucking good, Rockstar just gave up and GTA5 never happened?

9. Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was part of a loose grouping of games that seemed to celebrate Hip Hop culture in the early 2000s. Often forgotten, consider that from 2003 - 2009 we got DJ Hero, FreeStyle’s surprisingly good B-Boy, Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure and both Def Jam Vendetta games, the latter - Fight For New York - being so unbelievably astonishing that I can barely believe that it actually exists. And I played it though a few years ago!

10. Yes, this is indeed a Brass Eye reference.