The Other British Invasion of 1997-2003: A Culmination

Beatles and Stones out of the way

Take a look at some of the biggest games and entertainment products to release from 1997 to 2003, look at their country of origin, and count on your fingers how many of them are British. By my estimate, there’s a handful of the most famous ones that come straight to mind. Majority video games, but also film and TV. Regular readers and subscribers know what my go-to is and we’ll get to the video games in a moment, but let’s talk about British TV a little. The Brits reading this can name some of their favorites (excuse me, favourites), but let’s look at the one that successfully crossed over to the American TV world:

And let’s look at the one that was brutally molested on MTV:

There were several that didn’t survive the American makeover. Sorry, lads. We’ll perfect it next time… in a thousand years.

The opener may suggest this post will look past Beatlemania, the Rolling Stones, David Ziggy Bowie Stardust, Queen, and all the other British bands, but the British Invasion didn’t stop (which is probably the best way to summarize the British Empire in a very stupid manner), it just took many different forms. The music kept coming, but so did the comedy. Such as those blokes who eventually rode in on coconuts, debated the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows, and tried to dismiss the “messiah.”

And the music isn’t something to sleep on. Well, how could you? It’s blasting downstairs, shaking the foundation of your flat, and if that tosser doesn’t tone it down, I’m calling the f[flip]king cops!!

Case in point: blues. Post-war America still had segregation. Blacks, Latinos, and other non-whites partook in mankind’s deadliest conflict thus far, and they tend to be left out of the story. Something they may have had to put up with since the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, but following that came hopes and dreams where a white and non-white can have more than a transactional at best relationship without the country turning asunder.

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Bessie Smith, my personal favorites Marvin Gaye and Robert Johnson. We know who they are now, but some of them were obscure in their lifetimes. Sometimes that was on purpose. They helped pioneer blues, rock n roll, jazz, swing, and other genres we still have in new forms. The social constraints that kept a lot of black musicians from achieving much of the same recognition of their white counterparts was legally or societally enforced by everyone… in America. The Brits weren’t bound by the same rules at home. And by way of Google-senpai, I learned that it’s a common misconception that British musicians or musical hopefuls wandered into juke joints and listened to black musicians play locally. That’s not the case. A broke-ass from Bristol or Yorkshire or Northumberland would be lucky to afford groceries that week. A transatlantic ticket was a dream and nothing else.

Instead, the war did something else rather unexpected. It bridged the gap in the Anglophone world. Yanks, Canucks, Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis can understand each other well these days and for the most part in 1943 until you get to regional dialects. New Yorkers, Newfies, Brummies, Bogans, and Kiwis who grew up near Maori people may struggle to understand each other at first. But you know what would unite the lot? Music. So white and black American G.I.s got their music into Britain, played them, and the first American tunes to reach British ears changed lives forever.

His and others’ music would soon find their way to the future musicians we know as Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and countless others. Essentially, the feedback loop was such that Americans brought their music to Britain, Brits liked it, some became famous, and brought their takes on American music back to America… not the most aware of its origin because contemporary Jim Crow America didn’t want that music to exist.

Not the first set of white folk to do so, either, right, Elvis?

Growing up in Mississippi in any era will show you many things that are beautiful and horrifying depending on who you ask.

And this circles (evidently and dramatically so) back to a lot of the bigger British productions to jump ship and hit the U.S. TV, film, comics (see the Dennis the Menace coincidence for more details OoO), literature (Ian Fleming didn’t just s[gun]t James Bond out of nowhere) and by the time computers got up to speed, video games!

Tomb Raider, Conker’s Bad Fur Day (as well as the rest of Rare’s lineup), the first three GTAs (and associated expansion packs), The Getaway, Manhunt; I’ve discussed some of these in detail. Consider the dark nature of some of the listed games, or how crude they are. Conker for instance is anything but light on swears, and the accent variety can be found across Southern England.

Channel: 8-Bit Fam

Cute and cuddly creatures say piss, s[fart]t, f[chirp]t, damn, twat, arse, and continued. Think Happy Tree Friends if it had dialogue, those homicidal animals would be 100 times worse… for the better!

Tomb Raider shook things up by bringing us a badass, kickass, twin-gun wielding Londoner.

One of them at least. Marky boy will be back in a jiff.

Lara Croft became a lot of things, notably a “sex symbol” for the video game industry at the time of debut:

But she’s always been a trailblazer in-game and in pop culture. The games’ use of platforming combined with combat changed the scene of 3D gaming in the late 1990s irreversibly and later games would later take that formula and individualize it going forward.

British archaeologist fights supernatural creatures guarding a priceless artifact for millennia… if you remove the British and go back in time, you may find one of the more obvious inspirations:

And moving forward brings a list of games that either follow up on archaeology and the supernatural or simply adopted the puzzle-platforming. Uncharted, Batman: Arkham series, Assassin’s Creed, the Greek God of War games; Lara’s lineage is everywhere and it can be said that her original 1996 debut inspired her later reboots. Causal loop?

One of the heavier hitters from this era is undeniably the Grand Theft Auto series. These days, we see it as a stark and glamorous satirical sandbox, but the earlier games were less “laugh at these clowns in their circus” and more “bugger me, Jim, this is harsh.” Notably GTA III, not just because of what was in it, but because of what had to be taken out. The original release date was October 3, 2001, and had even darker missions.

How much darker? Well, in the early days it was under heavy dispute and included a bunch of hoaxes that Rockstar put down. One such fully conceptualized mission revolved around a psycho hobo named Darkel who would order Claude to hijack a loaded school bus to fit it with explosives and parking it in a location tied to the city’s economy. If that sounds familiar to some of the older folks who were old enough to remember a specific world-changing incident at the time, then yes, this is indeed the infamous terrorist mission.

Darkel’s other missions were said to be equally and progressively volatile, but contrary to popular belief (which might be a conclusion some of you reading this might’ve considered as a possibility), these missions were long cut well before 9/11. Looking at the development time between 2 and III, they seem to have been working on III for a while and had plenty of time to scrap inappropriate (by the game’s tonal standards) content. So Darkel the hobo never got to urinate on government property and blame it on a certain group of people historically oppressed, but he also never had the chance to make weapons out of children either. Rockstar would’ve gotten infinitely more attention and may have been even more maligned by more than just a disbarred lawyer and the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. The most innocuous things that were still cut were some of the first responder vehicle liveries, as to not allude to actual first responder liveries in use by NYC emergency services and National Guard units deployed to clean up and secure Ground Zero… which the building was located a couple miles away from.

The abruptness on the ground and some of the ground dialogue, which may have referenced President Clinton’s repeated attempts to whack Osama bin Laden in the balls throughout his presidency (not a joke, he famously wouldn’t shut the f[plunk]k up about it), was cut because it stops being funny when 3,000 people actually do turn up dead. Nevertheless, the other scrapped missions simply became El Burro’s payphone missions.

And while GTA III came out as a mildly disturbing crime-box, Manhunt leaned further into topics contemporary and modern media refuses to acknowledge: voyeuristic sadism.

Dark, dreary, deadly and with an armed pedophile, death cultist, white supremacist, or some unholy combination of the three and then some breathing on your neck, the atmosphere alone can sell the environment well. The classic “sell ice to an Eskimo” idiom, a Brit playing this could look at the environment, step outside for five minutes and think, “I thought I was out of the bloody game.”

Likewise an Upstate New Yorker, Michigander, Ohioan, Pennsylvanian, etc. can also step outside and if there isn’t a local sheriff who touches kids, a Confederate battle flag enjoyer, or a member of an accelerationist Christian cult within town limits, then something is off. ಠ_ಠ Again, none of that is an exaggeration, though it depends on where you’re looking so you know what to drive past at slightly above the speed limit T_T. And I praise Manhunt for making me visually uncomfortable rather than functionally uncomfortable because a game doesn’t need to cripple you to criticize the thing it depicts.

ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

All in all, the British-American cultural exchange has evolved from “hide the dark-skinned embarrassments, but conscript them anyway so they can die without us having to lift more than a pencil” to “Oi, bruv. Who’s that on the gramophone” to “Get a load of this, Yanks” to “Get a load of this, Yanks” to “Get a load of this, Brits/Yanks” in music, film, and video games respectively. The Americans make games that make you feel like Super Superman; the Brits make games about themselves… and take the piss out of Americans without the Americans realizing it.