Open World Radio
As in real life, you spend a lot of time in open world video games traversing from point A to point B. Some games tell stories in worlds without the luxury of modern technology and travel, but most of the time you’re making the trek in a city, and you’re doing so in a car. The non-gaming amongst you may be wondering, “Well, what does one do with all that time? (Also, if you could explain to me what an "open world" video game is at the bottom of the article and forget that I asked you to do that in the next sentence, that would be perfectly fine.)” The same thing you do in real life, of course! You turn on the radio, you listen to some songs, and you mow down some pedestrians in your stolen car whilst running from the cops.
Alright, fine. Chances are you’re not a psychopath, and what with the current state of radio, I’d be willing to bet that what you’re actually doing is listening to music/podcasts/books on tape via your device of choice. But that’s an experience that’s personal to you, and it’s hard to reflect that in a product meant for everyone. (Unless you’re playing on PC, in which case, plenty of games will let you import your own music.) Thus in order to inject a certain degree of life, many video game studios put radio stations in their cities that you can listen to at your discretion.
But radio is different everywhere you go. Example: Make your way to New York and listen to either of the major hip hop stations, Hot 97 or Power 105. You’re going to get almost entirely New York rappers. Now fly to the west coast and tune into Power 106. You’ll get some rappers from New York, but you’re mostly going to get artists from literally anywhere else. Different cities want different things, and the radio is there to provide.
You can learn a lot about a place from the content of its radio stations, and I think the same holds true with cities in video games. Of course the game’s creators choose which songs make it onto the stations rather than any billion dollar media conglomerates, and some of the choices aren’t based on artistic expression so much as budget concerns and other impeding factors. But every song gets picked for a reason, and in one way or another, they reflect on the game itself and the city where the player will be spending time. So let’s see what we can learn, shall we?
Los Santos (Grand Theft Auto V)
On a surface level, the radio in Los Santos, the Grand Theft Auto equivalent of Los Angeles, resembles real life commercial radio. There are seventeen stations (not including the channel of original content and the custom station on PC), the stations play different genres, DJs play songs, and after a handful of songs we then get a few commercials.
However, if we take a closer look at these stations, it all starts to resemble something else. The songs are uncensored. Some stations don’t seem chained to a particular genre or business model so much as the whims of the DJs and whatever they want to play. This could be satellite radio, but when we drive out of the city, we lose the signal to WCTR (West Coast Talk Radio) and gain that of Blaine County Talk Radio, the talk station of the more rural areas to the north.
All this points to a modern city closely tethered to the internet. Over the last few years, the internet has become more and more personality based, and Youtubers are increasingly filling the roles of critics, celebrities, and (unfortunately) journalists. You have access to these personalities everywhere you go, and just like in real life, the in-game internet is always accessible via your phone. Thus Rockstar (creators of Grand Theft Auto) reflects this reality in Los Santos by literally giving actual celebrities and internet stars their own radio stations.
One such example is FlyLo FM, the radio station of actual electronic musician and Brainfeeder Label owner Flying Lotus. The songs FlyLo plays span multiple genres, but mostly consist of contemporary electronic music and hip hop. Plenty of the songs he plays on the station are his own. (Mostly unreleased tracks/songs made specifically for the game.) However, it still feels like he’s just playing whatever he wants, and you’re there to hear whatever that may be. Thus he can play some experimental electronic music…
…Or some undeniable hip hop classics…
…And even some old school soul.
And nobody can stop him because he’s still on brand. Sure, you’re there for the music and the business operates so advertisers can buy space, but he’s the person bringing in both the audience and the money people, and thus he can do what he wants.
Another radio station that operates under the same set of rules is WorldWide FM, the station ran by real life DJ and record label owner, Giles Peterson. Like Peterson’s actual shows and podcasts, the station plays often obscure music from all over the world. Much like FlyLo FM, WorldWide spans many genres, but keeps a consistent sound rooted in slower paced electronic music…
…jazz…
…hip hop…
…and worldbeat.
One could argue that this station operates a lot like public radio, but again, it’s on brand with Giles Peterson himself. You’re here for him and his tastes, not the other way around.
Apart from the presence of the internet in Los Santos’s radio stations, we can also learn a lot about the history and ethnic makeup of the city itself. Los Angeles, as the more music savvy of you may know, had a massive genre defining punk movement in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. These bands had a more (what we now call) hardcore punk and thrash sound than what was coming from New York and other areas of the country, and this era birthed some of the biggest punk bands to ever do it. As such, there is a radio station in Los Santos called Channel X, DJ’d by Keith Morris, lead singer of The Circle Jerks, one time Black Flag singer, and legendary figure on the California punk scene.
The station plays songs from not only the most famous groups from the era…
…but also bands in the movement that didn’t achieve the same level of notoriety outside those who know about punk.
The station even plays songs not directly from California, but instead made concurrently in other non-New York areas in the country that stick to the same kind of sound. One such example is this song from MDC, a band from Texas that later relocated to San Francisco.
(I didn't need another example. I just really wanted an excuse to play that song.)
While we can learn about Los Santos’s punk past on Channel X, (as well as other eras of California music on other stations) we can learn about its present day makeup on East Los FM, a radio station that plays Spanish language music from Latin America.
Los Angeles, to put it mildly, has a high Latinx population. In fact, according to this article from the Los Angeles times, the Latinx population has overtaken the white community as the largest ethnic group in the city. Though I can’t tell if this is true in Los Santos, you can find Latin people of various origins all over the map, and Rockstar did a great job correctly identifying the actual Latinx neighborhoods in Los Angeles and reflecting them in Los Santos when possible.
As such, the Latinx makeup of Los Angeles is reflected in East Los FM. The station is DJ’d by actual Mexican TV and radio personality Don Cheto and Mexican DJ and producer Camilo Lara, who records his own music under the name Mexican Institute of Sound. The station plays music from all over Latin America. It plays everything from ‘80s Mexican pop…
…to contemporary Venezuelan alt rock…
…to ‘70s Columbian cumbia…
…as well as a variety of music from different countries and genres. Of course in Los Angeles, there are a variety of different Latinx stations to choose from. It may have been nice to see more of them in Los Santos, but I’ll take one station over nothing at all.
I realize I’ve been talking about Los Santos for a too long, but there’s one more point I’d like to make that sets it apart from most video game cities. If I can digress for a moment, there’s an incredibly subtle but effective dig at Los Angeles in the Los Santos map. In eastern Los Santos, there’s a neighborhood called Mirror Park that’s essentially an amalgam of Eagle Rock, Los Feliz, and Silverlake, the hipster capitals of Los Angeles. Mirror Park has a heavy Latinx population, but it’s also filled to the brim with white hipsters and if you drive around the suburban neighborhoods, there are for sale signs everywhere. There’s even a radio station called Radio Mirror Park that plays the most hipster-y music on Earth. I don’t know whether or not this was intentional or not, but if so, this might be the greatest joke in the history of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
My point: The music you hear on the radio has actual physical manifestations in the world. You can listen to Latinx music on the radio and then interact with the Latinx population and even travel to Latinx neighborhoods. You can listen to hipster music, then randomly stumble into hipster parties in Mirror Park as well as the game’s equivalent of Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills. (Another favorite joke: If you go stand near a group of hipsters at said parties for too long, they’ll awkwardly walk away from you.) Los Angeles’s punk past manifests itself in the Whisky a Go Go, which Rockstar did a fantastic job recreating in Los Santos. (In the game, it’s called Tequi-la-la. Also, just to be a snob, I’ll point out that the game has the building in its yellow and black iteration whereas the actual building has reverted back to the old school red and black of its early days.)
There’s also a certain amount of regionality in the music, best manifested by the talk radio. We talked about how different areas pick up different stations, but the content itself differs as well. WCTR, the talk station in the city, has a variety of programming ranging from shows about meditation and spirituality to celebrity gossip. The kind of talk radio you’d actually hear in the city. When you leave the city, however, Blaine County Talk Radio has shows with Southern hosts that range from topics such as conspiracy theories to cooking. While both parody their respective market, it does an effective job communicating what kinds of people live in and out of Los Santos and the differences between the two.
There’s plenty more to talk about with radio in Los Santos. The vast number of genres and what they say about Los Santos culture, the unifying themes in the selected music, something self-indulgent about my favorite station, The Lowdown 91.1, which plays amazing ‘70s soul music. Gonna sneak a song in here if that’s alright with you:
But we’ve talked about Los Santos enough, and we have another city on the other side of the planet to explore.
Honk Kong (Sleeping Dogs)
Sleeping Dogs is a vastly underrated game you should all play that takes place in Hong Kong. It’s not the most original or shocking story, but it does what it wants to do well, the city looks fantastic, and it’s a lot of fun to play. No, this has nothing to do with city design or radio, but I pay for this webspace and I’ll do what I damn well please. *Folds arms and kicks rocks*
Now, I live in Los Angeles, thus I can provide you with some sort of insight into Los Santos and whether or not it accurately resembles LA. (Overall, Rockstar did a pretty great job. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Los Santos is a better organized city than actual Los Angeles.) I’ve never stepped foot in Asia, let alone Hong Kong. I don’t know how radio works there. Based on cursory research I did, there seems to be a few government channels, some commercial radio, and some illegal broadcasts. The city also seems to have a healthy internet radio presence, but other than that, it seems like slim pickings. But I could be wrong. I probably am.
I was not able to figure out if the radio in Sleeping Dogs is an accurate depiction of real-life Hong Kong radio. My guess is no, but alas, I can’t say for sure. So from now on, unless I say otherwise, assume that when I mention “Hong Kong” that I’m talking about the fictional depiction of the city in Sleeping Dogs and not the real one.
The radio in Hong Kong, again, works mostly like real radio. There are ten stations, the stations are mostly divided by genre, DJs play songs, and every once in a while you get a commercial or two. The Sleeping Dogs budget wasn’t as high as one for a billion dollar franchise like Grand Theft Auto, so there aren’t any celebrities voicing the DJs. Furthermore, the commercials actually sound like commercials for the most part, and not jokes or parodies as is the case in the Grand Theft Auto. Thus, I would argue that the radio in Sleeping Dogs does a better job resembling real-life radio than Grand Theft Auto.
However, much like Los Santos radio, the internet has clearly killed the radio star. Besides the presence of uncensored music, several stations exist in Hong Kong that don’t cater to a specific genre, but instead, a recognizable brand. Instead of a specific celebrities having their own stations, however, it’s actual record labels and music publications that fill their stations with their signed (or used to be signed) artists or whatever kind of music they cover.
One such station is Ninja Tune Radio, ran by actual English independent record label Ninja Tune. Ninja Tune’s output is hard to pin down genre wise. In broad terms, I suppose they specialize in downtempo electronic music, pop, and hip hop, but that’s not the best way of describing it. It’s more like they have a specific sound and you know it when you hear it. How about I just play some songs:
Another record label station is Daptone Radio, an independent label based in New York specializing in retro funk, soul, and R&B. It’s the home of such acts as Charles Bradley and Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. (Rest in peace, Sharon Jones. You’ll be deeply missed.) It is, to put it mildly, a great fucking video game station:
And if soul music or electronic doesn’t float your boat, there’s a metal station for you provided by the good folks at legendary Dutch metal label Roadrunner Records:
(I know very little about metal. I picked these at random. Hopefully these float your boat.)
Other label stations include one for Warp Records, an independent London based label that more than likely put out something you loved in the last twenty years, Boosey & Hawkes, the world’s largest distributer of classical music, and Kerrang!, a station from the English Kerrang! rock magazine. (I believe they actually have their own radio station in real life, but I don’t know how much it resembles the one in Sleeping Dogs.) I have little doubt that these stations weren’t an artistic choice so much as the result of placement deals with the publishers of Sleeping Dogs, nor do I believe that labels having their own stations is an actual aspect of real Hong Kong radio. (It might be. I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer.)
However, not only do the available stations suggest a world of ubiquitous internet usage, but they also suggest a different kind of radio market. Unlike American radio where the model is, “Play the same top forty song over and over again until the listener wants to drive full speed into something flammable with spikes and little children,” the residents of Hong Kong have more niche tastes, and thus other markets can thrive. There’s an audience for classical music, as well as one for old school funk and weird electronic music. These markets can thrive in Hong Kong, but not in America.
Another indicator of differing cultural values than those of American audiences is the song selection itself. Let us for a moment consider Real FM, Hong Kong’s contemporary hip hop and R&B station. Unlike similar stations in Grand Theft Auto, Real FM pulls a lot of tracks not from mainstream rappers, but independent artists and influential figures in underground hip hop:
Sagittarius FM, Hong Kong’s classic rock station, has a similar philosophy. While the artists the station plays have more name recognition, the station goes for deeper cuts from their catalogues. Or at the very least, not the obvious picks.
Again, I suspect the reason the game’s radio stations went in this direction has more to do with licensing fees than an actual reflection of the music played in the real Hong Kong. However, if we take the music selection at face value, it suggests a more music savvy culture, or at the very least, a form of radio that isn’t dictated by Clear Channel or whatever the fuck they call themselves now. Hong Kong is a city where different kinds of music than the ones we’re used to in America can swim in the mainstream. We have similarities in how we approach our music, but it’s from a different style of business and art.
In fact, every aspect of the game, from the story to the radio, goes out of the way to make clear the differences between Hong Kong culture and that of America or the UK. But the radio specifically has a lot in common with the west, and that decision struck me as strange the first time I played Sleeping Dogs. Then I noticed something you probably noticed a long time ago: “Boy, there sure seems to be a lot of British influence on these radio stations!”
It’s hardly surprising as, after all, the UK did not transfer Hong Kong back into Chinese sovereignty until 1997. Still, the English are practically omnipresent on the radio. Ninja Tune, Warp, and Kerrang! are all UK based, many of the DJs are English, Boosey & Hawkes exclusively plays classical music from Europe, and English artists make an appearance on a majority of the stations.
It’s an effective way of communicating the history of Hong Kong and the lingering English influence on the city culture. Never does the game go into a heavy handed speech about the history of Hong Kong and how it's shaped the city. It’s just there. Even the story has a large English influence. One of the primary characters in the game is Thomas Pendrew (voice by the always fantastic Tom Wilkinson), protagonist Wei Shen’s direct superior in the Hong Kong Police Department. When Hong Kong was given back to the Chinese, Pendrew decided to remain in the city and fight the triads. Although the UK no longer has any direct control over Hong Kong, old institutions still wield an inordinate amount of power over the day-to-day lives of those who live in the city. Sometimes it’s something as grand as the institutions that control the city. Sometimes it’s a song on the radio.
Capital Wasteland (Post-Apocalypse Washington D.C.) (Fallout 3)
A brief summary of the Fallout universe: In the timeline you and I live in, our technological advances were made by harnessing electricity, thanks in large part to the invention of the transistor. As a result, our gadgets got smaller, we invented the internet, and now we live in the world we live in and I took a million breaks from writing this article to goof around on Twitter on my various devices. In the Fallout universe, the transistor was never invented, and America turned to nuclear fusion. Everything in American life became nuclear powered, and as a result, the trajectory of technology, culture, and history changed. Long story short: It didn’t go well. China and America went to war over diminishing natural resources, and we nuked each other to kingdom come, turning the world into a big radioactive shit hole.
Somehow, in a society where your car can erupt into a small mushroom cloud if it hits a tree too hard, the apocalypse was foreseeable. As a result, hundreds of “vaults,” massive underground bunkers, were built and enough of humanity survived to reemerge and repopulate. Now, humans live in a lawless land where soda bottle caps act as currency, dangerous mutated animals and crazed raiders roam and kill as they please, and you can either find refuge in large settlements or try to make it on your own.
Luckily, somebody figured that as long as you’re fighting for your life, you might as well be entertained! Or, depending on what station you listen to, oppressed. Thus, there are few radio stations that broadcast from the wasteland and you can pick up on the device strapped to your wrist called a Pip-Boy, or on any radios found in the world that still work.
For my non-gaming folks, there are three major games in the Bethesada Fallout era: Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4. (The first two games were published by another company in the late ‘90s.) New Vegas and Fallout 4 probably have the most radio, but we’re sticking with Fallout 3 because A) I never played New Vegas, B) I like Fallout 3 more that 4, C) Fallout 3 takes place in Washington D.C., and I grew up in the D.C. suburbs in Virginia and commuted to the city everyday for school, and finally D) It has fewer stations that require less effort on my part to write about. He he.
As I said, Fallout 3 takes place in a nuked out version of the District of Columbia and the surrounding Virginia suburbs, now referred to as the Capital Wasteland. Apart from a few minor stations and broadcasts that can only be accessed at certain spots of the map (one of which we’ll be talking about in a minute) Fallout 3 has two primary stations. The first is Enclave Radio, the station controlled by an organization called The Enclave that claims sovereignty over the United States and acts as the “government.” The station, ran by “President” John Henry Eden (voiced by Malcom McDowell), plays old recordings of patriotic music from America’s past. The kind of music we’d refer to today as public domain.
On top of the music, President Eden uses his station as an excuse to give “speeches” that consist of the same kind of empty political rhetoric we’re used to from similar silver-tongued snake statesman. (Say that three times fast.)
Chances are you aren’t spending a whole lot of time listening to this station. After all, if you’re to choose between a propaganda station and a non-propaganda station, I’m guessing you’re going to go with the latter. However, in some cases, you don’t have a choice! Throughout the map, there are floating robots called Eyebots that patrol the streets broadcasting Eden’s message. They can be found all over the map, and while they are equipped with a small laser, they’re easy enough to destroy. The second reason is that the broadcast dish for the other station has been badly damaged, and fixing it is a small part of the main storyline.
Once you do, however, you have access to Galaxy News Radio, or GNR. GNR is DJ’d by a man who calls himself Three Dog, who runs his station less like one radio show and more like a large media network. He reports on the goings on of the wasteland and the city. He plays old recordings of radio plays that were done specifically for the game. He gives general tips on surviving to his listeners, and most importantly, he plays recordings of songs that survived the nuclear holocaust.
These songs come from the late 1930s, 1940s, and the early 1950s. He doesn’t have that many songs to play, but most are fantastic. They range in genre from jazz...
… to sly pop vocal selections that take on new meaning in a post nuclear apocalypse…
….to traditional standards (with, in this blogger’s opinion, an unnecessary updated orchestral backing not present in the real-life recording)…
…to one particularly deep cut from a 1954 film called Garden of Eden, a film about a nudist community that featured real-life nudity, that led to the supreme court case that stated that the mere presence of nudity is not the same thing as pornography. (Christopher S. Parker is the credited music supervisor of Fallout 3. Damn fine work here, sir.)
Now, obviously, the rules of this society, and radio’s place in it, are much different than that of Los Santos and Hong Kong. Moreover, it can be argued that the connection between the city and its radio are less intertwined, and the radio says more about the overall world of Fallout than Washington D.C. itself. However, one of the key differences between Fallout radio and that of other games, besides the setting and the style of music, is the goal of the radio stations in the first place. Sure, the real reason the stations are there is to entertain the player. But the radio stations in the other games function like businesses similar to the ones in real life. The goal is to earn enough listeners to sell ad space. Entertainment is a secondary priority.
The Fallout stations are there for reasons other than making money. Mainly, GNR exists as not only a source of pure entertainment and refuge from the hard realities of living in the waste, but as a public service. Its goal is to help you by reporting on the actions of the Enclave, where and how to find supplies, to inform you where things are happening so you can steer clear or investigate yourself, and much more. It’s in everyone’s best interest to listen to GNR.
Enclave Radio isn’t a business either, but its purpose isn’t public service. The point of their station is to reassert control of the land and the political power they claim to wield. It’s there for the sake of an image: Out there, it’s chaos. But if you buy into our illusion of control, we can go back to the way things were before the bombs dropped. (Of course you and I don’t live in a post nuclear apocalypse, but that line of thinking is beginning to sound awfully familiar, don’t you think?)
The radio in Fallout can also serve a more personal purpose than service or brainwashing. It can also serve as a genuine platform for artistic expression in a land where beauty is hard to come by. Whilst roaming the wasteland, you can encounter a woman in her home named Agatha. Agatha is an old widow who lives by herself in a highly secluded house built for her by her late husband. As it turns out, she can play a mean violin, and she has her own private radio signal she uses mostly to entertain the various traveling trade caravans. But the fiddle she has won’t last too much longer, so she asks you to go retrieve her great-great-grandmother’s sister’s Soil Stradivarius violin in an abandoned vault. Long story short: You go to the vault, you shoot the things inside, and you get it back to her. As a reward, she gives you some money, some supplies, and access to her radio signal.
Agatha’s station consists of her doing violin improvisations (there are six of them recorded for the game, all of which you can find here)…
…and performances of works from famous composers such as Bach and Dvořák.
All this points to the radio being a more personal experience in the Capital Wasteland. It isn’t a space anybody’s looking to make a buck. How can they? Civilization is over. Instead, it’s a public space where anyone with a few dishes and some equipment can pretty much do whatever they want and it doesn’t matter how many people are listening. In a way, it almost resembles internet radio and streaming. You do it for free (or at least you do it for free if you’re just some random person without the backing of a corporate entity), you can say what you want, and you can simply do it for fun.
Living in a specific place informs the day-to-day priorities of your life. When people agree to live in a city together, there’s an often unspoken bond: If we help each other, there’s something in it for all of us. The Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3 embodies this attitude in its use of radio. Most of the citizens of the waste live in large settlements like Megaton or Rivet City. These settlements provide protection, and once basic needs are fulfilled, the people are free to help in other ways. Some seek to inform, some seek to suppress, and some just want to entertain.
But the primary difference between the radio of the Capital Wasteland and the cities in the other games is your direct role in the station’s content. When you do something big in the Grand Theft Auto V storyline, your actions get mentioned in the news, but you’re never mentioned by name. (Or at least I don’t think you ever are.) In Fallout 3, however, when you complete a major side quest or main story, Three Dog will mention you by your nickname, “The Lone Wanderer” and will editorialize your actions based on the decisions you’ve made.
Once he starts doing this, every once in a while you’ll have randomly generated encounters with a different group attempting to hunt you down depending on whether or not you’re playing as a good or bad guy. (I always played as the former, so I started being occasionally hunted by a group called the Talon Company.) Despite your rising fame with people who want to see you dead for your actions, however, most of the random people you encounter in the settlements or out in the world have no idea who you are.
The radio not only has a direct effect on your overall safety as you traverse the city, but it also gives you a sort of legendary status. If you’re a goody two-shoes like me and you spend the game helping people, you can go back to the settlement of Megaton, and a person will run up to you and give you ammo or supplies because of your good deeds. You never run into any people talking about “the lone wanderer” in hushed whispers at bars, and I sincerely doubt that your radio mentions are connected to the mercenaries on a purely technical level. But the radio in the Capital Wasteland shows that not only are you a part of a whole, but that your actions matter. Depending on what you choose to do, you can either provide hope to GNR’s listeners, or you can reinforce that the world is as bleak and shitty as it appears.
The radio in Fallout 3 serves as necessity and a link between the people in the wastelands. It reminds them, unlike the radio stations in Los Santos or Hong Kong, that they are a community. The world may be dead, but civilization is still possible, and our actions affect one another. You just have to stay informed.
* In layman's terms, an open world video game is one that drops you in a large environment and gives you control over when and how you can accomplish your goal. For example, let's say I was making a video game about going to the grocery store. In a traditional game, you would follow a pre-determined linear path to the store, and all you have to do is move in one direction and overcome obstacles using a set action. In an open world game, you choose your own route and your own method of achieving a goal. You can plan your own route to the store and you can avoid obstacles, face them head on, or do whatever you like provided you're following the rules of the game. The goal is the same. The only difference is the method.
