Journey: The Band's Disastrous Video Games - Journey Escape and Bally Midway's Journey

Journey: The story behind the band's 2 disastrous video games including Journey Escape.

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Sources:

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By the late 2000’s it was pretty common to see band centric video games, primarily through Guitar hero and Rock band franchises. We had Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Guitar Hero metallica and then Rock band released their own beatles rock band and green day rock band. There were even rumblings of other band centric games that never happened including Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. But nearly twenty five years ago it was nowhere near as common. But in 1982 the band Journey would get their own video game and it resulted in the company who made it going bankrupt and overall it was a total disaster.. That’s what were going to discuss in today’s video.

By now you’re probably thinking about the 1983 Journey video game, but one year prior the band was the subject of a different video game called Journey Escape for the Atari 2600.. It was backed by a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. The company behind the game Data Age would base Journey Escape on 1981 album Escape.

The promotional material for the game described it’s premise as follows: You’re on the road with Journey, one of the world’s hottest rock groups. A spectacular performance has just ended. Now it’s up to you to guide each Journey Band Member past hordes of Love-Crazed Groupies, Sneaky Photographers, and Shifty-Eyed Promoters to the safety of the Journey Escape Vehicle in time to make the next concert. Your mighty manager and loyal roadies are there to help, but the escape is up to you! During the game, the machine plays music from two of Journey’s songs, “Escape” and “Don’t Stop Believing.” Data Magazine would write that the game sold for $35.00 a steep ask back in the 80’s and hoped to capture the type of person who was both a journey and vidoe game fan. Surprisingly enough by the early 80’s record sales were on a two year slump but video game sales were on the rise so it was a good opportunity for journey. But timing was maybe bad. By 1983 the video game market was struggling due to an oversaturation and the shift towards making games for personal computers. In fact it came to light that Atari was found to be dumping unsold copies of their games in landfills

The company Data Age put out the game and due to the heavy licensing fees to have the band’s music and name in addition to the failed marketing campaign the company declared bankruptcy in 1984. But that wasn’t the only Journey video game.


By 1983 Journey was one of the biggest band’s in America. By 1983 the band was promoting their latest album Frontiers and the adult oriented rock band was riding high with Frontiers being their fifth record in a row to go multiplatinum. Band’s had various ways to promote albums at the time, making videos for MTV, releasing singles and then in the case of journey putting out a video game. The band would team up with a development company named Bally Midway which was put out to coincide with their Frontiers tour. The tagline for the game would read the hottest band in the country is about to take over the planet!"The game was released in the arcades and a home version was also put out but apparently the home version was a commercial failure while the arcade version was a modest success.


The game would feature digitized faces of the members of pixelated bodies and the premise of the game was pretty simple. You’d have to take a space ship named the scarab which is found on the band’s previous album cover Escape and visit various planets to reunite the members with their own respective instruments so they can play a concert. Each planet contains obstacles which must be navigated around or through to recover the instruments. Once the instruments are recovered the player takes control of a bouncer named herbie whose job it is to keep fans away from the stage while the band plays their latest hit ‘Seperate Ways”

Faces Magazine reviewed the game in 1983 calling it and i quote "one of the finest examples of the new breed of scatter-sho