Stop Making Sense has a reputation as one of the best concert films of all time. It's well-deserved. Starring Talking Heads and helmed by Jonathan Demme — the filmmaker behind The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia — the 1984 doc is a virtuosic feat from performers and director alike. It would also make a fantastic, once in a lifetime video game.
The wave of bands getting tie-in games passed over a decade ago, around the time that plastic instruments fell out of fashion. Before the trend ended, we got Rock Band games dedicated to the catalogs of The Beatles, Green Day, and AC/DC, Guitar Heroes honoring Van Halen, Metallica, and Aerosmith, and a Black Eyed Peas dance game for the Wii. Those games combined the music of their subjects with art inspired by their aesthetics. The Beatles: Rock Band got memorably trippy as its timeline extended into the band's drug-inspired late '60s career. This period roughly coincides with the era during which the band stopped touring, thus presenting Harmonix with a challenge on how to represent their performances visually. They rose to the challenge with levels that began in the recording booth, but voyaged off to surreal dream plains as the song progressed.
We don't live in that era anymore. But, the past few years have still given us plenty of great music games. Titles like The Artful Escape, Thumper, Sayonara Wild Hearts, and Fuser have shown what interactive music can look like in a post-Guitar Hero world. These games have taken music out of the realm of the literal — you won't bang a plastic drum to simulate playing a real drum — and focused, instead, on representing the creativity of music through stunning visuals and unique gameplay.
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This is a better fit for Talking Heads than playing a fake bass. While David Byrne strums a guitar at points in Stop Making Sense, he spends almost as much time doing a Keatonesque slapstick routine with a lamp. The film is a showcase of Byrne and his band's talent as performers, not just as musicians. A game version of Stop Making Sense would need to lean into that aspect, gamifying the details of the performance as a whole, not just the music. You could twirl the thumbstick to balance the lamp or hold the shoulder buttons and twiddle the sticks to make Byrne do . You could press down all the face buttons to make Byrne fall to the stage and sing on his back. The old era of music games tried to make you feel like a traditional rock star, but David Byrne is anything but.
The game could begin, as the film does, with Byrne's solo performance of "Psycho Killer." This would function as a great tutorial, introducing players to the mechanics against the stark, solitary stage. As the game progressed, additional musicians could join the roster, as they do in the film, until the stage was full. A solo player could choose which part they wanted to play, or swap between them, taking a turn on the drums, the bass guitar, or dancing, before moving on.
And, of course, a Stop Making Sense game would need to include the moment the film is best known for: when Byrne disappears from the stage for a number, then returns in a suit that is way too big for him. Instead of isolating these giant clothes to one song, they could instead function as a power-up in game. Like Mario, Byrne could get a reward that caused him to double in size. (Only, while Mario stomps turtles, Byrne would look like he was ready to join the .) Once embiggened, he could double the whole ensemble's points.
Byrne is still creating interesting work, and teamed up with another auteur director, Spike Lee, for a filmed version of his Broadway show, David Byrne's American Utopia. But, the stage and the big screen aren't the only venues that would benefit from Byrne's unique touch. It's time for Byrne to head to Steam and start making cents.