8-Bit Rebellion! was a mobile app developed by Artificial Life, Inc. featuring the American rock band Linkin Park. It featured retro inspired graphics and beat 'em up gameplay, as well as social connectivity including message boards, private messages, and customizable apartments that other players could visit. Completion of the game rewarded an unreleased song which at the time was exclusive to the game.
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I’ve always been a massive fan of Linkin Park so when this game was announced, I was instantly hyped. I don’t really remember much about whether or not I enjoyed it at the time. A few days ago I was reminded of its existence and it got me thinking “Hey, I’ve got a jailbroken iPhone 4S lying around for weird occasions like this, I could slap the game in there and play it again.” The experience sorta just existed with not much to write home about.
8-Bit Rebellion was quite ambitious in its premise, setting out to be an MMO for iOS systems in their early years. I don’t really remember coming across any other players when I first played it years ago and the servers have been shut down by now, but the game is still fully playable from start to finish with ease so in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
The game lets you pick a starting area where you can reside near one of the six members of Linkin Park. As far as I am aware, this has no bearing on the order you meet them and is purely just a choice of where you want your decorative home to be. The plot is that there is an evil big bad corporation trying to turn the world from pixels to HD. This part is weird to me because the corporation’s name is PixxelKorp, but maybe they hate the 8-bit LP guys because people normally only associate NES-styled sprites with pixels or something like that, I dunno. Anyway, Linkin Park is forming a rebellion against them, but they need a banger tune to inspire everyone. Instead of doing the smart thing and pulling out a CD of Hybrid Theory and using that, they opted to make a new song. Seems a little counterproductive given the circumstances but they’re my favorite band so I won’t complain about a new song from them. Knowing their plan, however, the big bad guys stole the tracks held by each of the six members of the band. And now it’s up to you, an HD person, to join Linkin Park’s underground revolution against PixxelCorp!
After a few fetch quests, you’re given your first weapon, a chainsaw, and you hope your enemies know you’re packing it because you’ll skin their asses raw (wait, wrong band!) then you get into a slightly bigger fight, get a piece of the missing track and return it to its respective member of the band, who tells you it’s better kept in your hands, this is a tedious cycle that repeats itself with very minor changes to the narrative throughout the rest of the game that it really leaves you waiting for the end to come, which is around an hour from this point.
The overall gameplay and controls do not feel great, you move either left or right by holding the respective sides of the screen and attack by double tapping, I’m not sure if this is just a quirk of my phone or if the game is just really like that, but the controls do not feel responsive. Each area of the game has an 8-bit rendition of several Linkin Park classics, which are really nice to listen to and they can make for a pretty sweet battle symphony, but after just a few minutes I was already getting bored of the tedious optional combat that I would just turn my back on the enemies, much to their disapproval.
It’s only towards the end of the game where the combat shakes it up a little by introducing different combat mechanics in a few boss battles that are definitely inspired by Mega Man, though this only ever applies to those two battles. Honestly, even this really isn’t enough to redeem it but it’s something. Admittedly it’s a bit unfair to look at this simplistic combat through a modern lens when this was most of what you could get on an iPhone until peak mobile games like Infinity Blade came out later that year and showed the us how it’s done, but even this felt a bit subpar compared to what there was at the time. The reward for beating it is a bonus Linkin Park song titled Blackbirds, a song which I really fell in love with and quickly became one of my favorite songs from them.
In the modern age of everything being uploaded to Youtube and streaming services, this isn’t really rewarding, but at the time this was huge as it was the first time this song was released to the public, and since then it’s only been released in certain bonus editions of A Thousand Suns. It’s also not a song that you can find on most streaming services either aside from Apple Music so we likely won’t be getting another official, more widespread release of it until either the 20th anniversary of Minutes to Midnight or A Thousand suns. Thankfully this isn’t much of a problem for me as I’m a boomer in mind who still puts her music on mp3 players.
All in all, 8-Bit Rebellion was a pretty meh game with a soundtrack that at the very least will leave Linkin Park fans satisfied, but would I recommend playing it? Not really seeing its best qualities can easily be consumed without going through the trouble of sideloading a dead game
Now there is still extra content that you can do, but I imagine that it isn’t anything different from the same style of missions the main story consists of so I opted to be done with the game here and leave out all the rest. I did, however, do one last thing before setting the game down. In the area the game puts you in after you beat the final boss, there is a vendor that sells you statues of each of the LP members. So for my final act, I bought the statue of Chester and added it to my character’s home. RIP Chester. Thank you for blessing us with your powerful voice.
8-Bit Rebellion was quite ambitious in its premise, setting out to be an MMO for iOS systems in their early years. I don’t really remember coming across any other players when I first played it years ago and the servers have been shut down by now, but the game is still fully playable from start to finish with ease so in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
The game lets you pick a starting area where you can reside near one of the six members of Linkin Park. As far as I am aware, this has no bearing on the order you meet them and is purely just a choice of where you want your decorative home to be. The plot is that there is an evil big bad corporation trying to turn the world from pixels to HD. This part is weird to me because the corporation’s name is PixxelKorp, but maybe they hate the 8-bit LP guys because people normally only associate NES-styled sprites with pixels or something like that, I dunno. Anyway, Linkin Park is forming a rebellion against them, but they need a banger tune to inspire everyone. Instead of doing the smart thing and pulling out a CD of Hybrid Theory and using that, they opted to make a new song. Seems a little counterproductive given the circumstances but they’re my favorite band so I won’t complain about a new song from them. Knowing their plan, however, the big bad guys stole the tracks held by each of the six members of the band. And now it’s up to you, an HD person, to join Linkin Park’s underground revolution against PixxelCorp!
After a few fetch quests, you’re given your first weapon, a chainsaw, and you hope your enemies know you’re packing it because you’ll skin their asses raw (wait, wrong band!) then you get into a slightly bigger fight, get a piece of the missing track and return it to its respective member of the band, who tells you it’s better kept in your hands, this is a tedious cycle that repeats itself with very minor changes to the narrative throughout the rest of the game that it really leaves you waiting for the end to come, which is around an hour from this point.
The overall gameplay and controls do not feel great, you move either left or right by holding the respective sides of the screen and attack by double tapping, I’m not sure if this is just a quirk of my phone or if the game is just really like that, but the controls do not feel responsive. Each area of the game has an 8-bit rendition of several Linkin Park classics, which are really nice to listen to and they can make for a pretty sweet battle symphony, but after just a few minutes I was already getting bored of the tedious optional combat that I would just turn my back on the enemies, much to their disapproval.
It’s only towards the end of the game where the combat shakes it up a little by introducing different combat mechanics in a few boss battles that are definitely inspired by Mega Man, though this only ever applies to those two battles. Honestly, even this really isn’t enough to redeem it but it’s something. Admittedly it’s a bit unfair to look at this simplistic combat through a modern lens when this was most of what you could get on an iPhone until peak mobile games like Infinity Blade came out later that year and showed the us how it’s done, but even this felt a bit subpar compared to what there was at the time. The reward for beating it is a bonus Linkin Park song titled Blackbirds, a song which I really fell in love with and quickly became one of my favorite songs from them.
In the modern age of everything being uploaded to Youtube and streaming services, this isn’t really rewarding, but at the time this was huge as it was the first time this song was released to the public, and since then it’s only been released in certain bonus editions of A Thousand Suns. It’s also not a song that you can find on most streaming services either aside from Apple Music so we likely won’t be getting another official, more widespread release of it until either the 20th anniversary of Minutes to Midnight or A Thousand suns. Thankfully this isn’t much of a problem for me as I’m a boomer in mind who still puts her music on mp3 players.
All in all, 8-Bit Rebellion was a pretty meh game with a soundtrack that at the very least will leave Linkin Park fans satisfied, but would I recommend playing it? Not really seeing its best qualities can easily be consumed without going through the trouble of sideloading a dead game
Now there is still extra content that you can do, but I imagine that it isn’t anything different from the same style of missions the main story consists of so I opted to be done with the game here and leave out all the rest. I did, however, do one last thing before setting the game down. In the area the game puts you in after you beat the final boss, there is a vendor that sells you statues of each of the LP members. So for my final act, I bought the statue of Chester and added it to my character’s home. RIP Chester. Thank you for blessing us with your powerful voice.