Published - 28.05.1999
The game, created for the Leftfield website, was inspired by the Chris Cunningham Video for the Afrikashox single.
The video shows a black man walking around New York. The victim of a Voodoo curse he stumbles around the city with a look of shear terror on his face. When he reaches out to a white businessman in a plea for help his worst fears become manifest. On contact with the businessman his outstretched arm breaks off and falls to the ground where it shatters as if made of porcelain. Several businessmen watch the incident with a look of scorn, offering the cursed man neither help nor sympathy.
The cursed man's plight only gets worse as he loses further limbs to the harshest of cities.
The Afrikashox track features the vocal talents of Afrika bambaata, and is reminiscent of much of bambaata's early electro output from the 1980's, because of this retro feel and the narrative of the video the Afrikashox game seems, both thematically and stylistically, perfectly suited to the classic Frogger arcade-game format.
The familiarity of the appropriated Frogger game play serves to focus the user's attention upon the changes in the song brought about by their progress within the game.
In the game each lane of traffic contains a different sound loop
taken from the Afrikashox song. As the user jumps forward into a lane of traffic a different song loop enters the mix. The lane samples are ordered to provide a simple song like progression from intro to climax, the more hectic of the song loops being assigned to the more dangerous traffic lanes.
This musical structure also follows through to the game levels, with completion of the final level greeted by the defiant, triumphant chant of "z u l u".