A little over 21 years ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were riding a tidal wave of success with bass guitars for boards. While the band had achieved mainstream appeal with the now iconic Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the shock departure of guitarist John Frusciante saw its follow-up album, One Hot Minute, launch to comparatively middling acclaim, and so it’s no surprise that fans were pretty stoked when Frusciante decided to rejoin the band after six years apart. What’s more of a surprise was the result of this reunion: Californication.

As well as being the name of one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ most enduringly popular songs, Californication as an album was an essential part of the band’s growth. Crucially, it is still their most commercially successful album to date, but at the time of its release it also demonstrated a new kind of maturity that was lacking in previous efforts - the title track alone deals with themes of globalisation, paranoia, artificiality, and more. It’s strange, then, to look back and watch the music video all these years later, which appears to depict an open-world game that was significantly more ambitious than anything that was actually available at the time.

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“A lot of it was just blue-sky thinking from the video game fans on the production team,” Naughty Dog writer and narrative designer Josh Scherr tells me. Prior to starting his decades-long career at the studio behind The Last of Us and Uncharted, Scherr did a two-year stint at Disney and some freelance animation work, the latter of which led to him helping out with the Californication music video.

“I’d never done a music video before, and it sounded like fun,” Scherr explains. “I actually didn’t learn about the whole video game aspect until I interviewed for the job. I was warned the timeframe was incredibly short - four weeks (including weekends) to animate and render the entire thing. But the pay was excellent, and I liked the band, so I went for it. Had no idea it’d be so popular and be remembered two decades later.”

Californication has been well remembered, but while a lot of people know the lyrics and can instantly picture specific key frames from the music video, some of its more absurd elements are weirdly forgotten: vocalist Anthony Kiedis swimming with sharks; drummer Chad Smith snowboarding across the Golden Gate Bridge; and bass guitarist Flea rescuing a bear from a hunter, escaping in a minecart, being surrounded by men with chainsaws, and super-jumping to safety at the top of a collapsing forest. While this all seems ostensibly odd, it had its origins not just in what video games at the time were supposed to look like, but in the possibilities that future games might permit.

“Obviously it was inspired by games that had come before it, but also in many ways, the games everyone hoped to see in the future,” Scherr says. “You have to keep in mind, this video was made in the summer of 2000; the PlayStation 2 had just come out a few months earlier in Japan; it still wasn’t out in the US yet. Games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 were still over a year away from release, and the original SSX came out in October. At the time, a lot of the things in the video seemed fanciful, but in the years since, we’ve certainly seen plenty of crazy snowboarding and driving games, games that simulate an entire city, and of course, games with people running through collapsing buildings (ahem).

“Other parts just came from thinking, for example, what kind of gameplay would emerge if you set a video game on Hollywood Boulevard? Who or what would be the obstacles? The band members also wanted to inject their own personal touch where possible; John Frusciante cited Leonardo da Vinci as being an inspiration for his recovery from addiction, hence his avatar finding da Vinci’s workshop and later gliding by on his flying machine.”

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Scherr explains that he wasn’t directly involved in the creative process behind the video, instead pointing to Little Miss Sunshine co-directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, but that the goal was to have as much of the footage as possible be a recognisable reference to California. This explains the swimming, snowboarding, and deforested redwoods mentioned above, as well as other visual identifiers like Hollywood Boulevard and soundstages. On top of all of this though, the Red Hot Chili Peppers had their own ideas for what the video should be - and not just that they should all have maxed out stats for their respective instruments.

“Apart from having some cool environments to explore, the band also wanted to reference the themes of artificiality in the song and convey their pro-environment messages,” Scherr says. “Yep, even this game is political.” Brilliant.

Speaking of the band, they apparently loved the video. While Scherr had already moved on to his next gig before being able to hear from them directly, he remembers them stopping by the studio towards the end of production and being really enthusiastic about what they were shown. “While I was working, the directors introduced me to Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante,” Scherr recalls. “I said something silly like ‘I didn’t recognize you with your shirts on’ and they laughed politely.”

It’s worth noting that it’s no surprise the band were impressed. Shortly before Scherr started on the project, the entire look of the video was revamped mid-production to be more in line with the highly anticipated PS2 in order to avoid looking like it was rendered on old tech. To accomplish this, everything in the video had to be remade at a higher resolution, including the models for the band members - remember Scherr’s contract was only four weeks long.

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“The short schedule is the main reason the animation, to be charitable, does not hold up,” Scherr says. “We had just enough time to rough something in, get feedback from the directors, make changes, and move on to the next thing. Watching my work in it today is somewhat painful, but we did the best we could with the time we had. I animated little bits here and there, but the parts I enjoyed doing the most are Chad Smith snowboarding down the Golden Gate Bridge and the Los Angeles earthquake sequence at the end.”

Scherr doesn’t work in animation anymore, instead spearheading the narrative design for games like The Last of Us Part 2, although there’s a curious link between his current employer and former work on Californication. Naturally, this starts with the story of how he joined Naughty Dog in the first place.

“It’s a fairly mundane story,” Scherr tells me. “I was still working freelance, the job I was on was wrapping up, and I started looking around for work. At the time I was on an email list (remember those?) called CG-CHAR, made up of a bunch of people like myself who’d been part of the early days of CG character animation. Someone on the list mentioned Naughty Dog was looking for animators and I thought ‘oh cool, I liked Crash Bandicoot,’ so I applied for the job and got hired as one of their first cinematics animators on the original Jak & Daxter. I figured it’d be like the rest of my career - stay for a project or two and move on after a while when I wanted to try something different. Ended up staying for ten projects and I’m still there 20 years later. No regrets.

“The funny thing is, when I first started at Naughty Dog, I mentioned I’d worked on this video. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe I was told the video producers actually approached Naughty Dog early on in the development process - they’d seen Crash Bandicoot and wanted to see if they could make the video in the Naughty Dog engine. When they were told how long that would take (too long) and how much it would cost (too much), they decided to go the more traditional animation route.”

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Given that the producers originally approached an actual game studio to make the video, it’s intriguing to think about whether or not this game could have been made in earnest, or if something like it could be made today. While Scherr has his own views on this, I also spoke to a couple of other devs about their thoughts on the subject, one of whom was The Falconeer creator Tomas Sala. Around the time Californication came out, Sala was spending his final years of art school trying to wrench an interactive design course into a game design one. To him, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were so inescapable that he was driven to avoid them at all costs - but the Californication video was “a pretty smart take on video games.”

“It did catch my eye, but I remember it with that snarky elitist phase you get when you've reached your first mini milestones in a field,” Sala says. “I basically dismissed it as the work of some hotshot videoclip director who knew nothing about games, which looking at it now is a pretty dumb and snobbish assumption.”

This may come as a surprise to some - that successful developers in 2021 look at a fictional video game from a five-minute music video and see it for its game design merits - but that only makes it all the more fascinating. There were obviously concessions made, likely due to the short and truncated production schedule Scherr discusses above, although there are certain victories in Californication’s video game, too.

“I think some of the character animations and especially the rigging look like they were done very rapidly, or probably by a high end 3D animator desperately trying to figure out how those games kept the rig workable with those simple joints and 3D models,” Sala tells me. “Thinking back, I remember GTA 3 literally using detached limbs stuck through the rump of the character to circumvent those issues.

“I do wonder if the crappy characters weren't a commentary by some pretty savvy musicians and artists on the fairly rudimentary visuals of 3D video games at the time. Beyond that it does some very fun stuff - snowboarding across the Golden Gate with the camera transitioning into the car diving into the water is a great bit of game fantasy. The earthquake sequence is also really nifty, with some weird different scales of buildings, vehicles, and people to make it work as a sort of platformer. If you look at it you can see it uses quite a bag of tricks to make that scene work at all.”

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What’s particularly funny about the answer above is that I never told Sala that the Golden Gate and earthquake sequences were what Scherr worked on. They just happen to be the sections he thinks are most impressive, which is lovely. Beyond that though, Sala thinks that there’s still a lot to learn from Californication. It may look like early PS2 nonsense to the untrained eye, but there’s much more to it than that.

“I think for its time it showed a gaming sandbox and did its best to unify all the different mechanics in an open world,” Sala explains. “I think GTA 3 came out after this video, but due to the music licensing in Rockstar games (and the time that takes) I have a suspicion some of the people behind Californication might have been ‘incrowd’ enough to have had previews and an inkling of GTA 3. Californication is straight up predicting the dominant form of gaming we now take for granted: the open-world sandbox. We can always guess which influenced which, but I love to think that this was just a cultural meme, where games were transitioning into something much, much bigger, and many, many people felt that coming, including musicians and music video directors.”

In fact, Sala and Scherr both think that Californication’s video game could work as a full-fledged project today. This doesn’t necessarily mean that people would pilot Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine as John Frusciante in a race against UFOs and dragonflies across the San Francisco skyline - although how cool would that be? - but instead that ambition, even when it seems absurd, always has its own inherent virtues.

“An apocalyptic game set during the big California quake, with open-world snowboarding, third-person melee combat, driving, and some Hollywood-themed hallucinogenic flying creatures?” Sala asks. “Why not? I think it's a matter of combining genres and finding a story that ties it together. I don't believe ideas are the tricky part of games - I have a few leftfield game ideas each day that take up needless brain space, so I'd say it's pretty daft to disregard any idea. Somebody will have to build it to be good though.”

“As for being an actual game - I mean, these days, I bet people with some talent and spare time could recreate the entire video either by stitching together clips from GTA 5 or mod GTA 5 and play it on the fly,” Scherr says. “That’s right, I’m throwing this down as a challenge; don’t let me down, internet.”

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