If you were to show someone under the age of 25 the music video for Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they would probably wonder what on earth they were looking at. Honestly, even those of us who were around when it debuted on music channels more than 20 years ago wondered what we were watching. If you haven't seen the video game-inspired video before, then you can check it out below.
Since it's 20 years old, the graphics are akin to that of a PS1 game. Once you moved past how odd the idea was, chances are you wanted to give it a whirl. Sadly, you could not, but now you can. Itching to play the game themselves for all these years, developer Miquel Camps Orteza decided to finally bite the bullet and make it happen. An “if no one else is going to do it, then I will” type situation.
“I wanted to play that game so bad! It's 2022 and I haven't seen anyone make the game, so I challenged myself to create it,” Orteza writes. “I have selected some epic moments from the video and turned [them] into 7 levels, each one with different game mechanics.” The Californication tribute game's levels include one where you can snowboard, and another that pops you in a car going across the San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.
The best part of all is you can play Orteza's creation for yourselves right now. The seven-level Californication game is available to download via Ortez's website absolutely free and can be played on PC and Mac. It will likely conjure up feelings of nostalgia for not just the Red Hot Chili Peppers when they were arguably at their peak, but also for some actual PS1 games with similarly janky graphics.
It's actually rather fortuitous that Orteza picked this moment in time, more than two decades on from when Californication's video game-inspired video debuted, to create their game. Just last year TheGamer spoke to Josh Scherr, one of the key minds behind the video, about how it all came together. Scherr cited the inspiration behind it and where the video game industry was at the time. Scherr would go onto work for Naughty Dog in the future, continuing his work with video games via some pretty special titles.