Monster Kids by Daniel Dockery

Author:Daniel Dockery [Dockery, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” Creates a Tiger Plant Warrior

If you insert Paula Abdul’s Spellbound album into your PlayStation, it will resurrect a golden plant warrior. Try David Bowie’s Earthling and a horned wolf will appear, ready for battle. Got a copy of comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be A Redneck If… lying around? It will spawn a full-blown dinosaur, one desperate to be trained for combat. Such is the beauty of Monster Farm, a series built on the idea that people probably had a lot of CDs lying around in the late nineties and that there was a high chance they were also interested in monster duels.

Monster Farm, which would be named Monster Rancher when released in North America, is a time capsule of a series and one that was destined to be popular during a very specific era of media and possibly never reach those highs again. Obviously, its video game developer, Tecmo, didn’t plan for it to be pushed toward extinction. For a short while, it was popular enough to be mentioned in the same breath as Pokémon or Digimon before it ultimately succumbed to the medium that made it unique in the first place.

Unlike Game Freak, Tecmo had been in the video game business a long time before throwing their hat into the monster-raising ring. Founded in the sixites, Tecmo had a hand in developing entertainment equipment and then, finally, video games in 1981. Their run from the late eighties to the mid-nineties is perhaps what they’re best known for, unleashing franchises like the football game Tecmo Bowl, the action-packed Ninja Gaiden, and the fighting series Dead or Alive. By the time they started Monster Farm, they were an established hit-maker. However, unlike those prior games, Monster Farm was built on a very unique gimmick.

The metadata of a compact disc consists of a few things: the artist, the track numbers, the length of the songs, the International Standard Recording Code, etc. If you happen to have a CD player in your car and you pop a CD in it, the metadata is what causes something like “6. ‘Toxic’—Britney Spears—In The Zone (2003)” to show up on the little screen. By using the PlayStation’s ability to read the metadata of any CD, Tecmo was able to create an algorithm that generated different monsters. In the late nineties, CD sales were only on the rise, so there was a pretty good chance that anyone who bought Monster Farm would be able to spawn a fair number of creatures. Also, in case you were curious, In the Zone creates a cute little insectoid plant fighter, just in case you’re a fan of Britney Spears.

The idea behind the game was pretty simple: You breed, raise, and train monsters on a little farm, and then you put those monsters in tournaments. In these tournaments, players battle other monsters to achieve higher ranks, gain access to more stuff, and eventually unlock more and more powerful monsters. Plot details are fairly scarce and, honestly, rather unimportant.

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