REMEMBER THE KISS/PSYCHO CIRCUS VIDEO GAME? YEAH, ME NEITHER.
It’s entirely possible that I stayed up way past my bedtime last night playing Crackdown 2. (I also had a Predator marathon in anticipation of Predators. Ladies, try to control yourselves.) I still find it kinda funny how video games can very much take control of my life, given that just a few years ago, I’d stopped playing them altogether. Then I had some extra money burning a hole in my pocket, and rather than do something useful with it, I bought a used Xbox, and then for some reason my writing career kinda stalled for a year. Hm. Curious.
ANYWAY, I’m telling you entirely more information than you care to know as a way of explaining that I wasn’t playing video games in 2000 — and I certainly was no longer paying attention to Kiss or anything Psycho Circus-related. So I had no idea that there was ever a PC-themed video game, entitled Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child. (I hear the working title was Colon: The Video Game: For PC and Dreamcast.) Then I saw this old commercial for the game on one of my favorite nerd sites, Topless Robot, who observe that “Even the announcer in the trailer can’t fake any enthusiasm about this piece of crap.”
Wow. That looks pretty lame. What I can’t figure out is, why the hell did it come out two years after the album? I’ve been operating under the impression that Psycho Circus ultimately only sold about a half a million copies — a great number if you’re Killswitch Engage, but pretty lackluster by Kiss standards (even in 1998, which I think was right around the time the record industry was rightfully starting to get nervous). I know hardcore Kiss fans are like hardcore fans of any arena-headling band — they’ll buy anything with the group’s logo on it — but I’d still be curious to know if this game was ultimately profitable. (Especially because most Kiss fans are pretty old. Do they even know how to play video games, or do all the colored buttons on the controller confuse them?) Given the complete overabundance of crap Kiss is will to put their name on, I’d think that occasionally at least some of it has to shit the bed.
-AR
