It's easy for us, as jaded gamers, to dismiss 4mm Games' Def Jam: Rapstar as a Johnny Come Lately. Thing is, the game isn't for us.
And 4mm's CEO Nick Perrett does a good reminding everybody of that in an interview with MCV. Rock Band, Guitar Hero and SingStar may all be on the decline, but is that the fault of the genre, or just the games themselves?
I spent a little time with the game last year at E3, and while the basic formula of the game looks just like SingStar, or Rock Band, or Karaoke Revolution, it's the culture that's going to be important for this game, not its mechanics.
Just like Nintendogs, SingStar and Brain Training were able to reach markets that weren't previously being catered for, Rapstar may do exactly the same thing with the hip hop community, which aside from a few blatant cash-grabs over the years has never really had a game to call its own.
INTERVIEW: 4MM [MCV] [image credit: John Darwin Kurc]