iPod Gets New Music Game From 'PaRappa The Rapper' Creator

'Musika' allows users to 'interact dynamically with the music.'

There are video games that re-create a convincing game of football or race a car around the track. And then there are the unusual ones - like "Musika," a game designed to test a player's abilities to spot the letters in the titles of songs downloaded on their iPod.

If that sounds strange - and maybe less joyous than most video game descriptions - it helps to know where it's coming from. On Tuesday morning, Apple launched "Musika" on its iTunes music store. It's the fruit of Masaya Matsuura, one of the pioneers of the music-game genre that has borne the likes of "Guitar Hero," "SingStar" and the still-in-development "Rock Band". Matsuura, who counts those games' developers as his friends, planted some of the genre's seeds with "PaRappa the Rapper," a 1996 music game for the original PlayStation.

"I was thinking about a game for downloadable audio," Matsuura told MTV News in a telephone interview from his native Tokyo earlier this week. He has music-game ideas for guitars, for robots, for all kinds of devices. For this concept with downloadable music, he said, "The iPod is designed for that."

To play the game, players pick a song from their playlist, press play, and then press one of two buttons to either select or skip letters and numbers that appear, one at a time, on the screen. The goal is to select letters that are in the song's title and skip the ones that aren't. The letters appear to emerge through a digital fog of increasingly abstract or psychedelic patterns, making it more and more of a challenge to recognize them. Hitting the correct buttons in succession builds a scoring chain. The challenge is to get a high score before the song runs out. But during all of this, the only sound the player hears is the song they've chosen, which makes it a different way of listening to music.

The concept fit one of Matsuura's overall goals for his career and his craft: He wants people to look at electronics differently. With the iPod, the change in perception he seeks is relatively modest. "Many think the iPod is just for listening to music or just for watching video or pictures, but [using "Musika,"] you can interact dynamically with the music."

Down the line he's interested in grander changes in how people view — and even care about — their electronics. Take the drum pad being made for the upcoming "Rock Band" title. "If we see the drum pad, maybe we want to beat it," he said. "But unfortunately, the drum pad is not a robot. It is just a machine so we don't have to care about how the drum machine or drum pad will be broken, how it feels about being beaten."

Matsuura's unusual perspective in such matters comes from being a big fan of robots: He became doubly animated when the conversation turned toward the topic. But he's only experimenting now and doesn't have any robot projects to announce.

Asked what he thought of the music games that have succeeded his "PaRappa" title, he said he likes the ones with guitar controllers, like "Guitar Hero." But there's something he'd like to see more of.

"Currently the main successful games in the Western world use licensed music," he said. "[Such music] was composed for listening. ... I am focusing on how American and European music creators make their own music tracks for games. That is a very interesting thing for me."

Ultimately, he said, it would be even better for these games to let people create their own music - essentially turning the hardware into musical instruments. "If the game or interactive art [help] the audience to try to express themselves using their own environment and game hardware, that would be great," he said.

While "Muzika" doesn't exactly achieve that, iPod owners can run the game on any audio track in their Apple handheld and therefore make a game out of anything from a Nas track to a podcast about cars. In the small field of iPod games — the other 17 of which include "Pac-Man," "Sudoku" and "Kaplan SAT Prep" - this music game on the world's most popular MP3 player is still a significant step.

The "Muzika" concept was created by Matsuura in conjunction with producers at Sony BMG, who pitched the project to Apple. (Those producers were unavailable to comment on why Apple approved the project.) The game was developed in Texas by Method Games. It is available on the iTunes music store for $4.99.