Music Week: Someone should make a game about: Frank Ocean's Channel Orange

We all have a sound which reminds us of our gaming childhood. For me, it’s the Artisans theme in Spyro The Dragon. For Frank Ocean, evidently, it’s the Street Fighter 2 opening beep. It’s this sound which opens his debut album Channel Orange, a narrative album about a conflicted adolescence whose only constant was video games. This beep follows the distinctive start up sound of the original PlayStation, before Ocean takes us on a journey of unrequited love, drug addiction, coming out, religion, Hurricane Katrina, and existential dread.

We might associate the PS1 with Final Fantasy 7, Tekken 3, and Crash Bandicoot, but the truth is we all associate the console with something deeper. The sounds, the look, and the feel of the machine reminds us of the time we were enthralled by the PS1. Channel Orange, bookended by the PS1 start up and the fuzz of a CRT TV switching off, wraps up Ocean’s songs in the era and the memories of the PS1.

It feels like a love letter to video games – not to Street Fighter 2, nor to any specific game – but to the pure escapism video games can offer. And it’s full of such rich, engaging stories that inverting it, turning the whole thing into a video game, is the best tribute I can think of for one of my favourite albums of all time.

There are a lot of albums that I could listen to from start to finish. Very few of them would make good video games, but Channel Orange is the exception.

I’m not suggesting a Sweet Life shooter or Monks As A Service. But with the flowing, interwoven stories of Channel Orange, held together by the sounds of a PlayStation, there’s potential for a slow burn narrative. Something along the lines of Life Is Strange or Firewatch. Something like Gone Home or What Remains Of Edith Finch, only instead of exploring a house, we explore the album itself, and all the different tales within it.