For some strange reason, I’ve been on a concert attendance bender for the last couple weeks like never before in my life. Late last month, I got to hang out with Avenged Sevenfold to see their upcoming game Hail to the King: Deathbat, and last night, I was back at the same venue to see Drake and Lil Wayne showcase the gimmick of their new tour. Rap battles have been a thing for as long as I can remember (You’ve seen 8 Mile right?) and so has Street Fighter. Somewhere along the chain of command between Drake, Lil Wayne, and Capcom, someone decided why not combine rap battles with Street Fighter? Sure, why not, right? And with that, the Drake VS Lil Wayne app (Free) was born.
As someone who has had a history with Street Fighter for over two decades now, I was pretty geeked out about the whole thing. It sort of reminded me of the late 80’s/early 90’s right when video games were starting to get super popular and everyone was trying to tie in Nintendo with whatever they could. (Anyone remember the Nintendo Cereal System?) The vision they were selling seemed really cool too, download this app on your phone, and somehow interact with the show.
Unfortunately, like many things that seem like a great idea on paper, I’m not sure how well it worked out in practice. Before the show opened, the stage was driving everyone there to go download the app. The problem with this, as anyone knows who has ever tried to use their phone at any kind of event, downloading 43.9MB of data on iOS (or 18MB on Android) from the totally slammed cellular tower your phone is desperately trying to stay connected to among the 28,000 other people there was easier said than done. I watched a few people around me try to download it, but quickly gave up considering just how ruined the cellular climate was- I could barely even tweet 140 characters of text, much less download anything substantial. Thankfully, I had the foresight to install the app beforehand.
So, as the show starts, some Street Fighter-y stuff rolls across all the screens and people with the app are put to the task of deciding whether Drake of Lil Wayne go first by tapping the screen of your phone as quickly as possible to “power up" whichever rapper you prefer. My whole crew were wildly tapping for Drake, but I guess Lil Wayne won the tap-off.
From there, Lil Wayne and Drake took turns coming out and performing a ridiculous amount of songs. Every once in a while after taking some photos, I’d open the app back up to power-up Drake, but it never really was clear what if anything this was doing. The idea Capcom seemed to be going with was audience participation during the show, and initially it seemed like that was the case, but it never was clearly conveyed what you were supposed to be doing with the app and what impact it was having on the show. At least until the end, when the following two things popped up:
…But what was weird is that both things were only on the screen for a matter of seconds. I couldn’t even get the app opened in time to “power up" Drake, then Drake proceeded to just say something along the lines of “I don’t even need that sh*t," presumably in regards to the “powering up" process. In the end, Drake “won," although I’m not sure if he “won" like WWE wrestlers “win" or if it had something to do with the furious tapping my whole group of friends were doing inside the app. The whole thing sort of had the vibe of those crowd noise meter things they show on the jumbotron at sporting events. Are those actually measuring the crowd screaming, or is it just a canned graphic? I’m not sure that’s a secret I want to know.
Overall, the idea of gamification of a concert via a game-ish smartphone app is a super cool one, and one that I’d like to see more of. This was only the third show of the Drake VS Lil Wayne tour, but hopefully on future stops they try to do more to explain to the audience what they’re supposed to be doing with the app, making sure to point out to download it beforehand. I love the concept though, and could totally see the baby steps of this turning in to something really awesome in the future when more people are tuned in to the fact that they can have an impact on what happens in the show using the companion game/app.
At the end of the day, the show was great, and the Street Fighter tie in was really cool, particularly to people who knew both artists and the game well enough to appreciate it. Did it even matter that the app didn’t seem to do a whole lot? Not at all.
