Make My Video: Kriss Kross
I had friends who were into ’90s rap, but it was on the list of things my mother banned from the house. I had to retroactively catch up on the period’s greatest artists, so I can’t reminisce about the era or the culture. What I do remember was how much U.S. politicians wanted to insert themselves between rap and the masses. Tipper Gore, Jack Thompson, those parental advisory stickers, and, yes, Kriss Kross.
I’ll explain that last one. Politicians and news media painted rap music as a moral red line that black artists were flagrantly stomping across. It’s not important why Ice Cube had issues with the LAPD – his song was called “Cop Killer,” so he should be in jail. If you listened to the controversy instead of any actual songs, it sounded like every rapper was in a gang, beat up women, and would love nothing more than to kill whitey. Rap had no art, no value, it was just “those people” causing problems.
So, when two middle school kids show up rapping about innocent shit like missing school and how “loveable and huggable” Mac Daddy is, oh boy were they held up as perfectly acceptable examples. I was around their age and remember them being everywhere in 1992. Their songs were catchy. Rap faithful seemed to legitimately accept them – look how fly these little dudes are! – while their biggest controversy was getting school admins furious over kids wearing their clothes backwards. Put it another way, there’s a reason you’re not making Pac’s videos.
All four Make My Video titles have a different, hokey explanation for why you’re doing this. Today’s excuse finds you working at a call-in show for some kind of radio/video station, complete with futuristic beep-boops in the background – basically someone took The Gerry Todd Show from SCTV seriously. Energetic DJ “Boyd Packer” (an actor; they did not get a known hip-hop celeb) mans the phone lines, taking requests for how listeners want to see Kriss Kross’ videos remixed. You pick a caller and their video out of a static menu. Another FMV clip plays as Boyd gets the deets on this edit.
You’ve got “Jump,” “Warm It Up,” and “I Missed the Bus” – inarguably, the three greatest hits off Totally Krossed Out. Each caller has 2-3 possible requests. This allows Boyd to build up some familiarity (like flirting with Charise or insulting pesky young Jerome), all played for laughs. Which of the 3 requests you get is randomized, but the specifics of each request never change. I’d guess there’s 20 edit challenges in the whole game – especially if you count “Sudden Cinema.” These are the same kinds of requests as the calls, but they can pop up right after you just finished another edit.
Each request has you looking for about five things. Callers ask for “cars hopping like toys,” no girls (a surprisingly frequent one), or particular effects, like Kriss Kross flipped upside down. Still images sometimes play over the call, demonstrating clips they want added or cut. Many requests are hard to understand, either from fast-talking callers doing phony accents, or an added phone compression effect. Even when you can hear the words, the meaning isn’t always clear; like “I wanna see… or not see… all the stuff on the screens!” – well, which one is it, Eric? After the caller finishes by shouting “Make My Video!” (it’s the law), you’re shipped off to the edit interface.
Three independent monitors are mapped to the A, B, and C buttons. One monitor is always the official music video, while the other two are public domain clips – astronauts in zero-g, an owl bobbing its head, 1920s flappers dancing, etc. Your main monitor is in the top center. Press a button to send the corresponding video to the main monitor and the final recording. In the upper left is a panel of effects like strobe, smear, flip, and single colors. You navigate this panel with Up and Down on the D-Pad and toggle effects with Left or Right. You cannot rewind if you missed an edit point, nor can you slice up and reorder the official music video. You can only overwrite it with some fever dream stock clips and beginner effects.
When I wrote about Power Factory, I said I hated this interface. I still do. But I want to give it a chance this time. If all you want to hear about is how the series is pants, you can go to YouTube. There’s no reason for me to write this if I don’t put in the work. So let’s do it. Let’s make a video.
Alright, Jerome. How do you want your video?
Alright, Roxanne. How do you want your video?
“No effects” – love it; I picked this one to be as easy as possible. “Lots of switching stuff” – can do, but what’s too much? Guess we’ll have to try out options. “Daddy Mac dribbling between his legs” – easy; that’s two shots towards the middle of the official video. But “girls chasing the limo”? Maybe I’m mishearing, cause there’s no limo in any of these clips. “No fat guy with zipper on his butt” also highlights a problem. I had to watch the official video online to realize the guy at 3:24 was walking with his pants on backward. I didn’t even realize Kriss Kross were driving the car backward – on the Sega CD, these videos are too small and the compression too chunky. Callers will talk about things you can’t see.
My plan is only possible because the game runs timecode in the lower right. You can track minutes, seconds, and frames with repeatable accuracy. Also, none of the videos change. This is obvious for the official video, but those two stock footage feeds aren’t randomized either. For “Jump,” you will always find a ballet dancer leaping at 00:55:11, or a rocket launching at 1:45:10. With this knowledge (and judicious use of Start to pause), you can literally write out a list of what switches need to happen when, then follow it back during the edit.
If this doesn’t sound fun – congratulations! – it’s not. Since the calls are randomized, it also means you have to keep resetting the console until you get the one you’re working on. And I do mean reset. Once you pick a caller, that train is leaving the station. You can’t skip Boyd’s intro. You can’t skip or back out of the challenge. When the video finishes, your entire edit immediately plays back (probably while it’s still in memory), which you can’t skip either. Your next 6-7 minutes are booked solid.
With Roxanne’s requests in hand, now I had to watch the video a bunch of times to find these scenes. You can do this by intentionally ignoring the challenge, or by booting up the video in the freeplay U-Direct mode. It still took me three watches of the entire video to find and verify times for all the edits. Now that I had an edit list, I had to keep resetting the console again and select Roxanne until I got the request I had the list for.
Queued up, it’s now just a matter of reflexes and watching the clock. I wasn’t even watching Kriss Kross anymore and the video was irrelevant – probably how they reused this setup for three more games. It’s still not exactly easy to keep one eye on the list and one eye on the timecode, so it took a few tries to finally get it right. Clips can flash on screen for just a second, so you’ve got to be fast. It’s not clear how many you can miss and still pass. The feeds also switch up three times during the program, which you have to consider in your list. And again, when I failed, I had to keep resetting the console to pull the specific Roxy request I was working on.
Now I can’t say I ever really sat down and paid attention to MTV in the ’80s and early ’90s. On in the background? Sure. But really stop and absorb music videos? Nah. I appreciated the idea and creativity of little mini-movies. I actually studied Michel Gondry’s videos for Kylie Minogue and The Chemical Brothers in college (both would be trivial to make with modern CG). But I’ve never, in my entire life, watched a music video as many times as I’ve now watched “Warm it Up.”
Obviously, I don’t think you’re meant to play it this way. I think you’re supposed to just fail the challenges and replay them until you’re fast enough or familiar enough to predict the switches. You can even make the argument that this is supposed to be a reflex-based, live editing challenge. VJs were becoming a thing – not Downtown Julie Brown, but people actually remixing videos on the fly, like a DJ scratches records and mixes samples. I always thought that was rave shit – live cameras and psychedelic lights, like this scene in Virtuosity. But apparently throwing together stock footage and crazy effects as a live performance was a thing, which seems like it inspired this entire game series. Maybe it was never meant to be an editing game in the way I’m thinking of it, but more like an early video-based version of DJ Hero.
Once your edit plays back, the caller either berates you for a terrible video, credits you for getting it partially right (Boyd literally does the so-so gesture), or praises you for nailing their request. You’ll likely know right away if you blew an edit, but the line between getting a perfect video and one that’s just considered okay comes down to a lot of finger-crossing – then frustration when you’re pretty sure you got it right. Did I switch too many times? Was an effect on for too long or not enough? The only thing I confirm is that you can’t leave an effect on for the whole video. The request was to strobe the demon bus driver in “I Missed the Bus” every time he’s on screen – well, he was strobed, but I guess it’s implied that the rest of the video shouldn’t be.
Win or lose, the (silent?) credits roll and you’re back to picking a new caller. I had to fail a few Roxanne calls to confirm that, indeed, the request that I “beaten” was right back in the rotation. There truly doesn’t seem to be an ending, or a way to complete the game. For its part, Power Factory tried to make more of a story. I’d believe there’s a video in there of you escaping the factory with Phil Lamarr if you make enough amazing edits. But here, your best work only puts you on a nebulous leaderboard (no displayed high score or anything), then kicks you back to the menu to try again.
Graphically, this isn’t great. Like Night Trap, the Make My Video series was conceptualized for a different technology than the Sega CD, and it’s pretty obvious. Boyd kicks up his sneakers in the intro with something written on tape on his soles. I assume it’s a joke, but the pixelation makes it unreadable. All videos are limited to small windows on screen – the black borders on these screenshots are just the way the game is. Even those little windows are pixelated and smear colors all over the place. Even at the time, the best thing you could say is that it’s novelty video that you didn’t have to rewind.
I also think it’s interesting that they never seem to decide what to even call this. Aside from Make My Video – Instant Edit, U-Direct, EditChallenge, InstaSwitch, and Sudden Cinema are all trademarked and show up interchangeably. That kind of matches the whole vibe of this series – they’re just throwing this at the wall and seeing if anything sticks. I talked about the “work is fun” genre in Spycraft and this also seems like an early prototype of what would become a very familiar Steam indie genre. But technology and gameplay limitations mean this series is a whole lot of work and very little of it is fun.
The Good
CD quality audio. Three popular videos. You can save one edit to the console, if you’re really proud of something. Boyd Packer (Richard McGregor) manages to not be cringy and keep the mood fun. They even got Don Pardo (famed announcer from Saturday Night Live) to do intros.
The Bad
Video quality is at the very bottom edge of “serviceable.” The editing premise just masks that tiny windows are the largest size these videos can show at. Gameplay is either a lot of thankless work, or a very inaccurate reaction challenge.
“The moment of truth, baby! The payback’s in the playback! Hook it up! Hook it uuuuup!” – Boyd