Rock Bands Keep Playing In MMOs, Because The Future Is Weird

Noted 1990s punk band The Offspring must love the tank-based MMO World Of Tanks, because they recently played live at a World Of Tanks event in front of 250,000 people in Minsk. It was called "Wargaming Fest: Tanker Day 2019," and that's exactly what Fox News is going to call their coverage of whatever new war we're going to be in before the calendar year is up.

Days after the show, The Offspring announced they're going to be playing another concert for the World Of Tanks community, but this one will be in the game itself. Character models of the band will appear in the game and perform all the songs you listened to during the year you were convinced you were going to be the next Rodney Mullen when you grew up. If you're wondering what that performance will look like, you only have to go back to this past August, when Korn performed "live" in some game called AdventureQuest 3D. It looked like, well, this:

For 11 minutes, Korn played a mix of new and old tracks while fans in attendance defeated hordes of monsters, including literal freaks on leashes. 13-year-old me would have died from a joy aneurysm. Predating both of those shows was Marshmello's concert in Fortnite back in February.

During an actual live show, just to kill time between songs, frontmen will lead call-and-response chants like "How you doin', ?" and then everyone will scream. During a concert in an MMO, however, the band isn't actually live, and there is no feedback between them and the crowd. When Korn lead singer Jonathan Davis opened the concert by asking the AdventureQuest community if they were ready to get crazy, his prerecorded message was met with an equally prerecorded roar from thousands of fans picked up from a sound effects library.

The in-game recreation of real-life concert tropes led to one wonderfully cringey moment during Marshmello's Fortnite concert, when he said that he "wants to see everybody's favorite emotes right now" right before the beat dropped. That's the line that makes your roll your eyes when you hear it in a movie set in the near future. But it wasn't a movie, it was real life ... and it was seven months ago.

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