The Ryan Lambie Column: Gaming’s ugliest celebrities

Turning on the television the other day, I was confronted by the surreal sight of Iggy Pop reeling and gyrating across the screen while unpleasant colours and slogans flashed up behind him. Not a music video as I first thought, but an advertisement for car insurance.  "Hang on," I thought. "Iggy Pop doing insurance ads? Iggy Pop, of Iggy Pop and the Stooges? As in Lust for Life and the hypnotic classic The Passenger? Sellout!"

It’s strange, watching a man once infamous for his monumental drug intake and onstage self-harm appear on television to extol the virtues of fully comprehensive motor cover. The man was meant to be an outsider, a rebel. It’s like Keith Richards making adverts about stairlifts or Che Guevara coming back from the dead to endorse Cuban real estate.

To make things extra confusing, Iggy Pop and Madonna appear to be steadily merging into one entity; a photoshoot released yesterday showed the grand aunt of pop cavorting in some queasily orthopaedic-looking underwear. Compare these pictures to recent ones of Iggy Pop’s gaunt and wizened torso and you’ll see what I mean: stick a conical bra on him and you’d never know the difference.

Time may do much to diminish a celebrity’s integrity or looks, but its cruel tricks pale into insignificance when compared to the horrors visited on them by video game developers. Actors from stage and screen have appeared in games for almost as long as the medium has existed – witness the mindbending travesty that was 1983’s The A-Team game for the Atari 2600. Not only was it an appallingly simplistic shooting gallery which had absolutely nothing to do with the television show, it also featured a giant floating Mr T head that more closely resembled a badly carved pumpkin than Bosco 'Bad Attitude' Baracus.

Still, at least the makers of the A-Team had the good sense never to officially release it – a pity the same can’t be said about the depressing Sam Fox Strip Poker from 1986. Featuring ‘DIGITIZED GRAPHICS!’ of the page three strumpet herself, Strip Poker caused quite a bit of playground excitement among the young males at my school - I even learned how to play five card draw in preparation. The game itself proved to be a colossally unerotic disappointment. Sam Fox appeared onscreen in an entire wardrobe of clothes including stage glasses, hat, coat and about three jumpers, looking like a news correspondent reporting from Siberia. Cunningly, the gratuitous apparel served two functions: it made the game longer (it took hours just to get her to remove her wretched scarf), and also disguised the fact that the china-faced apparition on the screen looked nothing like the real-life model whatsoever.

Sigourney Weaver didn't fare much better when she ‘appeared’ in Data East’s Aliens arcade game; the digital Ripley was depicted with a bizarre blonde perm, 'would you like fries with that?' fast food worker's headset and naff stadium rock ankle-length boots. Incredibly, Weaver’s lawyers didn't sue.

You can’t be too hard on eighties game developers, though – trying to make a recognisable celebrity out of a matrix of chunky pixels was the Devil’s own work, after all. When hand-drawn sprites were retired off in the nineties, a new problem arose – how can you make a convincing-looking Pierce Brosnan, Robbie Coltrane or Sean Bean in 3D while keeping Goldeneye’s in-game action fast and smooth? Rare found the perfect solution: make all the models out of boxes and stick dodgily photographed faces on the front. It didn't look too bad at the time, but revisit the game nearly twelve years later and you’ll find a faintly melancholy-looking Brosnan who looks like his head’s been shut in a door and a boxy Mr Creosote where Robbie Coltrane should be.

That’s not to say that celebrities look any better in the games of the last couple of years; technology may have improved exponentially, but the ability to accurately capture a famous person’s visage remains elusive. As a result, Robert Downey Jr looks like Derren Brown in the Iron Man tie-in, Harry Potter resembles Jack Straw in Order of the Phoenix while poor old Vin Diesel shoots, drives and sulks his way through the trailer for the forthcoming Wheelman as though he’s had a mild stroke – which, thinking about it, isn't too inaccurate after all.

In fact, Mirror’s Edge is the only game I can think of that contains a truly faithful polygons-and-textures celebrity. Say what you like about the gameplay - that really is a stunningly accurate Bjork.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.

22 January 2009