Over the last 50 years, Hip-Hop has served as a soundtrack for the American experience. Through it, we’ve highlighted social inequities, lamented broken relationships, and, of course, used it as the audioscape for celebratory moments.

Beyond being a creation of the African-American community, Rap and Hip-Hop have become integral to the musical and cultural tapestry of the world. Virtually every nation on Earth has a Hip-Hop scene, so it’s no wonder that Hip-Hop has a place in gaming culture, too. In fact, the two industries have seen very similar trajectories, ones that often overlap in crucial ways. 

A Shared (Sega) Genesis

It's easy to forget that video games and Hip-Hop are essentially contemporaries. The growth of arcades and home consoles in the late 70s and early 80s coincides with the foundations of Hip-Hop. The Atari 2600, hailed as the first commercially successful home console ever, was released in North America in the fall of 1977. Not two years later, The Sugar Hill Gang released Rapper’s Delight, causing Rap as we know it, to begin its ascent into the cultural zeitgeist. From that point on, the two art forms seemed to mature alongside each other. 

By the time the 90s rolled around, both Hip-Hop and gaming were entering their golden eras. Albums like Notorious B.I.G’s “Ready To Die”, Nas’ “Illmatic”, and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” were in heavy rotation. At the same time, people were playing Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and Street Fighter II. Arcades became ubiquitous in cities around the world, and over the loudspeakers, they played Hip-Hop and R&B. 

Popular rap songs even started to reference gaming. As Biggie crooned on 1994’s “Juicy”:

Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis
When I was dead broke, man, I couldn’t picture this

Throughout the 90s, these two forms of art and expression came into their own and captured hearts and minds around the world. Hip-Hop ushered in an entire culture that spoke to people across racial and cultural lines, and gaming introduced people to an all-new medium of storytelling and entertainment, with all-new capabilities. 

But outside of the communities that had developed around gaming and Hip-Hop, it wasn’t so easy for the general populace to accept them. Both were seen as degenerate and counter-culture by society at large. Whilst Ice T’s “Cop Killer” was used as an example of rap’s violent content in 1992, Mortal Kombat was under the same national scrutiny in 1993. Eventually, both ended up ushering in national content rating laws, for their respective mediums. 

When Rap & Games Collide

By the mid-90s to early 2000s, video games and Hip-Hop were slowly becoming close compatriots. 1994’s Wolverine: Adamantium Rage, led by producer Dylan Beale, included one of the proto-beats of UK Grime, nearly a decade before the genre existed. 1997’s Parappa the Rapper fully embraced Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop culture, serving as a precursor to well-known rhythm and music games like Guitar Hero and Just Dance. In 2000, Jet Set Radio was released as a love letter to multiple facets of Hip-Hop culture such as graffiti and UK pirate radio. 

Games like the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series were almost like mixtapes each year, showing off the less radio-friendly sub-genres of alternative hip-hop. These games featured underground champions that had loyal followings in the chat rooms and message boards of the early internet. Artists like Murs, Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, and Del The Funky Homosapien were hallmarks of the THPS games, and formed the soundtrack for many millennials as they entered adolescence. 

Eventually, Hip-Hop producers began to return the favor, and experimented with sampling video game music in their albums. And while it wasn’t unheard of for a producer to use a game’s BGM for a beat, it was a practice that exploded in the mixtape era of the late 2000s. Hip-Hop became a hotbed for video game samples as artists were much more comfortable with playing fast and loose with copyright law. Because mixtapes were ostensibly “for promotional use only”, artists and record labels donned the cloak of “fair use” and began to sample not just each others music, but all kinds of video game music as well. One of the more well-known examples of this is “Never Been” from Wiz Khalifa’s classic tape, Kush & Orange Juice, which samples Schala’s Theme from Chrono Trigger. This trend created an even deeper resonance between Hip-Hop and gaming, and allowed the two cultures to further intersect.

A Fully Formed Symbiosis

It’s impossible to talk about the relationship between Hip-Hop and gaming without talking about the Fighting Game Community. Street Fighter, arguably the most iconic fighting game of them all, has fully embraced its connections to Hip-Hop in the past few years. Way back in 1999, Street Fighter III: Third Strike shook the scene by leaning heavily into acid jazz, house, drum & bass, and Hip-Hop for its soundtrack. Its main theme, “3rd Strike” by Infinite, is an eclectic blend of all these different genres, and helped to set the scene for one of the most iconic soundtracks in all of video games. 

The series’ newest iteration, Street Fighter 6, is full of homages to the Hip-Hop sensibilities that have always historically been present. Not only does its art style lean on a graffiti aesthetic, its soundtrack is essentially a Hip-Hop instrumental album. Tracks like “Fete Foraine (France) and Genbu Temple (Japan) are basically just trap beats. And Ed’s Theme, “König oder Feigling”, is a rap track made specifically for the game by German rapper, Blumio. From the art direction, to the OST, to the sound direction as a whole, SF6 is a complete love letter to the world of Hip-Hop — in the form of a fighting game. It serves as a great companion, musically, to a game like Guilty Gear: Strive, a series that has been an ode to Metal and Rock since its inception.

Rappers continue to this day to reference and pay respects to the series. Artists like Lupe Fiasco have openly professed their love for the series. Lupe, in particular, has gone as far as playing in show matches against FGC pros. Others simply use fighting games as points of reference in their lyrics. Rap legend Nicki Minaj even had a whole “Chun-Li” phase and named one of her singles after the “World’s Strongest Woman.” 

Moving Into The Future

As Hip-Hop continues to evolve, the gaming industry’s interpretations of it continue as well. Virtually all current sports games like NBA 2K, EA FC, and Madden come with massive soundtracks that heavily feature rap and Hip-Hop. And artists like JPEGMAFIA and Lil Yachty continue to sample video game music, flipping and reinterpreting it in ways that expand the soundscape of the genre. Needless to say, there’s no reason not to expect the connections between hip-hop and video games to continue for as long as they both exist. As both mediums continue to become more ingrained in pop culture, Video Games and Hip-Hop are two distinctly 20th Century inventions that will persist, in parallel, for decades to come.