DOG WOLVE shows how game spaces can create cool music videos

Developer Ryan Trawick was so into Midnight Juggernauts' remix of Dragonette's "I Get Around" that he made a whole sort of-game video about it. It's odd—you wander around a parking lot with a baseball bat, smashing old TV sets while a neon yellow dog follows you around—yet as an experience, it's altogether perfect.

The premise, according to Trawick, is that you've just been invited to a magic 4AM parking lot after buying a Big Gulp from 7/11 (the Dragonette lyric "Here I come when I better go" sure does sound like "Here I come, with a Big Gulp" on the remix). And there you are, amid the manic joy of the six-minute song's insistent surges, bat in hand, bashing televisions to brightly-lit, utterly arbitrary scores.

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The yellow dog stays close by, always behind you, and each area of the dark lot gets a Grand Theft Auto-style cursive caption. That single nod to our subconscious vocabulary for game space makes the music video parking lot feel suddenly bizarre, illicit, celebratory at once. The original song "I Get Around" seems to be about a narrator who can't help herself from having sneaky one-night stands, but the distinctly-dudely DOG WOLVE has fun with blunt perversions: beyond just hearing "better go" as "Big Gulp," it seems to imagine that "get me back down to street level" is about a parking garage, and sets the "tiptoe out of this mess" incongrously against the armed smash-em-up.

It's not an official video or anything, though I wish it was: it all just comes together with the song in a way you kind of have to try for yourself. It's free. Wear headphones.