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Linkin Park releases customizable music video powered by Xbox's Project Spark

Linkin Park releases customizable music video powered by Xbox's Project Spark

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Linkin Park
Linkin Park
Flickr / NRK P3

Microsoft launched the beta for Project Spark last December, allowing gamers and developers on Xbox consoles, PCs, and tablets to create and play custom games all from home. To help promote their new album, Linkin Park teamed up with Microsoft to create an interactive music video that users can remix and recreate from the ground up.

Familiar thematic territory for Linkin Park fans

The band worked with developers Team Dakota to build the seven-minute-long interactive video for their new single Guilty All the Same told (or played, rather) in three acts. In it, you play a creature racked by guilt for an unspoken reason. The visuals are appropriately dark and broody, and the overall gameplay appears to be platforming on rails as you try to escape a stylized hellish landscape being destroyed by some unholy entity. So it should be halfway familiar territory for Linkin Park fans. However, it's the chance to mix the audio and visuals that could prove compelling. While it isn't completely clear what can be changed and in what ways, Microsoft and the band promise that gamers can come out of the video and remix the song and gameplay however they want.

While the presentation can't quite be called the most mind-blowing foray into gaming ever made, it's still pretty inventive and looks to make good use of the new Project Spark platform. Linkin Park is offering the music video to gamers for free for Xbox and Windows 8.1, and the new album will see release in June.

Update: A previous version of this post gave a rumored title and release date for Linkin Park's upcoming album. Those were inaccurate, and have been removed.