7 Best Games About Graffiti, Ranked

Highlights

• Video games showcase graffiti as an art form, allowing players to explore its beauty and make bold statements without legal repercussions.
• Titles like
  De Blob
  and
  Jet Set Radio
  use graffiti to revive colorless cities and rebel against oppressive authorities.
• Games like
  Getting Up
  celebrate graffiti as a creative tool for individual expression and resistance against totalitarian rule.

Graffiti is often associated with run-down neighborhoods and acts of vandalism. It has often been used by marginalized individuals in order to tell the world that they exist. Unfortunately, not many cities are willing to allow their public spaces to be a free canvas.

Video games, fortunately, have offered a canvas to explore graffiti as an art form, without the risk of getting arrested. They highlight not only graffiti’s ability to beautify cityscapes, but also to make bold political and social statements. They also highlight some of the obstacles that graffiti artists face to show the world their work. Here are several titles that are graffiti sandboxes.

7 Tag: The Power of Paint

Painting And Puzzle Solving

Tag: The Power of Paint is a student project from Tag Team at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. It is a first-person puzzle platformer where players navigate black and white city environments to reach the portal at the end of the level.

Navigating these obstacle courses requires spraying surfaces with paint of different colors. Each paint has a unique property, including allowing players to slide across the floor and bounce off the ground as if it were a trampoline. The team behind Tag would later be hired by Valve to help craft the gel mechanics for Portal 2.

6 Super Mario Sunshine

How Not To Use Graffiti

Super Mario Sunshine was the follow-up to the groundbreaking Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64. Instead of simply making essentially the same game with more advanced graphics, Super Mario Sunshine added a new mechanic to the mix. On the beautiful Isle del Fino, Mario is framed for polluting the tropical paradise, and forced by local authorities to clean up the imposter’s mess with the versatile FLUDD backpack.

Super Mario Sunshine shows how graffiti can be used for ill. Instead of beautifying the island, the imposter Mario vandalizes it. He covers the ground and buildings with his sticky goo, as well as paints his signature M on surfaces as his calling card.

5 De Blob

An Artistic Revolution

The Nintendo Wii was underpowered compared to its sibling consoles, and it had an unconventional control scheme with the motion-focused Wii Remote and Nunchuk. This would drive developers to create unique titles, focusing on more stylized designs with their own unique personalities.

Such a title was developer Blue Tongue Entertainment’s De Blob. The platformer follows the titular character as he restores color to a city turned colorless by the evil INKT Corporation. He absorbs and mixes different paint colors, splatting them over the walls and surfaces that he touches. This ability revives parks and public spaces, bringing back culture and individuality.

4 Splatoon

Get Inked

The Splatoon franchise is one of the most popular multiplayer shooters on the Nintendo Switch, and was a massive hit on the Wii U. The first Splatoon introduced a world where human-squid hybrids compete for territory in 4v4 battles.

Instead of using guns, though, they splatter territory and each other with colored ink. The goal is to cover the arena with as much paint for their team as possible. When victory is declared, the arena looks like a cross between street art and a Jackson Pollock painting.

3 Sludge Life

An Artistic Adventure In A Psychedelic Dystopia

Sludge Life is an open-world platforming adventure with a funky attitude that would make Toe Jam and Earl jealous. The protagonist, who goes by the name “Ghost,” is on a one-man quest to tag every location on a polluted island, dominated by the omnipresent GLUG corporation.

Sludge Life has a hundred locations to tag with graffiti. Ghost can acquire tools along the way to help him on his quest, including a jar of floating eyeballs that point to nearby graffiti spots. The visual style itself is also reminiscent of graffiti. It’s a cel-shaded adventure with all kinds of funky characters, including anthropomorphic flies.

2 Jet Set Radio

Claiming Territory In Tokyo-To

Sega’s final game console, the Sega Dreamcast, was a commercial failure, but it had some memorable titles. One of these was Jet Set Radio, known in the West as Jet Grind Radio, a cel-shaded video game that takes rebel graffiti artists on a rollerblading journey through the streets of Tokyo-To, an alternate version of the real 90s Tokyo.

The gangs of Tokyo-To mark their territories with graffiti throughout the city streets. Artists must respond to quicktime prompts to rotate the analog stick in different directions in order to paint their designs. Rivals will be competing for territory, and law enforcement will be breathing down their necks.

1 Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure

Taking Street Art To New Heights

Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure takes place in New Radius, a city ruled by a corrupt government and a brutal, militarized police force. The game’s protagonist, Trane, goes on a journey to establish himself as a prominent graffiti artist, and stand up against totalitarian rule.

This title is a celebration of graffiti and creative arts. Trane gets to select his stencils for his projects before booting into a save file, allowing gamers to extend their own creativity and individuality into the game. Game environments also have plenty of spaces to use as canvases, including some hard-to-reach spots that will have players performing some Prince of Persia-style acrobatics to reach them.