Released 15 years ago as a highly lethal multiplayer HL2 mod, Neotokyo is the project everyone wanted to love but external circumstances and its own intimidating learning curve seemed to constantly prevent it from reaching the level of recognition it deserved. What still seems to endure, at least in the hearts of those that still remember it, is Ed Harrison's immaculate soundtrack.
Very few, if any other works, succeed so well in evoking its specific tone of anime inspired military sci-fi. This was the music for the military nerds amongst us desperate for something with even a whiff of aesthetic in the ocean of drab gulf-war informed military sims. Something that made you feel like the highly competent military agents of a dystopian state, but also knew how to look and sound good while extrajudicially executing your opponents.
In some regards, Neotokyo's OST could probably be described as, "What if Orientalism was good actually?" It's leaning heavily on a lot of the kind of moody evocative sounds commonly found in the cyberpunk anime that resonated with Western audiences at the time. Kenji Kawai's Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2, Shoji Yamashiro's Akira, Hajime Mizoguchi and Keishi Urata's work on Texhnolyze. You can hear all of them in the choral chanting, haunting strings, and surprisingly restrained usage of synth. It's a remarkably cool sound.
I think at the time, Neotokyo's soundscape explored the idea that military sci-fi could be elegant, atmospheric, and effortlessly cool in a way a lot of Western military media would eschew as effeminate or incongruous. Female vocals, no heavy guitars or bassy drops. Maybe the shooter audience of 2009 simply wasn't ready for something like Neotokyo.
Anyway, I'm posting these because apparently the Neotokyo website has finally gone offline, meaning Neotokyo is truly dead media at this point. Support was abandoned in 2014 and while it is still technically playable should you be dedicated enough, the time to experience it as intended is long gone. The only way to experience Neotokyo is for the people who still remember it to share it.
At least you can still purchase the soundtrack.
https://edharrison.bandcamp.com/album/neotokyo-nsf
https://edharrison.bandcamp.com/album/neotokyo-gsdf
In the end, the art and music of Neotokyo are probably its most enduring legacies. I don't actually care for many shooters on the market these days because I find so many of them bereft of any kind of distinct aesthetic. You don't have to be an anime cyberpunk themed shooter to get me to play, but the nature of how live service games are kept afloat by a constant dripfeed of cosmetic content mean most don't really have any kind of unifying visual identity anymore.
As someone who has worked on weapon skins for Apex Legends, PUBG, Call of Duty, and the cancelled TLoU multiplayer spinoff, I can tell you from personal experience that the ways in which multiplayer shooters have been boiled down into cosmetic content mills is a lamentable thing.
Neotokyo may have arguably been a failure in the long term view of things, but its distinctive identity punched well above its weight on the back of a unified aesthetic, visually and musically. I'll certainly remember it far longer than whatever gun skin I did for season 12 of Apex Legends.
To this day, my litmus test for how good your military sci-fi operator designs is simple.
How hot would they look with 'Footprint' playing them in? Specifically the crescendo starting at 3:40. If you can't imagine your masked up tacticool agents rapidly deploying to this, take them back to the drawing board.
