Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 9: The 50 Cent Solution

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

Thanks to AShadowLink for edits. Content warning for violent imagery.

“That b____ took my skull!”—50 Cent, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

It was the most bizarre game of the year, right? Has to be. Its sheer existence feels like some grand indictment of… something. Decency? Intelligence? Basic sense? But a game where Fiddy goes to the Middle East, kills hundreds of people, and battles three helicopters over a diamond encrusted skull?! That is bonkers, nonsense, utter madness! If you ever want to utterly confound someone with no attachment to the games industry, just describe this game. You’ll see the confusion visibly swell in their eyes.

Let’s jump back a bit. In the early to mid-2000s, few artists were enjoying the success of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. He was ubiquitous, one of the main artistic engines that moved rap fully and definitively into the mainstream. His rise was fast, too; he learned from Jam Master Jay in ‘96, debuted with The Power of the Dollar four years later, saw a huge public boost after getting the attention of Eminem and Dr. Dre, and by ‘03, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ would come out to sell nine million copies. Fifty was everywhere. His popularity stemmed from a lot of things. Of course, he could make an earworm of a hook; that’s the most important. He was also good at the kind of emotional honesty that would become more prevalent in rap over the coming years. Sure, he dined out a lot on that iconic story, that he survived being shot nine times right before the release of his first album (and if we’re being fair, he deserves to), but he was always open about his feelings in a genre that places value on authenticity. Despite this, it’d be wrong to call him sensitive; much of that openness came from how loudly and viscerally he glorified wealth, power, and excess. Things that, off the stage, he pursued with cold efficiency.

Image: Source Gaming. 50 in a Blood on the Sand FMV. He’s introduced threatening someone over an unpaid gig. There’s no attempt to make him heroic, but also there was perhaps no need.

This is important because “50 Cent: gangsta rap icon” and “50 Cent: business magnate” were and are inseparable. They feed into each other. His persona, physique, and style were openly calculated to build as wide an audience as possible, particularly among women. He made his own record label after co-founding G-Unit, a supergroup that found additional success despite infighting and many of the strange feuds that defined Fifty’s career. He branched out into other fields, and while that was most famous by the millions he made off buying into vitaminwater, that also included video games in 50 Cent: Bulletproof, a vanity project that featured his collaborators as guest stars and sold over a million copies. Shovelware for a star, but that didn’t matter in 2005. Honestly, the hustle was part and parcel of what made him beloved. This was a decade obsessed with accumulation and size, and while large swaths of rap were no less obsessed, no one rapper was more so. I mean, his first breakout single was about gloriously stealing from other rappers, and I’m far from the first person to point out that he’s literally named after money. While some critics at the time debated whether he was the successor to the irreplaceable Tupac Shakur, today a different title feels more fitting: if any one person could be the musician of the Bush Era, it’d be Fifty. Even has the nihilism down.

However, all things must turn. As the decade went on, Jackson’s output got worse to varying degrees of severity. New albums didn’t do quite as well. He starred in the box office bomb Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (which is unrelated to the album but whose soundtrack spawned a second and, again, far less successful album of the same name) and was roundly mocked for his acting. He poorly beefed with Kanye West as a marketing ploy and tried to ape Donald Trump’s The Apprentice with a failed reality show, and… wow is that an exhausting sentence to write in a 2024 review of a video game. He was an early adopter to YouTube, albeit through embarrassing comedy sketches. None of this voids the fact that he was one of the biggest stars in the world. It was simply that “was” is the operative word, and that he was a man on a clear decline.

And then, in 2009, Bulletproof got a sequel by an unrelated studio. But unlike that game, which crafted a plot around its star’s brand (i.e. he survives a hit and fights his way through New York’s crime world), this one, uh, didn’t. It was also a shooter, now a cover-based one in keeping with the era, but it wasn’t about Fifty fighting his way through NYC. It was set in a vaguely Middle Eastern city, with him and G-Unit overcoming whole militias to retrieve a diamond encrusted skull that had been offered as payment for a concert. He fights some guys for it, then some other guys, one of whom is played by Lance Reddick a year after The Wire and several before Destiny, then even more guys, and at some point it all works out. I could explore what few narrative twists there are, but they’re meaningless and anyone reading this review knows that.

Image: Source Gaming. The in-game graphics lay in stark contrast to the FMV; Fifty looks barely like him.

In some ways, it isn’t that surprising. The celebrity tie-in video game is a time-honored trope of vanity projects, and… oh, who am I kidding? 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand was a joke the second it got announced and stayed that way through cancellation, a publisher switch, and its belly flop of a release. “Where my skull” and Fiddy’s drive over an allegedly “big-ass ramp” instantly became pillars of video game memery, to the point of overshadowing all the other ridiculousness. That’s the reason it’s here (well, that and I did own the game already. I only played it for about a half hour over a decade ago, so this is still a new experience). Maybe part of it was people happy to kick a man when he was down or gamers distrustful of what looked for all the world to be cheap and disposable, but this never stopped being a punchline. Still is.

Throughout Blood on the Sand, Fifty and the sidekick of your choice—Tony Yayo, Lloyd Banks, DJ Whoo Kid, who was never officially in G-Unit proper, but whatever. Jackson had already demeaned and expelled Young Buck—go through corridors, shoot racially problematic bad guys, and avoid fire by taking cover. It’s a blatant follower of Gears of War and 2008’s cult shooter The Club, as openly mercenary as its star. But it’s also a fun Gears of War follower. Unlike Bulletproof, whose reputation is miserable, Blood on the Sand is actually quite good as a playable B-movie. Mechanically it does nothing you couldn’t find elsewhere, but it does it well. Even if Fifty’s health bar magically regenerates like plenty of other boring shooters, you’re not immediately smote by God for daring to leave your cover. In fact, the game openly dares you to. Enemies are dull, but their attacks never feel unfair. The game feel is great, the level design is alright, explosions are satisfying to cause and delightful to see, and it’s only in the giant late game levels and some unfortunate sequences with helicopters that this breaks down.

Image: Source Gaming. The grenades, rockets, and exploding barrels are all a delight in Blood on the Sand. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had with them in a game in years.

It’s also a matter of tone, of course, and Blood on the Sand is an absolute camp delight. The strangeness of it all—a real world superstar played by himself annihilating hundreds of goons and destroying an entire city—is never couched in lampshading or self-consciousness like the comedy was in Matt Hazard. Fifty is fully game to do this out of revenge, machismo, and the desire to own a diamond encrusted skull he only just learned about. His villains are as wildly over the top as can be (I’m a big fan of the main bad guy shouting “you have no chance, Fifty Cent!” from his helicopter, as though he’s cursing James Bond). The man’s open love of money is an actual mechanic thanks to a shop, and an arcadey point system encourages you to play with bravado, cause mayhem, and find collectible posters of our star. That’s what powers your Gangsta Fire, a bullet time that refills if you do stuff like taunt right after a kill. Oh, right, there’s a taunt button! If you press down the left stick, Fiddy curses at no one in particular, and you can buy more profane curses in the shop!

Everything carries this aesthetic. The soundtrack is all his and G-Unit’s music, and Jackson recorded over a dozen songs for the game. You can even watch music videos of them and make a playlist that seemed to just kill the score entirely the moment I played with it (there’s also an original score for those disinclined, but… c’mon. Some of the songs are good, and why would you play this game without them?). Your plucky G-Unit cronies are a delight; while Jackson gives a performance reminiscent of someone stuck at an unpleasant family function, they’re having a great time talking about Napoleonic architecture, cracking jokes about OSHA, and giving you boosts up walls. Best of all, this is a cover shooter that starts out by giving you four guns, as opposed to the standard two, and then one of those starting guns is a rocket launcher. Even DOOM doesn’t start you off with a rocket launcher. It’s the kind of game with a driving sequence that directs you to jump off a fully optional light ramp, because this kind of game needs cars to jump off ramps. This takes tenets of the 50 Cent persona, stuff like dominance and stupid beefs and unflappable forward motion, and gleefully runs with them into absurdity. Rarely is a tongue so firmly in cheek.

Image: Source Gaming. Fifty gets a lesson in architecture from DJ Whoo Kid… though, as all three G-Unit members share a script, Yayo or Banks will say the same things.

Some stuff doesn’t work, much like the music player. To push the combo system, you only get grenades and Molotov cocktails by dutifully following time-sensitive demands, like killing X number of snipers in Y seconds. It’s not bad to push players into a certain kind of gameplay, but the grenades are actually quite fun to use, so maybe it’d have been better for the system to be a bit shallower and just give you explosives. The level design gets weaker over time as chapters become increasingly over the top, especially once you survive a shootout at a burning club that probably should’ve been the finale. Those vehicle sections and helicopter boss fights are abysmal. There’s the occasional misread of whether pressing the A button is supposed to make you attach to cover or dodge roll. None of these issues are particularly surprising, especially with this genre and generation. Blood on the Sand is far from the first Aughts-era cover shooter to have them—it’s not even the first, or third, entry in this series with an overlong climax. I suspect playing on Easy would smooth these parts over a bit, so I’d recommend you do that if you, like me, have an interest in surprisingly fun camp nonsense.

That level of quality comes out of a deeply strange origin. Toiling under Vivendi during the merger that would birth Activision Blizzard, Swordfish Studios was working on a third person modern war shooter, a licensed game whose license kept changing. Initially it was gonna be an adaptation of the Covert-One novels, which were getting a TV series, only for the show to get swiftly canceled and presumably drag down the IP’s value. At one point they intended to shop it to Ubisoft as a potential Tom Clancy’s game, with level design and script changing to match. It was partway through development that a Vivendi executive suggested retooling it for an outsized personality whose likeness they had the rights to—and wouldn’t you know it, but they just happened to have a successful shooter starring a world-famous musician. Essentially, 50 Cent, G-Unit, and the diamond encrusted skull were grafted onto a strong third person shooter foundation, one that could theoretically be dolled up to suit any IP in the world. This could’ve been the basis for a joyless but no less competent military shooter. Making a game to sell to a license is a terrible method of production, something that continued once they settled on the license. The reason there are those terrible battles in or against helicopters is because during development, Jackson’s son asked for them, and while those are the kinds of whims that can wildly screw up an entire project’s timetable, Jackson demanded and they followed. An even bigger issue was Activision giving up on the game after the merger, setting the team adrift for months until THQ picked up publishing duties. All that headache… for 50 Cent.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the game’s helicopter turret sections. You can use Gangsta Fire to help with some parts, but it’s a pretty big slog overall.

It’s this that makes the game, and what makes it both a target of ridicule and a surprising cult classic. Blood on the Sand is a very competent version of what was the most popular and dull genre of game at the time. It does what a lot of these did, which was to stick you in a brown city and shoot people who shout in a foreign language. They were nasty and outright demented. Fifty follows this to the letter here by being a full-on psychopath, as many of the heroes of these games were; he’s just in a story with neither the illusion that he’s anything else nor the desire to humanize him. Forgive me for even daring this analogy, but it’s almost the inverse of Spec Ops: The Line. That (yes, far greater) cult classic was also a modern military shooter, and it used the basic tropes of its genre to explore the inherent moral quandary of a war video game. This one has no narrative ambitions at all, but by turning those same tropes into this cartoonish, openly comedic ego trip, it also destroys their magic. One is deconstruction, and one is pastiche.

In some ways, this proudly shallow thing fits the paradox of 50 Cent—and, by extension, the much greater paradox of the Bush years. On one hand, he was an ultra-capitalist who embodied every cliché about rap at this time: utterly unapologetic, misogynistic, and a fetishist of money and power. On the other, he was so thoroughly pervasive that he transcended American tastes and demographics. He found mass success not by shedding his nastier qualities but by holding to them, boasting of them. And I think this makes him of a piece with the heroes of this era, the Bald Whitem’n and the like (and within this game, he totally is a Bald Whitem’n. It’s only hard to notice because you don’t associate the archetype with people who actually exist). The heroes of War on Terror-era America were tough men who did what “had” to be done, no matter the cost. Their tools ran the gamut from modern military hardware to outright torture to obscene status. These things made them special and deserving and “real.” That was the most important part: a thin veneer of authenticity. We were implicitly asked to adore the world’s most dangerous and powerful men as normal but never average, as both Goliath and David. As “blue collar billionaires.” Thus a hero who regularly boasts of his honest street cred, shrugs off point blank rocket attacks, leads a rampage backed by his own chart-topping hits, and enjoys the kind of sociopathy and monomania you associate more with Patrick Bateman than idolized stars. Even if Fifty does absolutely nothing heroic and is basically pure evil, he’s not far off from the super spy or Navy SEAL who acted in our stead in these trying times.

Image: Source Gaming. The storefront for buying lewder and meaner taunts. This is a game of unbelievable shamelessness, and thank heaven for it.

I’m reading more into this than the text provides, but I’m allowed. Because the 2000s weren’t just a time where video games explored online play and high definition. It was a culture of globalization, interactivity, terror, imperialism, mendacity, confusion, surveillance, information overload, and a constant bubbling chaos. Shows like 24, movies like The Bourne Identity, and albums like Fifty’s weren’t just standalone products. They were reactors and engines of a culture where seemingly anything could happen as the world seemed to inch closer and closer to the brink. Maybe this game came out at the tail end of such a decade, and maybe it was a flop, but it’s a flop that could only exist because for several years in this country, every radio station played “In Da Club” on repeat and every high school playground had a teenager shouting “G-G-G-G-G-G-Unit!” Fiddy sold himself to America on being what America wanted to be, and that is slightly sobering.

Beyond its adding the phrase “diamond encrusted skull” to the gamer lexicon, the most notable thing about Blood on the Sand is that it was somehow not only not the most embarrassing story for 50 Cent, but something almost positive in a half decade that all but destroyed him. When G-Unit dissolved, he trashed Yayo and Banks’ artistic contributions to the press. He was the primary creative figure behind the absurd Before I Self Destruct and All Things Fall Apart, dramas eviscerated by the few critics who bothered seeing them. A beef with Rick Ross backfired, more so than his one with West. And one aspect of that feud—that Jackson leaked a sex tape of Ross’ then-girlfriend to humiliate his rival—cost him $32 million in court. In 2015, he filed for bankruptcy. Amid all that, a stupid game that got better reviews than his first, successful, on brand game was… almost a highlight. Its financial failure almost certainly had no impact on him. Merely symbolic of his fall, and yet more palatable than anything he was doing.

Image: Source Gaming. The result of driving your car over the “big-ass ramp,” one of the first things that grabbed gamers’ attention. It’s very charming in its jankiness.

Today, Jackson is doing much better. He got a Primetime Emmy for his Super Bowl LVI halftime show, but he’s largely transitioned to being a successful TV producer and one of the main forces of the Starz network’s Power franchise. He’s still awful: deeply sexist, homophobic, and he assaulted a teenage janitor in 2016. Last I heard he was smugly crowing about the legal troubles surrounding his old rival Diddy, something that’s beyond ghoulish given the circumstances. But that cold fixation on power is doing him better than it probably should. The same cannot be said for Swordfish Studios, which was acquired by Codemasters the year before this game came out and shut down the year after. This is a tragically common industry trope, where studios get an established property, do the brunt of the work, and get the brunt of the pain. Beyond forcing them to program those asinine helicopter sections, Fifty was only involved as an actor and composer, so I don’t blame him for problems with the marketing or the inherent hurdle of selling this kind of product. I can blame him for plenty else.

And I ultimately don’t think this game could have succeeded in 2009 or any year since. Ironically, what makes it good, like the goofy tone and arcadey design, probably damned it. People looked at it and not unfairly saw shovelware out of step with the times. The idea of a game as the extension of a celebrity brand, something that was easier to sell when the market was smaller, was suddenly in a rapidly changing landscape. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood was an early trendsetter for live service design, you still have dreck based on stuff like Ryan’s World, and sports games with real athletes are a tradition, but this kind of product—something shameless, dumb, modest, but well made—can no longer come with an A-list star. If a celeb wants to be in a game, they can have a Fornite crossover or inexplicably make the end credits theme for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, or just stream themselves playing something they like. Conversely, solid “Double-A” games like this one are frustratingly rare and don’t have money to spend on big names. So in that sense, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is special amongst the entries of “Gun Metal Gaming,” as it feels the most like an artifact. Its budget, its size, its star: all things that cannot exist in concert now and, as it turns out, couldn’t then either. That Microsoft went out of their way to give it backwards compatibility is surprising, if a testament to its legacy. A legacy of ego, joyous stupidity, surprisingly technical skill, and that diamond encrusted skull. We shall never see its kind again.