Earlier this week Memphis rapper Juicy J started streaming his forthcoming solo album, Stay Trippy, on his site via a bandz-centric flash video game. Fans toss bills (and sometimes paint) at strippers sliding down poles to keep them from hitting the floor and to unlock all the songs off Stay Trippy. It’s kind of like the age-old game “the floor is lava,” where kids find ways to trapeze around a room using every imaginable object that will keep their feet off the ground, but this has more strippers and less innocence. Oh, and the game is called Stay Strippy.
Stay Strippy is simple and seriously addictive, and within a few minutes of playing the game I had a pretty good idea of who was behind it: Eyes & Ears Entertainment, a local digital marketing company that excels at creating interactive programs to help musicians promote their latest album or song. The folks at Eyes & Ears have done some great work for artists such as Manchester Orchestra and Willie Nelson, and last year they crafted a hell of a game for Big Freedia, which riffs on Dance Dance Revolution and the sissy-bounce star’s hyperactive and interactive booty-shaking live shows. (The Big Freedia Booty Battle game is what first alerted me to the company’s work, and it gave me the opportunity to use the phrase “Azz Azz Azz” in a profile on Eyes & Ears for my old Forbes blog.)
Once I noticed Eyes & Ears were behind Stay Strippy, I e-mailed cofounder Brian Schopfel for some background on the game. “We had originally launched a strip-club game for Juicy surrounding his single ‘Bandz a Make Her Dance’ on Cyber Monday of 2012. For the upcoming LP release, we thought it fitting to revamp the game,” he says. Eyes & Ears updated the design of the original Bandz game and added in a few more elements, including an option to switch from throwing bills at strippers to tossing paint, which is a riff on the artwork for Stay Trippy. But why keep reading about Stay Strippy when you can play it? Head to Juicy J’s site to see what it’s all about, and if you’re looking for something different head over to Okkervil River’s site for the forthcoming The Silver Gymnasium—it’s an RPG to help promote the album, made, of course, by Eyes & Ears.