The game’s launch 20 years ago coincided with the rapper’s meteoric success with his album The Massacre. Here, the team that made the shooter reflect on how it all happened
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he rapper 50 Cent (real name Curtis Jackson) was inescapable back in 2005. There wasn’t a British classroom without a teenager wearing Jackson’s G-Unit clothing, while his catchy hits Candy Shop and In Da Club dominated the radio. The backstory of this Queens-born New Yorker – how he survived being shot nine times only to become one of the world’s biggest rappers – also made for compelling lore.
That year, 50 Cent sold more than a million copies in one week with his sophomore studio album, The Massacre. In a bid to cash in on this superstardom, his label Interscope Records planned a twin strategy: a Hollywood biopic (Get Rich or Die Tryin’) and a licensed video game, 50 Cent: Bulletproof – both to be released by November 2005. “I think the general public are going to be blown away by my game,” 50 Cent told the website IGN. “It feels more like an action film.”
British developer Genuine Games, previously responsible for a poorly received Fight Club tie-in, was tasked with creating Fiddy’s 128-bit era adventure. The problem was it only had 11 months to do it. “I remember we’d get to the office at 7am and wouldn’t leave until about 11pm,” recalls the game’s artist Han Randhawa. “We all lived on a diet of KFC. 50 Cent became my whole life. I even read up the doctor’s report from when he got shot, just so I could put bandages on his 3D character in the right places.”
