Game Recreates Lost Oakland Music Scene

New life is being breathed into a long-lost Oakland music scene in the form of a virtual reality game now under development by UC Berkeley students aiming to revive the cultural identity of the area.

For the past two years, students in the Graduate School of Journalism have been working with graduate students in the architecture department to create a three-dimensional rendition of Oakland’s vibrant Seventh Street jazz and blues club scene of the 1940s and ’50s.

The project has been under development by the students for the past three semesters and will continue to be worked on over the next two semesters in anticipation of a possible public release in the spring or summer of next year, said Paul Grabowicz, coordinator of the New Media Program at the journalism school.

Grabowicz said the game, which will be accessible via the Internet, is focused on approximately eight blocks of Seventh street and one block on either side of it.

“The anchor of it was this set of jazz and blues clubs right along Seventh Street where musicians from all over the country would come to play,” he said.

Grabowicz also said players will be able to log on to the game, adopt a character, and walk around the virtually reconstructed Seventh Street area while speaking with other players and well-known figures of the day, such as Charles “Raincoat” Jones and club owner Slim Jenkins.

They will also be provided with tasks that include getting their character’s music recorded, playing at a local venue and halting a series of harmful redevelopment schemes like the ones that eventually doomed the real-life Seventh Street scene decades ago, he said.

The journalism students have been researching the history of the site and telling the story for the project while the architecture students have focused on building the physical context of the game, Grabowicz said.

The architecture students are using photographs collected by the journalism students to recreate the area accurately, said architecture professor Yehuda Kalay.

“We are modeling the physical context (to look) the way that area looked 50 years ago,” he said.

Grabowicz said the project aims specifically to interest two groups.

“The first is the people in Oakland who remember the jazz and blues club scene. We’re trying to recreate that for them,” Grabowicz said. “(The other is) the people who live in West Oakland now, we’re hoping the game will be useful to them. It will show them what the city was like when it was incredibly vibrant.”

Students who worked on the game said it was not only a unique opportunity to undertake a interdisciplinary project, but also that the product represents a new method of storytelling and teaching history.

“When complete, this project is going to be something that allows the community to re-embrace its past. It also gives people not familiar with the area an opportunity to see what it was like back in its heyday,” said Tara Cuslidge, a graduate student in the journalism school.

Kalay said the game represents a unique achievement for the Center for New Media, a campuswide initiative that facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration.

The center allowed two professors to come together to form a project involving both architecture and journalism that probably would not have existed otherwise, he said.

The project has been cosponsored by the Oakland Post and received a grant from the Knight Foundation, Grabowicz said.

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