In the city that was Ground Zero for rave culture, video game Toronto Rave puts you at the centre of the party

No one — no one sane, at least — gets into the tricky business of rave promotion thinking they’re going to strike it rich.

No, generally speaking, one gets into the tricky business of rave promotion and, rather more crucially, stays in the tricky business of rave promotion mainly for the love of the game.

A lot of moving parts have to come precisely together behind the curtain to pull off a perfect party and, when they don’t, things can go disastrously sideways in a hurry. But while it’s often a white-knuckled thrill ride getting to that satisfying point where you finally get the right performers and the right gear into the right room with the right music and the right decor and the right crowd and the right costumes and the right vibe so that it all seems magical and effortless to everyone dancing themselves delightedly senseless until sunup, the addictive thrill of that ride — that game — is exactly what makes you want to do it all again.

So why not turn that game into an actual … game?

Aaron Plummer — a GTA DJ/producer, underground rave promoter and admitted computer geek who throws drum-’n’-bass, hardcore and dubstep parties under the Toronto Rave banner by night but helps his father run Pickering’s United Computers by day — had such an epiphany during an idle moment in his home studio. While contemplating heaps of video games and the glossy Toronto DnB and Toronto Hardcore annuals he’s published over the past couple of years to commemorate the previous season’s events, he thought: Why not turn his adventures staging semiclandestine events in secret locations across Toronto into an actual video game?

The original rave experience involved a lot of sneaking into abandoned warehouses and out-of-the-way properties, dodging the cops and navigating throngs of partygoers to undisclosed locations, which is rather perfect fodder for a game. And Plummer, whose crew memorably managed to pull off a 500-strong hardcore rave in Christie Pits in May 2022 right under the noses of Toronto authorities, is no stranger to such devious nocturnal activities.

“Not a lot of people understand the tasks that come with putting together with a party,” said Plummer, better known as drum-’n’-bass DJ ACE and his hard-tech alter ego Crushenhaus. “People just show up and it’s, like, ‘Hey, this is fun!’ But someone has to make sure everything is OK. You don’t know how many people are coming so you’ve gotta plan for that. Someone has to get the CDJs (music players) there. Someone has to clean up afterwards. It’s literally such a multi-tasking position to have.

“I was in my studio holding my old games and these magazines at the same time and I was, like, ‘Wait, this could happen.’ I thought it would be funny, but then I actually made a proof-of-concept poster and the more I kept thinking about it, it just made more and more sense.”

“Toronto Rave: The Game” is a passing fancy no more. A Beta 1.0 version, in which ACE breaks into Toronto City Hall with the aid of his all-seeing hacker comrade Eve to unleash some fierce beats in the council chambers, supplied by Plummer himself, went up online a couple of weekends ago and has already received more than 250 downloads and 400-plus sign-ups to play.

The Beta 2.0 game will soon follow. It complements the “Grand Theft Auto”-esque open-world stealth concept of the 1.0 version with rhythmic musical play that allows you to toy around à la “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Bandwidth” with electronic music by ACE/Crushenhaus and fellow Toronto Rave mainstays TyriqueOrDie, Angelphroot, Ms. GothicFish and 666.pastel. First-time game designer Plummer hopes to have the finished product completed in 2025.

For the moment, “it’s just a little homemade thing,” but the goal is to eventually take it online with a chat component akin to Habbo Hotel that allows ravers to log in with custom characters and mingle in cyberspace when they’re not mingling at actual raves, “where it’s just fun being on there and you don’t even have to go on missions or play music.” Accompanied at all times, of course, by an entirely made-in-Toronto electro-soundtrack.

“Honestly, it’s already passed my goal,” said Plummer. “I thought it would be cool if only 10 people were to care about it. And now that there’s a couple hundred, this game is already a success for me because I was only doing it for fun to begin with.

“But not only that: growing up I was really inspired by ‘Guitar Hero’ and games like that. That game opened the door for so many musicians. So I hope the game eventually does that sort of thing for electronic music.”

As fun as it is to fritter away a couple of hours ducking security guards in City Hall and poking around for Easter eggs in the parking garage and subway-tunnel catacombs before lighting the place up with a bang — not to mention seeing a stylized Toronto skyline gracing a video game — there’s also a reverence for this city’s proud rave history driving Plummer’s ambitions.

At 26, he’s too young to have experienced Toronto’s original rave wave himself, but he has a deep reverence for the scene’s history and the players who made it happen. This town was Ground Zero for rave culture in North America during the 1990s and early 2000s, until the scene got so big that (yes) City Hall tried to outlaw it in a fit of moral panic over drugs and (non-existent) guns at parties after a couple of unfortunate overdose incidents. The local rave community was moved to stage a massive protest in Nathan Phillips Square dubbed iDance, which — ahem — a certain young raver and music writer might have even convinced the Toronto Star to sponsor at the time.

So while Plummer would love “Toronto Rave: The Game” to be a wild fantasy ride through Toronto in which one can explore underground nightlife in spaces both real and imaginary, hear some sick beats and maybe crash a helicopter into the CN Tower every now and then, he’d also like to rope in some of the local scene’s bricklayers to contribute music and characters: such local-legend DJs, promoters and producers as Mark Oliver, Marcus Visionary, Anabolic Frolic and deadmau5, for instance, or perhaps even the late Don “Dr. Trance” Berns.

“I see pictures from the 2000s all the time of Science Centre raves and CN Tower raves, and this or that 1,000-person rave, and holy s–t!” enthused Plummer. “And that’s what’s missing, those actual Toronto legends who did this way before I did it. So, hopefully, it gets to those people and they can be a part of it because I’m just a small part of Toronto. But even though there was this golden age then, we have these new artists and new people now who are doing stuff that’s interesting and the scene’s really changed. So putting all of those things into one game is definitely something that I think would be fun.

“Also, I have some really cool missions. I don’t want to give too much away.”

“Toronto Rave: The Game” already has a preliminary stamp of approval from Anabolic Frolic, at least.

The renowned happy-hardcore DJ and author of 2019’s unguarded memoir “Requiem for My Rave: The Story of Anabolic Frolic, Happy Hardcore and Hullabaloo!” is delighted that the local rave legacy has inspired a next-gen scene, let alone a video game. Probably not least because he and his wife and two teenage sons have an entire pinball arcade in their North York basement, but regardless: he’d be down with appearing in the game.

“I would love it,” said Frolic, known to friends and family as Chris Frolic (né Samojlenko). “This is a passion project and it seems like it’s in good fun and there’s a reverence for this ‘golden age,’ so all of this sounds good to me. This is how I want to contribute these days. I just want to be seen as this ‘OG’ and this elder statesman and someone who’s lived it, so I think this is all cool.”

Frolic also sees a heartening consistency between the original DIY rave ethos and self-taught programmer Plummer’s lack of real financial ambition for the game.

“If I were to put on parties today, I’d be coming at it from a totally different perspective of making sure I made money. Whereas back then, it was just making sure that the party was f–king awesome. That was number one, right? And then money was a byproduct,” he said. “And if this guy is self-taught and learning how to do this as he’s doing it, that’s the spirit, right? That is the original rave spirit: DIY.

“And I care about legacy. That was the big motivation for getting my book done. This is a forgotten slice of a reasonably important subculture that was not documented as well as we would have liked. So it’s cool that there’s another opportunity here to reveal a little slice of that forgotten history.”