Arctic Monkeys Made a Subtle Nintendo Reference in Their Track ‘The Car’

Arctic Monkeys’ most recent album seems to have included a reference to an obscure Nintendo DS city builder game.

As noted by GamesRadar and discovered by journalist Jordan Oloman on Twitter, in the final verse of Arctic Monkeys’ brand-new track ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’, which is featured on the band’s most recent album ‘The Car‘, the lyrics “The simulation cartridge for City Life ’09 / is pretty tricky to come by,” can be heard.

These lyrics make reference to the 2006 PC edition of ‘City Life’, an old city-building game on the Nintendo DS. The DS version, on the other hand, didn’t come out until 2009 and was exclusively available in Europe.

Someone on Genius seems to think that one of the lyrics from the new Arctic Monkeys album is a reference to a delisted Nintendo DS city builder game… https://t.co/jZkRHxnKv3 pic.twitter.com/VT75u1b78p

— Jordan Oloman (@JordanOloman) October 21, 2022

‘City Life’ performed poorly on Nintendo’s handheld console, despite being well-liked on the PC and receiving two expansions following its release. 

In fact, copies of the DS version are hard to get in 2022, which is why the lyrics of ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’ mentions it. This is because Nintendo stopped producing its DS consoles in 2014 and later announced that it would stop selling DS and Wii U games on its online eShop in 2020.

—Silviya.Y