Coming off the success of their album A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2003, the British band Coldplay took some downtime and all of the members of the band quickly became addicted to video games, in addition to starting families and getting older.

When the band reconvened to begin recording a new album, Chris Martin in particular found himself bored with the band’s sweeping song structures and asked his bandmates if they would rather design a video game.

They did.

Planned as a spiritual successor to the 1982 Atari game Journey Escape, Coldplay Escape II would have been an homage to the original game, with digitized heads of the members of Coldplay stuck on cartoon bodies having band adventures.

The mini-games in Escape II would have featured a Paparazzi-dodging game in which Chris Martin had to shop for baby bottles while escaping photographers, a dialogue-tree game in which members of the band would explain politely to groupies that they’re not into group sex and a music business simulator in which the band puts out a single for free on the Internet. The end goal of the game would have been to escape the music industry entirely in a biodiesel-fueled van that would leave virtually no carbon footprint whatsoever. The last stage before reaching the van was to be a rhythm game in which the player tried to simultaneously sound like U2 while trying to sound as if they were trying to sound like U2.

Ironically, the band shelved the idea for the game when they found out (erroneously, it turned out) that U2 was working on a video game called How To Dismantle An Alien-Infested Marine Base on Mars. They instead went back to recording music, eventually releasing an album called Viva La Vida.