Zef is a Chiptune artist from Saskatchewan, Canada. His debut release was released through NoiseChannel.org. Didn’t Mother Teach You to Share? by Zef I’m going to be talking about the chipmusic scene, and one thing in particular that makes it very unique. In chipscene, artists make music, perform shows, and...
My netlabel GameChops is hosting it’s first remix contest for Powerglove, the tune Benjamin Briggs and I did together. Here’s your chance to take this brand new track and edit, change, mix and wreck it in whichever way you see fit! Are you an audio nerd who just likes listening to stems? [I am, had to ask :] Well...
April 3rd, 2012 marks a momentous day for me. It’s the launch of my not-for-profit internet record label GameChops. Over the last few years of DJing VGM and making beats I’ve met a lot of great people and learned a tremendous amount about production, performance, and making music a greater part of my life. With...
It’s my birthday! To celebrate, I’m releasing a very special chiptune! It’s a collaboration with An0va, an all-gameboy cover of EDM producer and performer Deadmau5! This is an extra exciting track for me, as it is an 100% legal cover thanks to mechanical licensing. It is also (by far) the longest I have spent...
Chicago based MyLifeIsPixels brings us a free EP of chiptunes today. Robotic Uprising is a varied and expressive release with twelve tracks, ranging from peaceful 8-bit to dirty chipdub. Using FL Studio and Plogue’s Chipsounds, MyLifeIsPixels has crafted a unique and diverse album worth repeated listens. Check it out and download it for free from Bandcamp or Soundcloud!
Check out MyLifeIsPixels on Soundcloud and Facebook
Rare is a website this cool. The JavaScript GameBoy Color Game Center is a web-based GBC emulator that hosts a handful of awesome GameBoy Color Games and requires no download to play. Using HTML5 and JIT engines this site offers a desktop-like emulation experience right inside your browser window. It even includes the LSDj demo, for browser-based chiptuning. Awesome.
The JavaScript GameBoy Color Game Center
I love video game music and chiptunes. I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly shocking news to anybody at this point. ;3 That said not all too long ago, just a little bit before MAGFest X I think, I discovered a fairly unique combination of the two. Sorta. To be a little bit more specific:
It’s not technically a soundtrack to a video game, either from old or new platforms; there’s no actual game associated with this album. What it is is a collection of all “old school”, chiptune, 8bit, retro, etc. styled completely original compositions written as an homage by the artist to his favorite video games. More or less Daniel “Captain Awesome” Capo (which is the very fitting nickname that I just now gave him ;3 ) took everything that he loved, all of the wonderful nostalgia and artistry from his favorite video games and their soundtracks, and wrote his own damn album/soundtrack in tribute to such.
DO YOU NOT REALIZE JUST HOW COMPLETELY F**CKING AWESOME THAT CONCEPT IS?!?!!?!? :O :O :O
Also, Daniel has an EXTRAORDINARILY beautiful and brand spanking new track on the upcoming Chiptunes = WIN \m|♥|m/compilation, so there’s yet another reason for you to check that chippy goodness out when it releases! ;D
This was a game that was originally released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II computers in October of 1987. After the original printing, it was ported to other computer systems of the era, such as the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS based systems. In 1990, the game was ported to only a single gaming console, the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
It was a game that featured flying cars. Radioactive pools. Long, empty dungeons. Crazy wanted posters. Intergalactic communication. A mysterious package. A medical family. Three guys that will publish anything. Houseplants that burped after drinking cans of Pepsi. Slimey meteors. Severed tentacles that wanted to become rock stars. And if that wasn’t enough for you, microwaved hamsters.
For those of you out there that don’t know that I am talking about “Maniac Mansion”, you really need to “stop being a tuna head”. I can remember buying my copy of the game at the now defunct “Child World”. Buying games there was quite awkward. You had to get a slip of paper from the aisle that had the video game library, take the ticket to the cashier, pay for the game, and then go to the back of the store to pick the game up at what looked like a bank teller in a bad neighborhood. Kind of like how when CD’s first came to be, when they were always in that locked glass case in the back of the record store. I guess they were considered “premium” purchases back in the day. But regardless, nothing was better than tearing open the package in the car and reading the manual while I was the passenger in life, on the long trip home.
But I’m getting off topic here. Maniac Mansion was one of many games that I had purchased with my hard earned allowance money, but it was also one of the few that I had purchased solely based on the box art and testimony only. The front of the box, with its surfer guy, flashlight ghosting, and the typical big 80s hair. Complete with that strange face in the middle, that really cool looking mansion, and the full moon. The back of the box, with the statement, “Why is there a chainsaw in the kitchen?” As the 80s ad used to go, “Inquiring minds want to know. *I* Want to know!”
I start the game up with what had to be one of the most amazing video game theme songs that I hadn’t heard since Zelda II, which is one of my all time favorite video game soundtracks. Then with the title screen scrolling the words “Maniac Mansion” with the heart stabbed at the end, it was a homage already to everything that I loved: Bad B-Horror movies. I just knew at that point that it was going to be good.
Maniac Mansion takes place in the house of the Edison’s. Dr. Fred, Nurse Edna, and their son, Weird Ed make up the human-like aspect of the household, but add to that purple and green tentacles, and you have one big happy family! “20 years ago today”, a meteor crashed near the Edison mansion. The meteor took complete control over the family, which in turn, caused Dr. Fred to begin sucking the pretty brains out of other humans for experimental use. Dave, the main playable character in the game, believes that he saw his girlfriend, Sandy, get abducted to the mansion, and fears her safety. It’s up to Dave and two friends (of your choice) to enter the mansion and save her.
Each of the other characters that you can pick have a special talent or ability that will help you with the game. Examples of special traits include being able to repair radio and telephone equipment, playing musical instruments, or being excellent writers. The combination of characters that the player selects will determine not only the order that the game is played, but will also effect the possible endings, both positive and negative.
Once you enter the mansion, is when the real fun occurs. Using an interface called SCUMM (seriously), you select from options such as “Open”, “Go To”, “Use…With”, and others. It makes it feel like the old text adventures where you had to type out long commands and do a lot of reading, but the interface makes it easier, and of course, there’s graphics involved. I always had a thing for these kind of adventure games, because for the most part, you could take your time. (Unless of course you go straight for the kitchen… “Hello Dearie!”)
The object of the game is to use your special talents and abilities, and try to find and rescue Sandy. As weird as it sounds, to do that, you need to do some pretty strange things. Like getting to the attic by feeding Chuck a Pepsi. (Did I mention Chuck is a plant?) Or, feeding a tentacle a bowl of wax fruit. Or, temporarily emptying out a radioactive pool. Even doing something REALLY crazy like trying to set up a new band, or by writing a best selling novel! But don’t give a certain person their beloved pet after microwaving it, or it’s curtains for you.
The game is mostly a trial and error style of game unless you have a cheat guide, or watch walkthroughs on Youtube, but you’re not that kind of player, right? Besides, playing the game a few times has a very nice benefit, other than being a lot of fun. See, one cool aspect of the game is the multiple types of endings. Of course, in today’s games, it’s very common to have endings happen based on your input throughout the game. But in 1987, this was something very new. For instance, you can save Sandy, but get the Slimy meteor a record contract. Or, you can save Sandy, and have the meteor be arrested during a live intergalactic television broadcast. But make a few wrong moves, and you can also cause an atomic meltdown that causes “everything within a 5 mile radius” to be infected. (Really? Just 5 miles? Maybe those “Duck & Cover” videos from the 50s were right!)
With this a trial and error game, and with many different combinations of characters that you can play as, it really gives the game a fantastic replay value. Which for any generation of gaming, if you’re going to pork out $50 on a video game, replay value is an absolute must in my opinion. I’ve personally only seen about 3 different endings in the many years that I’ve played the game, but I know there are quite a few more. (Cause, you know. I *am* that kind of player!) And don’t feel that you have the finish the game in a single sitting: The cartridge uses a battery save state instead of a tedious password system. After all, games are supposed to be fun, not data entry! Kudos to Jaleco! All in all, this is definitely a game that should be added to everyone’s NES collection. I’m sure once you give it a play, even for just a few minutes, you’ll be hooked on the randomness, that is, the Maniac Mansion.
Hey there! I rare get excited enough about functionality upgrades to make a post, but I’m really amp’d about this one. We’ve incorporated DISQUS (pronounced Discuss), to make commenting on VideoGameDJ.com better and easier than ever. Now, you can visit any article’s page and quickly post comments via your twitter, facebook, or a number of other accounts. You can, of course, still sign up for a VideoGameDJ account, but now you won’t be required to post comments and participate in conversations. Hooray!
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Chiptune funk fusion at its finest, Joshua Morse brings us Waveform 3, an album that defies my ability to put it into words.
A distinct chiptune atmosphere surrounds each neatly arranged and thoughtfully instrumented piece. I particularly love Joshua’s use of delay, taking traditional chiptune sounds and adding a depth and and breadth that wouldn’t have been possible through old hardware alone. A unique album most certainly worth a listen, and definintly worth a download at name-your-own-price.
Follow Joshua Morse on Twitter and Facebook.
I’m going to be talking about the chipmusic scene, and one thing in particular that makes it very unique. In chipscene, artists make music, perform shows, and distribute albums just like in any other music scene, however chipmusic artists exhibit one major difference that distinguishes them from most of the music industry: In the majority of cases; chipmusic artists are doing these things for free.
For those who aren’t familiar with chipmusic already; jump on over here and pick up a quick background on it. For some reason chip artists are breaking the mould and they’re giving away perfectly good music when they could be making a profit on it; I believe there are several compounding reasons for this phenomenon.
Firstly; chipmusic is a rather small niche of the music market (though it’s growing in popularity quite quickly) that is to say, it had humble beginnings. It started off as people simply messing around with old hardware to see what new things they could do with it. Onlookers started paying attention and joining in themselves. Since its very beginnings chipscene has been about spreading interest in this interesting type of music. There were no means for early artists to make a career out of this music, and so the majority of the early scene was established primarily by hobbyists; people who did this sort of thing for fun. Since this scene was founded on the premise of having fun rather than making money it set a foundation that has carried on for years. The precedent this foundation set has carried on the principle, new artists entering the scene can see that those are already established in the scene are giving away their music for free and are actively working towards making chipmusic a community thing. Seeing that this is the way the scene works, new artists adopt these principles as their own.
One other possible contributor is that most of the materials involved in making chipmusic are free or very inexpensive. Most people have access to at least one old gameboy or NES, and most of the early software for making chipmusic was created by the musicians themselves and was given out freely. As it stands, most new chipmusic artists can get started for next to nothing.
All of these things helped to form chipmusic into the community that it is today. In this community you find the pros helping out those who are just starting, you see artists sharing tips amongst those who in any other context would have been their direct competition, and you see artists teaming up to use their music for the common good in compilations such as Chip In: Japan!.
The fans love it too of course, they get a lot of their music for free, but they also become willing to support their favourite artists through “pay what you want” releases. I’m certainly not saying that everyone needs to give out their music for free, what people do with their own music is their business, but what’s important here is that the precedent stay strong, that new artists can see that this isn’t a dog eat dog scene, but that it is a fostering community of artists helping each other to produce better music.
I’m Chris Penner, but I go by the alias Zef, and I encourage you to share this blog post around, and, if you’re an artist, to begin to share your own music for free too. To support this principle I’m releasing my new album Blackout (and all the source files) as a pay what you want download, grab it for free if you like, or donate a bit of cash which I’ll be lending through kiva.org, a wonderful organization that helps people in third-world countries get back on their feet; I highly recommend you check them out! In fact, I’ve made a chipmusic team for chipmusicians and fans alike to show the world how much they care; join up and start lending HERE. Just remember that the chipscene is about more than just music, it’s a community.