Chronillogical

Last week I spent some time putting together an 8track mix of some of my favorite ending themes from var­i­ous video games. (You can tell from the songs I selected that I was raised in the noble tra­di­tion of Nin­tendo fan­boy­ism.) In the process of track­ing down the tracks for that mix, I redis­cov­ered my fond­ness for chip­tunes. Since John and I are both fans of the genre, I fig­ured I’d share a few of our favorite resources for find­ing chip­tunes and clas­sic video game music online.

First, for those of you unfa­mil­iar with the genre: chip­tunes are orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions made using sound chips from clas­sic gaming hard­ware. If you have ever played an NES or Game Boy, you have some idea of what this sounds like. But unlike clas­sic game music, modern chip­tunes are not back­ing tracks for another medium—they are meant to be lis­tened to on their own, as other song you might find on your iPod/Zune/media player of choice.¹ Because modern chip­tune com­posers don’t have to worry about stuff­ing their music onto some tiny corner of an already-​miniscule gaming car­tridge, their tracks tend to be more lay­ered and com­plex than the game music you remem­ber from the 80s and 90s. Anyway, I could wax poetic about the virtues of chip­tunes for quite a while—but that’s nowhere near as good as lis­ten­ing for your­self. So onto the links!

First on the list is 8bitpeoples, a col­lec­tive of extremely tal­ented chip­tune artists. If you check out their site, you’ll want to head imme­di­ately over to the discog­ra­phy sec­tion, where they have nearly 100 EPs freely avail­able for down­load. It is a ver­i­ta­ble smörgåsbord—except instead of breads and cold fish there are hun­dreds of amaz­ing songs.

From there we move on to 8bitcollective, a com­mu­nity where users can post tracks they’ve cre­ated and dis­cuss chip­tunes with other mem­bers. There’s a metic butt-​ton of stuff there, and new songs are being added all the time. In any case, any com­mu­nity where there’s an epic space-battle going on between two of the mem­bers is a winner in my book.

And hey, wouldn’t you know it? Some­one made a doc­u­men­tary about chip­tunes! I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks pretty interesting.

If you’re inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to some of the orig­i­nal game tunes that you remem­ber grow­ing up to, you’d do well to check out the game music archive at Zophar’s Domain. If you remem­ber play­ing it for the NES, they have it. If you remem­ber play­ing it before 1994, they have it. They have every­thing. They even have Dynowarz: Destruc­tion of Spondy­lus. Now, play­ing the files can be a bit tricky—there are Winamp plug-​ins for each of the file­types on the site, but not every­one has Winamp. If you’re on a Mac, I’ve had good expe­ri­ences with Richard Bannister’s Audio Over­load and would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend it. (I’ve had trou­ble with it on Linux, though; your mileage may vary.)

Finally, no post per­tain­ing to game music would be com­plete with­out a link to Over­Clocked Remix. Over­Clocked Remix (or OCR for short) is a site fea­tur­ing thou­sands of songs cre­ated by musi­cians who rearrange, rein­ter­pret, and remix music from video games (any era, from the Atari to modern “next-gen” sys­tems). Admit­tedly it’s not a chip­tune site, but it’s a huge land­mark for anyone inter­ested in game music. Another good place to go for re-​imagined video game music is VGMix.

If there are any good chip­tune (or game music) links you think I missed, let me know about ‘em in the comments!

¹ This is in no way meant to imply that clas­sic game music shouldn’t be lis­tened to on its own. I have enor­mous respect for the medium. Unre­pen­tant nerd that I am, I reg­u­larly listen to game tunes inde­pen­dently of the games they were meant to accom­pany.