TAG
#chiptune
0 reviews · 7 essays
Related essays
Soundtrack: Minit — the sound that gave up on stillness to keep pace with sixty seconds
Minit resets you to zero every sixty seconds, cursed sword and all. Composer Jukio Kallio originally imagined something quiet and ambient, then realized a hard time limit woven into the gameplay wouldn't allow it, and rethought the whole approach. The game's hidden jukebox recostumes one melody into nine genres, from country to black metal. Doremi listens for how the sixty-second panic and the music's tempo line up.
Soundtrack: La-Mulana — sounding out a past that never existed, in 8-bit memory
La-Mulana scores a fake ancient civilization with the memory of an 8-bit computer that, in this exact form, never existed either. Composed by Takumi Naramura and Houryū Samejima, Doremi draws on the developers' own 2009 blog Q&A and Wikipedia to hear why the game's hardest puzzles never wear out their welcome — and why one fan-favorite track had to be quietly rewritten.
Soundtrack: Human Resource Machine — the quiet office, built from a single synth
The music Kyle Gabler wrote for Human Resource Machine is made almost entirely from a single free soft synth, Synth1. Languid office jazz, tiny loops that turn over in a dozen seconds in-game, the same themes stretched out on the album — I, Doremi, black coffee in hand, take apart a design born of constraint through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Void Stranger — a symphony built from poor sound sources, echoing in a monochrome labyrinth
The music of the monochrome Sokoban labyrinth Void Stranger conjures both grandeur and unease using nothing but stock MIDI sounds and chip waveforms. Composer Eero Lahtinen built it around one idea: that you shouldn't get sick of the same loop while stuck on a puzzle. Doremi reads its repeat-proof writing and its patient drones from a composer's chair.
Soundtrack: FEZ — the music that carried 8-bit into the present
The music Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace) wrote for FEZ keeps the vocabulary of chiptune, yet sands its corners down with reverb and bitcrushing and carries it into the spaciousness of New Age. Dynamic scoring that shifts with altitude and time of day, plus a trick where images are hidden in the spectrogram so that the sound itself becomes a puzzle. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can bring back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Unpacking — How to place a sound without overplaying it
The music Jeff van Dyck wrote for Unpacking layers acoustic guitar and piano over chiptune with its corners sanded off, and somehow it never overplays. In a puzzle with no failure and no timer, what does the music do, and what does it refuse to do? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Baba Is You — A small loop that never scolds you for being wrong
The music of Baba Is You is chiptune written in a tracker (OpenMPT) by Arvi 'Hempuli' Teikari, who made the entire game alone. It is a game you retry hundreds of times, yet the music announces neither victory nor defeat — it just keeps spinning a bright little loop. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this 'music that never scolds' keeps trial-and-error feeling light, through a lens you can take home to your own writing.
