Ha! I've found it; this will be the most videogame related thread the non-videogame board will ever see!
I'm too tired to make a big openning post about the whole chiptune scene to start this thread off, but I'll keep posting stuff in here whenever some thing comes up and maybe this'll actually turn into more of a thread.
But just to start things off, some of my favourite artists and groups in the field are YMCK who I still think are probably the best chiptune creators out there outside of the people who actually did this stuff for games back in the NES days of our youths. Before they came out, a lot of chiptune bands were just Swedish and Japanese wankers who made lame Euro-dance sounding garbage that I couldn't listen to for more than a minute or so, tops. But then YMCK came out of no where and made what was essentially a J-pop album that consisted entirely of the NES sound chip and a Japanese girl singing in Japanese and broken English. You know how a lot of people used to say that German was the perfect language for industrial music? Well it turns out that a Japanese girl is the perfect vocal accompaniment for NES chiptunes.
Normally, I completely abhor J-pop as the pathetic final stage of the late 90s caucasian "otaku", but YMCK's
Family Music was something completely different. I mean, it was jpop, but with the NES as the only instument it took all of the gay, over the sappiness out of the sound and to be fair, YMCK's main composer seems to have a lot more of a Jazz influence going on. If you've never heard the album before and you grew up with the NES as your playmate, then you should really check it out.
So other guys I like are American groups that mix the NES in with their garage band guitars in a tasteful way like
Anamaguchi.
Bit Shifter has always been a big name in the genre since back when it was just dance fags doing it and for the longest time I hated him just like all those Swedes I rag on. But last year I saw him live at Blip Fest in NYC and he really won me over. His stuff doesn't have that videogame soundtrack sound that I love and mostly uses Gameboys which I have no nostagia for, but hearing him played really loud in a room full of fools dancing really makes you
get him better. It's just good to dance to. It worked on me anyway. I do still hate his whole holier than thou attitude where he goes on about how chiptunes has nothing to do with videogames and are about expession through intentionally restricted means. I mean, of course it's that, but don't act like people are lame if they like it because of a lifetime of being a gamer, you pretentious jackass.
But I digress, the reason I made this thread was cause I was listening to the first compilation (that's volume 1) that
this site ever put out. Most of the music on the compilations is actually old game soundtrack stuff rather than new compositions, but there's a track on Volume one by some Japanese guy called Naruto that was never put in a game and it really hit the spot for me.
