Nintendo Stylee

So the lovely and talented Mark Marianelli (AKA MWizzle, MCM, DJ Marky Mark, Merry Markolous the Markonious One) over at 6AM Comics is working on a flash game called Turble and publishing it using a similar concept to microsong, putting up the pieces as he go's along. When we were talking the other day he asked me to write some music for it and I said, "obiviously."

The game itself is an old school Nintendo style side scroller. You can jump and shoot at baddies and the pieces he has up so far are very fun to play.

The NES style of gameplay inspired me to think write some of the 8 bit/chiptune style music that's so popular with all the kids and this is what I came up with after about a half an hour:



As I tend to do with concepts, this is all done in Reason. It really makes a great sketch pad for coming up with ideas. In fact, this one is so simple I made everything using built in Reason components with no external samples so I'll post the .rnp file up here as well if anyone wants to check it out and play with it. All the percussion and the main bass line are SubTractor synths run through Scream distortion modules set to digital and tuned for fair amounts of aliasing and bit reductions. The two melody lines are NN19 samplers(for extra aliasing) just playing square waves.

I think as the track progresses I'll break out of the pure chiptune style for some more fun effects (after all it is 2009). However, for now I wanted to go Crazy Nintendo Stylee.

Dan

UPDATE:

Mark's got a post over there on his blog with an earlier version of the track that I sent him as well as some new badguys he's drawn up. Find it here.