"Japanime," or "The Greatest Video Game Ever Made"

It’s finally time to reveal another track from my forthcoming album! This will premiere Friday, 6-21, at 12:00 PM. If you missed the premiere, the link below should still take you to the video!

I titled this song “Japanime,” because it sounded like it would work well as the soundtrack to an anime. That title stuck throughout the production process, but later I conceived the idea of a music video that paid tribute to classic PC games from the 80’s and 90’s and thought about changing the name to “The Greatest Video Game Ever Made (tribute)” - an homage to Tenacious D, obviously. However, in the end I couldn’t make up my mind, so you get two titles.

I’m always trying to think about ways to make an interesting music video on a budget. Combining other personal interests with my music is deeply satisfying, and the retro 486 project that I undertook earlier in the year seemed to offer a perfect opportunity. This video is a love letter to the video games of my childhood. I hope you enjoy it!

The 486 featured in the video is interesting enough to write an entire blog post on. It’s a Gateway P4D-100 from 1994. It intrigued me because the seller had replaced the Dallas RTC already, the interior shots showed everything in excellent condition, it booted into DOS, and it had a PCI bus - which was uncommon for a Socket 3 system. It came to me with 8mb of RAM, a Dimond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro (PCI, 4mb VRAM, S3 Virge-based video card), some kind of cheap and generic OPL-emulating sound card, a 2x CD-ROM drive by NEC (One of the very first 2x models), a 3Com Ethernet card, and a 333mb WD HDD, 3.5” floppy. Over several months I upgraded it to 16mb of FPM RAM, a proper Sound Blaster 16 (Model CT2290, one of the best revisions), an 8x CD-ROM, a CompactFlash-to-IDE controller that lets me use removable 2GB cards as drives, and an additional 1.6GB WD HDD.