Vinyl is getting near-impossible to produce and ship; digital is a mess. CDs are – sorry, just not a good format.* Game Boy cartridges seem better than ever. And Remute makes them look and sound so damned good.
80s cool meets early 2000s Nintendo state of the art:
Okay, okay – you can even get this on 7″ vinyl if you want. But far better is the GBA edition – transparent blue, with protective case. And hey, Bandcamp, if you want to do something useful with that acquisition by Epic, maybe recognize this as a format. Creator Denis Karimani is left in the awkward position of listing the cartridge as vinyl, even though it isn’t.
Here’s what it is: a cartridge!
Sure, it’s novelty. But there is also every reason to think that unique physical editions are a way forward for music. Oddly enough, it’s been working well for games. Even in the age of subscriptions from the likes of Nintendo and Microsoft, many game developers are offering niche limited-run physical for collectors. Remute, for his part, even offers stuff at one of those suddenly-hot vendors, Strictly Limited Games. They carry both his music album carts for Sega Mega Drive (known as Genesis in the US) and SNES.
In addition to Remute’s cool-and-catchy music, you get these brilliant visuals:
Code (and video capturing) by HorstBaerbel https://github.com/HorstBaerbel
Graphics and animation by Blue G http://blueg.io/
Head to Bandcamp or straight to the source at the artist’s page:
https://remute.bandcamp.com/album/unity
Previously – N64! (now I am really eagerly awaiting the Dreamcast edition, even with my anti-CD, anti-optical stance)
*Hey, why am I railing against CDs? Simple. The major advantage, players, has all but evaporated. The format itself is just lossless 44.1K 16-bit digital, which you can get any which way nowadays. But there is absolutely no reason this far into the 21st century to try to deliver those files on a fragile disc made of toxic chemicals that is prone to failure, damage, and that ages poorly. CD preservation is a notorious problem. Even in the midst of chip shortages and supply chain issues, solid state memory is now affordable enough that it just doesn’t make sense.
I think what we need is actually just a standard open source digital media player that anyone can build, flexible enough on platforms that it can accommodate whatever chips are available (and ideally one that could repurpose old hardware). That would be both a hardware and software spec for such a thing. There are some older attempts at this, but nothing that’s been updated so recently. Well, Denis, wanna chat once you’ve run out of obsolete game systems?