Retronauts - 656: Retronauts Radio: Farewell to STS

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Jeremy Parish and Nadia Oxford chat with Aaron Hamel about the history, hits, and great video game music releases of the late and lamented Ship to Shore Phono Co.—featuring tunes aplenty! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, the day the music undied. notes, all things are subject to change in this mutable, transient world we live in, but apparently this is episode 6506. It is another Retronauts radio episode, and if that doesn't sound familiar to you, that's probably because you are not a Retronaut's Patreon subscriber, because subscribers know that every once in a while I put together a music episode and splice in a ton of music from recent vinyl and CD and other releases. This one is not. not a patron exclusive because I want to share it with the world, so you're getting a little taste of the Retronaut's radio experience. If you're listening to this on Patreon, you're

getting it in high quality beamed directly into your skull and stereo, so you can fully enjoy the music inserts later in the episode. But if you're listening to this on the public feed, I hope you enjoy it, and please consider subscribing to Retronauts full time, because we do things like this pretty often. And it's awesome, and you would enjoy it. Anyway, that's my sales pitch. Now let's move on to the actual discussion of this episode, The Meat, as it were. Let's see, we have two people on this Retronauts Radio,

which makes it, or two other people besides me, which makes it different than usual. Let's have our Retronauts regular contributor introduce herself. Hi, I am Nadia Oxford, as you say, Jeremy. I am a regular contributor here. One thing I actually kind of wanted to say that happened yesterday is almost relevant to what's going on right now is we got a catalog, a paper catalog for Toys R Us, yes, that Toys R Us, with a picture of like, you know, a bunch of toys on the front. And one of the pictures was of a girl holding up a vinyl record. So good for the youth.

We're here to keep that alive. What vinyl record was she holding? Was it a video game vinyl? Some black thing. I don't know, that's how I should see. That could be so many. Kids pop. Okay.

Kids Bob. I feel like they probably, you know, do like picture discs for that or something. Anyway, welcome, Nadia. Thank you for joining this Retronauts Radio. And the reason we are both talking is because of our other guest who, have you been on the show before? I feel like you've contributed to Retronauts in some capacity. I know I've interviewed you for limited run, but I feel like, I feel like in all these years, you've done something on the show.

But please introduce yourself and refresh my ailing memory. Yeah, my name is Aaron Hamill, formerly the proprietor of Ship to Shore, Fonoco, now working for Materia Collective as label director. And yeah, I was on the show. Gosh, I think it was 2017 or 2018. It's been a very long time. Yeah, it's been a whole trillion years, which is why I don't remember. I barely remember what I had for breakfast, and that was like 15 minutes ago. So it's rough getting old.

But at least we have music to keep us happy and, you know, follow us into our dotage. Although the reason we're having this episode here is because for a little while, it seemed like the music was going away. Ship to Shore, Fono was shut down. very, very disappointingly and distressingly, but it seems like you're still out there doing the gospel work of bringing music to the masses, video game music to the masses. So I did want to just take some time this episode to pay tribute to Ship to Shore Photo

because that was my entry vector into collecting and listening to vinyl releases of video game music. which, you know, we've talked about this before, seems like an inherently contradictory idea, but it's one that is as old as video games, or at least as old as video game music. You know, back in the 80s, that's how music came out. It came out on vinyl, and people would release video game albums, you know, novelty albums, mostly in the U.S., but in Japan, they took it more seriously, and I've talked extensively about Harumi Hosono, and Yellow Magic Orchestra and the GMO label and the Super Zevius soundtrack and so on and so forth,

and just how that all sort of evolved. So when the vinyl resurgence happened, it makes sense that, you know, now that Americans also take video game music seriously, that there would be a label dedicated to releasing video game music on vinyl. And ship to shore might have been the first to kind of step in there. jump into publishing video game music in the West and licensing that in the sort of vinyl resurgence era. Do you think that's a fair assessment, Aaron? I think definitely among the first. I think our first video game soundtrack was our fourth release, which was the soundtrack

to mother. And that was in 2015. launched the Kickstarter for that in like i want to say like late spring early summer so it was very early on um yeah i mean it was i had no idea that people i had no idea people would actually be interested in such a thing i thought only i would be interested in maybe a handful of other people but the uh the the the Kickstarter that we did for the mother vinyl soundtrack you know the response was really overwhelming I thought I mean we had set a goal of like

$40,000 or something and I thought that would be like a struggle until the very end and we ended up reaching that goal in within 8 to 10 hours so you underestimated the rabid nature of the earthbound fan I think that was

definitely a big part of it yes and you know again it was always something I wanted and I just hoped that everyone else would want it to and it worked out and then you know ship to shore we did many types of music but you know the video game soundtracks were what I think we became most well known for and certainly was where the lion's share of our revenue came from so yeah it was a great it was great to be a part of it in the early days of it, especially

bringing video game music to the West, dealing with these Japanese publishers who bring them out. I mean, now it's becoming more common, but then many of them were just baffled that anybody would want to license this for that purpose at all, especially the titles we were looking at.

Yeah, I always appreciated the fact that Ship to Shore, you definitely released some mainstream popular titles, but also you would go off into the weeds and do some really obscure stuff. I do want to sort of correct myself and say that, you know, before Ship to Shore launched the mother Kickstarter, there were some video game vinyl releases released here in the U.S. But generally those were like promotional items or novelties. You know, Bioshock. There was, um, uh, Bioshock too, I mean, there was like a 45 that was released.

and Sega actually put out a like a blue vinyl of a bunch of its soundtrack cuts. I ended up getting a giant Final Fantasy 1 through 6 vinyl set that was sent to me as a promotional item. I had Nobua Uematsu sign it when I interviewed him in 2013 or so, 2014, and felt like, well, I can't can't keep this. And so I gave that away as a contest prize and greatly regret that because I think that thing is worth like a thousand books now. Well, you know, I thought, oh, journalism, I have to be respectable. I gave the Sega, the Sega vinyl to Jazz Rignal because he loves Sega music. Yeah. You know, I was like, what do I want with the vinyl record? There was, um, IM 8bit released the Battletoad soundtrack on vinyl, probably like 2011 or so. But all of these things were just,

sort of like one-offs they were just you know here's a thing you can buy and collect and you know it's a fun weird novelty i mean the main selling point of battle toads was not the vinyl it was when you opened the sleeve the gatefold it played the pause theme with a chip inside of it did the like those greeting cards so you open up and it screams happy birthday at you yeah yeah so it was like this this kind of funny novelty um but i think I think Shipped Ashore, followed by, you know, data disks and then a few other labels, you were really the first one that went out there and said, hey, this can be a business. This can be just, you know, instead of like a fun, goofy one-off, it can be something that we

actually do on a regular basis and use to bring music to the West that had never been brought over before, like Lagrange Point and things like that. But not just retro releases also. I mean, the first thing I bought from you guys, really, once I, I reclaimed my old record collection and bought a modern record player, the first LP that I bought was the Axiom Verge soundtrack back when that first came out. Yeah, I mean, it seemed kind of strange to me at the time. Like, I can't believe this is out there and exists. But at the same time, it also seemed like this music actually makes really great sense for a vinyl release

because it has that feel, you know, even though it's all chip tunes, it has the feel of like, you know, a sort of 80s analog synthesizer music scape that you would have bought on like some sort of, you know, on some sort of black record pressing that was published, you know, 200 copies and came in a vapor wave sleeve before we called a vapor wave. And it just made sense. Thank you. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Oh, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm going to be able to be. You know what I'm going to be able to be it. Word smell. Y. Thank you. I don't know. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. yeah um yeah that was a really great release to put together um thomas is so talented to have put that entire game and soundtrack together it's incredible it's not fair yeah um but yeah i mean at 2015 just to go back to when all this started um that was the year where everything, everything came out at once. 2015 was when we did Mother, when IMA bit did Banjo Cazui and Battletoads, when Mondo did The Last of Us,

and when Datadisks did Streets of Rage. They all came out within that period. And that was the beginning of this whole thing that's still continuing, which is great. Yeah, I mean, I have what, like, I have a lot of video game vinyl at this point. You can't see it because my... Blurred it out.

Zoom is blurred, but there's a calyx shelf behind me, and one cube is just the records that either I have contributed something to or that came out from limited run games where I work. And it's just a tiny selection. And then I have another like four shelves of other video game vinyl that I had nothing to do with, but it's there, and I like it, and I'm happy that it exists. It's great. Got to love that.

There's nothing quite like that jacket art, because, yeah, I grew up. I think we all probably grew up with vinyl, kind of coming back around on it, really. And that's the thing that struck me most as a kid. My parents, of course, collected a lot of, like, Pink Floyd and Jeth Rital and just the wacky-ass covers that came with them, really stick with the one-eary kid. Absolutely. Yeah, well, my parents kept all their records, so I was really into that. when I was starting in like middle school I really started to listen to them my dad is a

high-fi dork so he had all his he has all his stuff still set up so I would listen to records while I was doing my homework then and I got really into it and yeah just all went from there and I do want to also say before I forget to say this that you know both you Jeremy and Nadia you both were very helpful with Ship to Shore writing the liner notes. And I just wanted to thank you both for your contribution to it. That was great. It's as important as anything else. And I honestly don't know if I would have started Ship to Shore, at least the video game soundtrack stuff,

without having listened to Retronauts as a podcast since I started listening to it when I was in high school. I don't say things like that. I know, I know. But yeah, I mean, I remember, I learned a lot about stuff like Lagrange Point from episodes of Retronaut. So I just wanted to say that it, I don't know if it would have existed without this podcast. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be able to be.

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be I'm going to I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm a I'm a on the I'm Thank you. You know, I'm going to do. I'm going to be able to be.

I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You know, I'm going to be able to be. No. No. No. Thank you.

I'm sorry. Thank you. Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I am very vain and love to stick my fingers into things that I enjoy and say, ooh, I want to be a part of that. So vinyl notes, you know, that's like the liner notes for an LP release. That's pretty much the lowest friction way I can get involved in something. It's very easy and very low commitment.

So, you know, I appreciate that. but also I do appreciate the fact that you even began to include liner notes with your releases because, you know, around the time that all these labels started releasing video game vinyl was also when my parents brought me my milk crate full of old LPs that I had picked up in the early 90s because they were a dollar each at the record store because they wanted to get them the hell out and replaced them with CDs. And, you know, I started buying up releases for, all the video game labels that were

labels that were publishing video game soundtracks and, you know, writing about that stuff on US Gamer and talking about it here on Retronauts and that attracted attention from the people who run the different labels because, you know, we're all kind of in this boutique business together. This is a niche. So, you know, there's awareness

and they would see those and connect with me. And I at some point floated the idea of like, hey, I'd love to see, you know, vinyl, uh, liner notes in, in your releases to talk about, you know, the heritage of the music and, uh, you know, the methodology of bringing it to vinyl and so forth. And, you know, even if I don't write them, just like, I would like to see that because I want to read that. And, um, most labels just kind of said, no, that's not really what we're into. Um, that's not what we're about. We just want to put the music out. That's not something that interests us, you know, maybe we're more visually focused, or we just don't want

a lot of text cluttering up the sleeves, or we don't want the extra work, or don't want how to go through the approvals process with the licensor, whatever it was. And I think that's something that really made ship to shore stand out was that you did reach out to a lot of different people who have written about video games and video game music, not just the two of us, but, you know, Anthony John McNello and a few others. And, you know, said, like, please give additional context to this music, you know, within, within the packaging. And so I feel that that just adds value to your releases. And I'm happy that limited run has started to include liner notes and some of its vintage releases.

I think starting with VALIS Volume 2, VALIS Collection Volume 2, and then I contributed to Volume 3. and, you know, like when you have something that comes from an area of video gaming that is not super familiar in the West, I think it's especially valuable, you know, like the Valus collections. There's music from MSX and X68,000 and PC801, and so people are going to hear the same music, like the same themes over and over again in different ways. And if you don't know the history there, you don't know the technology, you know, you might listen to those records and think, why are they just playing like the same tunes over and over again with different quality? But having someone who can, like me or like Audie Sorely, who can kind of walk you through that and say, here's what's interesting about these and here's how the, you know, how the different technologies and styles of games affected the music output.

I think that really, that adds a lot to the listening experience. You know, vinyl is a big part of the appeal. It's always been like the stuff you look. at physically while you're listening to the music for the days of phones i guess yeah definitely i mean what the first um the first album for ship to shore that you did liner notes for jeremy it was lagrange point yeah i'm pretty sure i believe so yeah yeah okay and that's a perfect example of something that requires a lot of context especially for a uh western audience because it's so unknown and that was sort of you know that was a big part of why i wanted to include liner notes

from the beginning in a lot of these releases, because we were going after, you know, as we were talking about much more niche things, because that's just, that just happens to be where my interests lie a lot of the time. And a lot of those releases require context and history, and that's what appeals to me about releases like this, is that, you know, it's like looking into the past and getting this historical context is important for that. You know, again, with the release like LaGrange Point that uses such an interesting, the VRC7 chip that, you know, enhanced the audio so much that was only used in that one title, at least for the audio, something like that is so important to know when you're listening to it.

Or like the Fantasy Star One release that we did that had the two different versions, and going into the history of that and how the FM sound module was used on the master system. You know, it was just, I think stuff like that is so important and that, you know, a lot of releases can suffer if they don't have something like that. Yeah, I think we are still, like, terribly undereducated about the whole soundship situation for retro games in Japan. Like, even I just feel like I'm totally out of it when that record. personally since i'm not nearly the hardware wizard that perishes and i generally went for uh or i was hired to do albums that were more RPG focused like i would kind of go into how the music affected the story and um so i just kind of tried to find a way to weave it all together

and and give you something to read as you looked at the cover as the two as well i suppose great art yeah and i and that's definitely an important um approach as well for releases like breath of fire and this week and this weekend in both those series um i think that yeah it's just i i personally just like when i have an album especially an archival release like that and that's sort of how i looked at these releases was i wanted them to be like archival material that could for sure you know stand the test of time and educate in the future and that that's why i found the having liner notes to be an integral part of the process I really do think that's something that set ship to shore apart, and I'm happy that you're working with Materia Collective now, because, you know, I think a lot of labels that get into publishing video game music do it because, you know, it's an opportunity, and they like video games and they like music, so, you know, it brings all those things together. But I know you specifically bring that element of historic appreciation into it. And when you're republishing, as you say, these archival releases,

there is an element of sort of curation and just sharing to something like that that, you know, you don't always get with other labels, and I'm not throwing shade at anyone. I own a lot of video game music, and I'm happy to have it all. But, you know, I do think that was something that just set your work apart. And, you know, I know the folks at Materia Collective are kind of driven by the same interests and enthusiasm. So I feel like that's a good, some good synergy there. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I don't want to, what happens. I don't want to throw shade at any other company. There's lots of labels that put out

tremendous work. It's just, I guess, I'm just trying to say that it's how I felt that ship to shore could stand apart was by doing these sorts of, you know, trying to make them archival releases with liner notes and really talking to the publishers as much as possible. I mean, I remember you wrote the Bayou Billy liner notes, Jeremy? I'm pretty sure. Okay. It's been a long time. So my memory is fading. Yeah. No, that one stands out to me too. Yes, because we had gone to Konami with approval on the liner notes. And one of the people who worked on the sound team was still there and sent back like a pretty lengthy explanation of how they devised the guitar strumming sound in the opening track. And I just thought that

was so cool. So it was great to get little snippets like that from these publishers that I'm sure no one has asked that person about how he, about how he did the music and the Adventures of Bayou Billy, uh, maybe ever. So, yeah, I, I, always sort of dread the concept of publisher approval or developer approval, especially working with developers in other countries because there are these cultural barriers and differences and expectations and so forth. But I have to say that working with Konami on approvals for the various liner notes that I wrote for various Konami games was always pretty seamless. And, you know, aside from the occasional, like, hey, you can't mention this trademark

or, you know, this intellectual property that belongs to someone else, pushback, which is, you know, understandable. I understand how Japanese publishers are especially very sensitive about that. And it's, you know, it's just kind of baked into the business culture there. It was actually pretty informative because we did get notes back saying, you know, like, oh, hey, I was involved in this and it's like the notes that you've written are fine, but I really think you should highlight this one thing because that's what I'm most proud of. And getting that perspective, you know, even though it wasn't presented as an interview, which would have been great to like, you know, talk to these composers and get their perspectives. But even though it wasn't

presented like that, we didn't have that opportunity, there was still that feedback. So it helped guide the things that I wrote more, you know, in the direction that, you know, in the direction that I think best represented the music and, you know, it made my work better and made for a better end result for listeners and readers. So it was a, yeah, it was all pretty enjoyable. Thank you. We're going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. I'm gonnae. I'm gonnae. I'm gonnae. Thank you. I'm gonnae.

Thank you. And if we're talking Konami, I guess we could shift over really quickly for a quick interlude about your current pre-order release that went up by the time this went out by the time this episode goes out it'll have been out for like a month or so

and it may have sold out by that point but we should still talk about it because it was a big endeavor and Konami was surprisingly cool about the entire thing

at least from my perspective but I want you yes so you're referring to the Castlevania 46 LP box set that material launched on Halloween

and And I've been working on it for, I clocked, I went back and looked at the date that we initially started the conversation with Konami. And it was sometime in 2021, it was like spring of 21. So it's been a long time. We've been working on this. It took a lot of heavy lifting, but Konami was surprisingly great. I mean, they've always been good to work with, but we had to do a lot.

of new stuff that sometimes they can be uncomfortable with but a lot of new recordings a lot of a lot of new artwork and the liner notes um it was a huge package um spanning 1986 to 2010 in terms of the games featured um yeah i mean i'm very proud of it um and i can't wait for it to be physically in people's hands so they can get a sense of what we created because I think it's pretty special. Yeah, I

wrote the liner notes for that one and it was very much a dream project and I spent, God, it was like a month and a half just, you know, that's like writing a game entry per day, basically. Yeah, how many words was that? Not really, but I looked it up and I can't remember,

I want to say it's a lot. You know, I'm going to look that up again in the background, but no, it was, it was, it was just a, like, it's a very memorable project for me, not just because of the sheer immensity of it, but, you know, I was traveling a lot at the time. I had a couple of work trips, and after I was done doing my work for the day, I would go down to, like, the hotel bar or whatever and have a drink and maybe grab a bite of food and then just sit there, like, writing my thoughts about, oh, let's talk about the jazz arpeggios in Castlevania 4 and things like that.

And I'm sure, you know, I looked like very serious business down there at the traveler at the hotel bar tapping away to his computer. But I was writing about video game music. And, you know, that's always a delight. That's serious business, too. Absolutely. Yeah, I was, I mean, who else was I going to call about writing line or no? which for what I considered to be the definitive Castlevania music thing, there was nobody else I would call.

Well, I mean, you could have called other people, but I would have taken it personally. Of course, yes. I don't want to be on your enemies list. Yeah. But no, it was very flattering to have been tapped for that. And I, yeah, it was a great experience. I really, I can't wait to see the set come together myself. Yeah, I mean, the liner notes came out amazing.

I mean, it's, because obviously, you know, you've spoken at length about, you know, the, the big Castlevania games, you know, the NES trilogy, Symphony of the Night, etc. But it was great to read about something like Castlevania the arcade or Castlevania Judgment or some of these more, Castlevania legends, some of these more obscure, relatively obscure ones. that we were able to include. So I think it really, it's a, it's a real journey through Castlevania's history, and that's what I wanted it to be. And that's how it came out, I think. And hopefully it will be in people's hands sometime early next year. You know, the manufacturing is obviously a gigantic lift for the pressing plant.

Did you basically just take over like the Czech Republic for a month? Yeah, that's pretty much what we're doing. Yeah, I mean, I'm, we have any, we have, we're, we're getting the test pressings in a little week or two. And I'm really looking forward to having, what, a hundred and twelve or a hundred and two, uh, records to show up at my door. That'll be, and then listening to them for about a week. Uh, that does seem like a, uh, yeah, like a, a full-time job in itself just listening. to the entire Castlevania soundtrack from start to finish. I believe it's, I was putting, when I was putting together the cue sheets, it's, I was able

to figure out exactly how many tracks. It was 974 individual tracks. Oh my God. And about, and a little over 30 hours of music. Wow. I just looked it up and I wrote 30,000 words for the liner notes. So basically a thousand words per hour of music. So that's a pretty good.

good ratio. Yes. If you read really slowly, you can make it through the liner notes just in time for that record to finish. Yes, exactly. I mean, yeah, no, it works out perfectly. Yeah, I'm very happy with it. I really hope people enjoy it.

I personally am just happy for it to be done after three years of working on it. But I really think that the new recordings we've done for the cartridge-based, titles especially are excellent and all and all the credit for that goes to my engineer jeff roberts who is fantastic um because previous releases of especially castellvania ones soundtrack have been you know they were taken from a very old master so it was great to update a lot of these masters for inclusion in future potential future things as well yeah that was That's always been a frustrating thing about the Castlevania soundtracks is that Konami just keeps trotting out or kept trotting out the same old master from the 1980s.

I think it was from, you know, like a CD release at the end of the 80s, early 90s. So yeah, you get like, what is it the stage four theme of Castlevania? I can't remember the title just linked out on me, but it has sound effects in it that are, you know, like syncopated to the music. But that's, that's a very much a holdover from the GMO era. Like GMO loved, if you've heard any of the, the episodes that I put together or heard those original albums, they love to just kind of put sound effects in there sort of in the beat of the music, building off of the what Hoseno did with Super Zevius. But, you know, sometimes you just want to listen to the music and you don't want, like, heart powers. I was going to say, you know, sound the sound of the whip, the heart. Yeah.

Yeah. Castlevania 2, they were using the Famicom Disc System Masters, which the FDS version of that soundtrack is really shrill and annoying compared to the NES version. Yeah, three's different, but two is, two's not great. Yeah, Castlevania 3, I want to say there were sound effects added, and then Castlevania 4, they kept doing like the segways, so you would have these sweets of music. Sometimes with sound effects like creaking doors and wolves and things like that added that are not taken from the game, it's like here's some extra. wind sound effects to create a segue between tracks and you know all of that's fine but that was created for you know a collection like Dracula best collection or whatever back in the 90s and that stuff showed up on the bonus disc in the Japanese version of Symphony of the Night and it showed

up in various other releases when Mondo put out there Castlevania soundtracks which you know I'm grateful to have had those and for those to exist, but they still had to use those masters from Konami. I asked them about it, and they were like, this is what Konami gave us and wanted us to use. Right. So, you know, that showed up all the way, you know, that's like 20, 25 years of using the same masters.

So the fact that you were able to convince them to re-record that stuff is, that's, you know, that's awesome. It's great, yeah. I mean, they were used to the music. they were used on those old masters that you're referring to were used on the cd set that this vinyl set is based on um so it was so this is this is really the beginning of a new era of their audio masters for castlvania and they should be using these going forward for any releases and hopefully any sort of digital releases of the castlvania music that come out um And that's that's sort of why I think that was a big reason why I was able to do it is, you know, I was convinced them by saying, you know, if you let us do this, we'll make them good and you'll have them for the future and you can use them for anything you want going forward.

And I think that's what really was helpful in convincing them. But we had done that. Yeah, they've actually, they've already taken you up on that. I don't know if you've heard the Famicom collection set that they put out. there's like 13 records in a massive CD collection that has some of the 8-bit Famicom Castlevania games in there and they did I don't know they used your masters but they did at least you know finally release that music without the sound effects and edits and stuff so that's good that does exist but that's you know

that's just you know the Japanese versions of Castlevania two and three so yeah it's still just a tiny narrow window of stuff that needed remastering right Yeah, I mean, we had done that with Konami before. They've always been pretty, you know, pretty good with us re-recording stuff. I mean, a lot of the stuff we've released, they just simply didn't have audio masters for because, you know, why would they have audio masters for Adventures of Bayou Billy? Oh, why not? They should. I mean, that's got such a great beat to it.

Oh, I agree. I mean, I agree. It's amazing, but, you know. It's like, you know, strumming disco rock in the, in the bayou. It's a perfect combo. Yes. They were very, I mean, yeah, when we did Y, Y, Y, World one and two, they didn't have anything for that. I don't even think, I don't think they had anything for Legend of the Mystical Ninja either, which that one did kind of surprise me.

But, yeah, they did not have a lot of the stuff. But even when they did, they were very open to letting us, you know, redo them. I remember the gradius the gradius masters that they had originally sent had also had sound effects on them and they, you know, as long as,

Konami is very flexible, as long as you can explain it in a way that makes sense. So I've always said. Make a business case for it, basically. Exactly. Yeah, they're, they're, I do a lot of

license-related work with Konami through limited run also. And they are surprisingly chill about a lot of things in ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect, especially compared to some other publishers I've worked for overseas or worked with. Konami is much more like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That's cool. Here's the thing you want to change. Whereas other companies can be like, this is not okay.

What are you doing? Get your act together. You are working with a Japanese corporation. You need to think like the Japanese do. Oh, hey, maybe dial it down. that's a bit much. So, yeah, it's, I actually really enjoy working with Konami because they are not, they don't have that, like, kind of, they don't have their hackles up when, when you, when you come to them, which is nice. I'm going to be able to be.

You know, I'm going to be able to do. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. Thank you. I don't know. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. You know,

on the you're going to and you're I'm and I'm I'm

I'm I'm and I'm and so I'm I'm going to be the

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm You know, I'm going to I'm going to be able to be.

I'm not I'm gonnae. I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm I'm not I'm

I'm not I'm I'm on the I'm I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, I remember, you know, obviously ship to shore, worked with Capcom a lot as well. And when we did Mega Man Legends, one and two, especially two, there was very little in their archive. of the music so we had to go in again jeff roberts my engineer uh went in and i i don't have the technical expertise to explain what he did but he got basically every piece of music in that game by mining the data on the disc itself wow and it came out really great uh and i think you know obviously we couldn't fit every piece it was very long but um but but it was you know explaining all this to Capcom was a little more, it took a little more finesse. So you did what with our property?

It's all right. Yeah. But, you know, it all came out well in the end. Yeah, actually, I would say Legends 2 was probably the most difficult project I had with you guys. Not because of Capcom, but just because once you sit down and listen to the soundtrack, you're like, oh, it's one theme done in like 15 or 20 different iterations all throughout the game. It's just like the town theme from Catalox Island in the first game, you know, stretched and

they changed the key and they changed the tempo and they changed the instrumentation. And it's still just the same track. So how do I, how do I pull, you know, like a thousand words out of this? It was a little bit of a challenge. Yeah, you just talk about how great legend too is. There you go. But I do feel like, you know, when you're writing liner notes, it still needs to be a little bit about the music.

I don't remember the soundtrack very well, but I just remember being pretty okay. I mean, imagine the catalogs island town theme from Mega Man Legends, and then imagine it spooky, imagine it adventurous, imagine it somber, imagine it melancholy. That's a very interesting style choice. Why did they do that? Yeah, it was interesting. I guess they just said, like, this is, you know, this is the music of Mega Man. This is Mega Man Volunt's tune, so we're just going to keep going with it. It was, it's a very unusual soundtrack. And you don't really notice it when you're playing the game. Right. I think that's my problem right there.

When you, yeah, when you, well, I mean, you don't notice like, oh, this is just the same music. This is the same melody. But when you sit down and, you know, have to actually write about it, then you're like, huh, okay. Well, I'm going to talk about mood and tempo and, you know, how, how you can color a melody just with the arrangement. Yeah, that's what you go with. It's a good, but I'm not, I'm not formally trained in music. So it was kind of bullshit. shitting too. That's my problem as well. It always came out good for both of you. And it was it was it was wonderful to you know talking about Mega Man Legends too. It was great to have both of you do like the the complete like series that Ship to Shore would release. So there was sort of a continuity between them all and that was always important to me too that you know everything carry over when we would do multiple releases. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate.

appreciated that because I did breath of fire one, two, and three, if I'm not mistaken, as well as speaking a one and two. So that was good to kind of carry on that mood. Yes, yep. It was always important to me that everything sort of carry that continuity between the lighter notes. Yeah, the fantasy star tetralogy is one of the projects that I really wanted to highlight talking about here because it was, you know, for someone who, didn't grow up with a Sega system. It's one of those things that I discovered later in life, but it really caught my attention, the fantasy star music, once I started to kind of dig into it and discovered like, oh, the American soundtrack is different than the Japanese soundtrack.

And, you know, I don't think that's totally foreign to us now because the amazing Sega Ages fantasy star for Switch really tried to, you know, encompass the entirety of that. and there are reissues or like rom hacks that bring the Japanese soundtrack back into the American game and so forth. So it's one of those things that's kind of like a latter-day discovery for a lot of people. So it kind of put me on the same footing as even, you know, a lot of fantasy star fans. But just the way the music evolves over the course of the series, kind of shifting with the style of the games themselves. It was really interesting.

And, you know, I was really surprised by, you know, I was really surprised by, how sophisticated the Fantasy Star 3 soundtrack is. People tend to bag on that as the bad fantasy star. I can't really speak to that. I don't think it's that bad. But the music is, you know, it's kind of forward thinking. It's dynamic. It shifts as like it does that thing kind of like Mega Man Legends 2

where it's, you know, a few of the same melodies kind of explored over and over again. And it underscores the generational theme of the game. And also, you know, the music kind of builds up as you build your party. So the overworld music changes. And that's something that you would see, you know, almost a decade later with Yoshi's Island where the Yoshi's play more complex music and on Klonoa, where the like the map screens grow and evolve and just kind of give you like this sense of a progression. But, you know, there's an even more direct line of progression with,

Skies of Arcadia, which did the same thing in its music, and you have like shifting melodies and styles with the overall theme depending on what part of the world you're in. So, you know, when you're in the imperial spaces, it's bombastic. And when you're, you know, basically the equivalent to South America, you get like acoustic percussion built into it. So it was just really cool to kind of like have to sit down and really look at what innovations these games brought to the table. and you know how fantasy star four kind of is the most like traditional what you think of as jr pg of the entire set and the music really reflects that as well and really kind of pushes the genesis sound chip to its to its utmost yes yeah i was i was i was very proud of the fantasy star one through four albums that we did because i felt that simply because saga is much more interested in archiving their stuff than some of their companies.

There was just such a wealth of material that they provided that I really felt that we had enough archival images and illustrations to fill out a little booklet that could go along with your liner notes. And the cover art using the original cover art

was always something that I wanted to do if it was possible, but it was just so rare possible um that i yeah i'm i was very happy with the way those came out um because to me those that those represented what i really wanted ship to shore to be like in the in its like fullest form using you know making a completely archival release You know, I'm going to be able to be.

We're going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm going to be I'm going to be. I'm going to I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm not going to be the

you know, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be.

I'm going to be the I'm going to be. I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to Thank you. Yeah, no, I love the fact that the liner notes that I wrote for the Fantasy Star games appear as part of, like, a tiny mini publication that I had nothing to do with. so it's always nice to like see my my work printed in a you know like a little booklet that I didn't actually have to put together

yeah kind of a relief but but yeah like they they really did give you access to a ton of production art and sketches and things like that which is really cool because I know you know with something like Lagrange Point the cover is just like the title Lagrange Point in space because what is there for that game and you know that's something that other publishers have had to do too like other labels like shipped uh sorry data disks um was was always has always been pretty good about uh with their Sega publications or productions you know reprinting the original art as lithos or something but then you have something like um i want to say super hang on and they just there's no there's no artwork for that that doesn't exist anymore maybe there never was artwork for it so it's just like a die cut super hang on logo as the the sleeve and you know you do

what you can. Outrun, outrun also from them had a similar approach to it. Which is wild. Those games were so big for them. You think they would have kept that material, but I guess they just, they didn't. Sega has kind of an advantage because up until like two years ago, they were in the same office building

in Tokyo for like 30 years. So stuff just amassed there. Stuff got buried. Some of the companies where they move around a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was, it's great when they when these companies do have access to that but it is in my experience very rare um but uh yes the seeing that box artwork for the fantasy star games was just like in that high of resolution was really amazing um and they just yeah they provided so much i mean stuff even beyond what we were releasing they just said i think they just sent over their file of fantasy star artwork materials

because a lot of it was the Game Gear games, like illustrations from the game, from the Game Gear titles. Like, there was a lot of it, which really, like, more than, there was more for the Game Gear games than for Fantasy Star 2. Very strange. Interesting. I mean, that's, I can kind of see that because I think, you know,

the difference in time, you know, like late 80s versus mid-90s, you just had better archiving and you also have. had, you know, more of a sense of like we need to create material for marketing. So it does, it does kind of make sense. But yeah, I, I've seen some, some people complain that the Castlevania box set doesn't use original artwork. But I can't imagine the difficulty, how impossible it would be to be able to reproduce or find or source artwork for all the Castellvania games to print a 12 by 12. Like, I'm sure some of that stuff doesn't exist anymore.

I know a problem that we've run into at Limited Run is that, you know, sometimes a studio shuts down or like the American branch closes and some of the original artwork gets sold off to collectors. And then the collectors are like, this is part of my collection and no one else can have it. Or it's part of my collection and you can, you know, pay me $100,000 for a photograph of it. And, you know, repo rights. So, you know, there's a lot of barriers, logistical and human to making that work. So, yeah, that was something that I was a little like, oh, that's disappointing that there's no, you know, there's not like official artwork in some of these releases at first.

But then I started to realize just, you know, what that actually would have entailed. And so, yeah, I enjoy a lot of the covers that you kind of came up with to. as a workaround like um you know drew wise always does great art and um oh crap i forgot it's alias or their alias mush mushbush that's it who does the like the cg i guess they're i assume they're cg renders but they're made to look like plasticine models yeah those are so good like bomber man hero megaman legends like they really bring the charm and personality of the games to the front even if it's not like hey here's the most important important pivotal scene in the game rendered, you know, in action. It's more like, hey, here's

like the heart of the game. Here's the charming part. Here's Mega Man, you know, tossing eggs in a skillet for breakfast with roll sitting there at the table. Like, it's just super charming. The Bomberman hero, I think, is the one that has like the, basically like a store shelf where there's all these different products, basically. It's so great. It just, it's such a creative approach. And it really add something to the music. Yeah, for me, that was always a fun part. I mean, I always loved the original art and whenever possible I would like to use it. But it was fun to come up with creative outside of the box solutions. And that Bomberman Hero one is one of my absolute favorites that we did. And I, you know, I took a lot of inspiration from Japanese releases

of soundtracks that had sort of out there artwork that is not. was not just the key art slapped onto a thing they they went in a or Japanese box art that was oftentimes not what you would expect yeah compared to the American artwork um so yeah i you know even though sometimes it could be divisive amongst the fan base i you know i was proud of everything that we did I'm going to be able to be. I don't know. Thank you.

We're going to be able to be. I don't know. You know, I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. And so, you know, and and

So, you know, I'm going to be able to be. So I don't know what you can talk about with your material collective work and what your intentions are there. But I am curious to, you know, like, do you see material collective as a chance to just have continuity with Ship to Shore? Or do you want to explore new directions and take new approaches to things? And can you talk about any of that? Yeah, I mean, we had a lot of things that, you know, Ship to Shore closed very abruptly. for reasons that I won't bore anyone with.

But I was able to take a lot of the projects that we had in the works, including the Castlevania set, but there are many others that had not yet been produced by Ship to Shore that Materia now has access to. And, of course, taking my relationships with Konami, Capcom, all of these publishers over there so we can continue. to do great things. I mean, I personally, you know, my, my love and passion is for the retro stuff and making these sorts of archival releases. And Sebastian, the CEO of Materia, has been very generous in letting me sort of do what I want to do. And he has been very supportive. He, you know,

When Ship to Shore closed down, Materia bought the remainder of the Ship to Shore stock. So it didn't just end up in a landfill by the people who had bought Ship to Shore. So it's been a great experience so far. It's still fairly new. I started there in August, on August 1st, and it's November 5th now. So, yeah, I think I want to just keep going the way we were doing it at Ship to Shore. And with the backing of materia, I think it's going to go really well. I'm very excited about the future.

I believe the morning suns Always gonna shine again And I believe a part of the cold Waits at every rainbow's end. I believe in roses, kiss with you Or shouldn't I believe the same with you I believe in may believe Fair it has a lucky chance

And I believe in promises Spoken as you've got your heart I believe in skies for error Why shouldn't I believe in believe in You may stay I will choose in the way that I do You can call me for the end and say I'm crazy as a moon I believe in through the lining

And that's why I believe in you I'm going to be able to be. I don't know. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. So I did want to talk about briefly some of our favorite ship-to-shore releases. I've already mentioned Axiom Verge, Fantasy Star Tetrology, Nadia, you've mentioned Breath of Fire and squeak it in to

Aaron, what about you? Like, what are your top top picks? Like the ones that you think really embody what Ship to Shore was about? I mean, I mentioned Mother 1. I think that was just so pivotal. I mean, not just

for Ship to Shore, but I think the broader idea of putting video game music online. Out of curiosity. Why did you go with Mother 1 and not Earthbound? slash mother too because I just loved that

album so much because it was that that that that wild you know arrangement album with those English lyrics I just thought it was so interesting Pauliana I think it's from that album yeah yeah Pollyanna being friends you know that eight melodies

that's sung by St. Paul's Cathedral Choir I mean it's just a beautiful album that I always really liked and I was kind of I went with Mother 1 at first because I was sort of gambling that if we could do Mother 1 and it was successful

enough, then we could probably get Mother 2. I didn't want to go backwards and I was just hoping that it worked out and luckily it did. But that was definitely a favorite, you know. I have to ask, did you make a bid

for Mother 3 at any point? Oh, please. Tell me yes. There was no, unfortunately, there was no one to bid it too. because Mother 1 and Mother 2 they were licensed through Sony because they had they

it was licensing the CDs that that they had made in the you know when those games came out they still had the rights to those and it was licensable through Sony without having to do anything else whereas Mother 3 it's much more complicated

there's like three or four developers and publishers on that game yeah it's a whole mystery I just had to put the question up there to because otherwise we'll never hear the end of it for mother fans of course yeah oh i mean i think we we got you know people tweeting at us emails coming in very regularly asking about mother three and trust me if i if it could have been done i would have done it um other three just alludes us in every form possible yes exactly um but yeah i mean that was a great one i mean one of my favorite ones was snatcher just because i am a huge

fan of that game and I still think that the vinyl color variant that we did where it was like the colors of the old Konami logo was one of my favorite color variants that we ever did and just just getting that game out in any in any form even if it was just the music was really important to me and that was another fun approvals process snatcher the the the gateful they actually Konami actually had a decent amount of archival artwork for that release which was really cool and one of the things that they sent us were all the like the character portraits and I had lined them all up in the gatefold and their Konami's only note on the entire package was that they had to their heights had to be relative to the heights that are listed in the manual and I think that. I just thought that was very cute. Sure. Yes.

We're going to be able to be. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. Electrode. Thank you. We're going to be able to do. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be.

I'm going to be able to be. So, yeah, Snatcher was a great one. I loved, Celeste was very fun to work on. Yes, you know, Lena is such a great artist. She's so great to work with over the years. know, and we, we basically got, we got Celeste kind of by accident because I had reached out to Lena about putting out one of her, like, non-VGM albums, an album called Singularity that I was just a big fan of. And when I reached out to her about that, she was like, you know, I got this

like Celeste thing that I'm working on. Like, I don't know if you want to release that too, but you can. And I was like, okay, I mean, if it's as good as, if it's as good as Singularity, that then, of course, and that it became, you know, what it is now. Huge. That would have been a huge release, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is just kind of a sidebar, but I'm really proud that we hired Lina to compose a podcast theme for us back before she was famous back in the one-up days.

Because Jen Frank introduced us. Oh. Yeah, so we launched an RPG podcast that eventually kind of evolved into Acts of the Blood God. Yeah, we have her theme. We still use it. Yeah, she composed the theme for us. I didn't know it goes back as far as one up. Like, I thought it was relative.

Yeah, that was great. Back in the old days, yep. Even before Celeste. I mean, I think you're probably using like a remix or something of it or rearrangement, but yeah. Yeah, that goes back to the olden times. Wow. Cool. Every time I think about that, I'm like, oh, gosh, my touch was celebrity.

One more, one more favorite I'll just mention is, you know, I, like I was saying about the working with Konami on Bayou Billy and getting those notes from the developers. I always liked getting access to the developers. And if I could speak to them, it was, you know, that was some of the most fun things. And when we did our release of Gimic, getting to interview, Masashi Kagayama was really a treasure for me. So that was a really notable release for me. And I just love, I mean, the music is amazing in that game. and getting like a definitive recording of it was it sounds great and I thought the pack and and a great mushba cover art on that one as well. Yeah, that one really takes advantage of the unique mapper chips or memory chips that Sunsoft created in a way that you don't get in their American releases. So I'm glad you were able to bring that to vinyl.

Nadia, do you want to say anything more about some of the projects you worked with or not even necessarily things you worked on but just favorite ship-to-shore releases? It's just been great to work on the tracks that the albums I was allowed to work on just because I had so much freedom to just kind of talk about the games

and how they related to the music, as I said earlier. Breath of Fire 3 in particular was an interesting soundtrack for me to go back to because that is a jazzy-ass soundtrack. I adore Breath of Fire 3 soundtrack. I'm so glad I got a vinyl release. When I first played Breath of Fire 3, I actually did not appreciate it.

I'm like, because Breath of Fire 2, which is another album I also wrote the liner notes for, cough, cough. And I think I note this, and if not both of the liner notes, then at least one of them. Breath of Fire 2 had a very rock, heavy rock sound that was like that really late S&ES like Mega Man X3.

Like they were really going on. on the guitar. So I liked that. And with Breath of Fire 3, it was like, da-da-da-da-da, jazzy, airy, like the wind... So laid back. So laid back. Like, the Windya theme for the town of Windia and Breath of Fire 2 is like so epic and sweeping. I'm like, oh, I can't wait to hear that again in Breath of Fire 3. It's the same world. It's like, oh, okay, so we're doing jazz now, are we? And it took me a long time to kind of like get to appreciate that. I also noticed it. I don't even know if this is true or not. This is a myth I made up, and I also mentioned it. Well, not made up, but I wonder about it. I swear to God, there's so much

Pet Shop Boys' influence in the soundtrack for Breath of Fire 3. I'd love to just kind of find out what the deal is with that. Could be completely coincidental. It could just be that I like the Pet Shop Boys too much. But yeah, thank you, Aaron, for letting me, like, just write about these games. I actually just want to point out that I started out the, I have my notes here. Breath of Fire 3, I noted, starts with an immeasurably valuable life tip in its first

10 hours, which is, quote, don't F with the mob. That's how I started those liner notes, and I'm glad you let me do that. Because that is actually a very important lesson that you learn in Breath of Fire 3 is a strange game, but I love it. I don't know. I'm going to be able to Thank you. I don't know.

I'm sorry. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. Thank you. I'm going to be the I'm going to be the I'm going to be. I'm going to

I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be. We're going to be able to do. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're going to be able to be. Thank you. I don't know. I'm gonnae.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was a joy to work with you know, like I said earlier, you know, like I said earlier, it was a joy to work with both of you, you know, especially after, you know, listening. to both of you for a very long time and being fans of your work. So it was really a pleasure. So I appreciate that. Thank you. And thanks again for letting me contribute to these music releases because it was very very satisfying to have been writing and talking about video game music for so long

and then being able to take part in this kind of niche reissue of so many great soundtracks. to write for print. I will take any opportunity right for print these days. I do want to call it one of my personal favorite projects for ship to shore, which is one of those rare, like, this had ripples that I didn't expect, which was the Zintata collection, the volume one, which contained Nightstriker and I can't even remember all the games that were on it. But it included elevator, oh, go ahead. It was Knight Stryker, Metal Black, and... That's it, Metal Black. Elevator Action Returns or Elevator Action 2. And I jumped on that because I'm like, God, I love elevator action too so much.

And I wrote my notes and then kind of didn't really touch on Metal Black or Night Striker that much. I was like, oh, yeah, those exist also. They're fine. And I feel like I mentioned this before, but that eventually, you know, made its way back into Zuntata's hands and Taito. And they were like, huh, wow, Westerners really like elevator action too. We had no idea. This game must be really big over there. And that actually directly helped that game recirculate in the modern era.

So it was extremely self-serving of me because I do love that game and I'm very happy to have it, you know, available for a larger audience than it had ever seen it before. But that was not my intent. I was just like, ooh, I love this game and I want to write about the music and um did not expect did not expect that kind of uh subsequent impact for my work so it's a it never happens when you want it to it's always you know my my curse is that like i i seem to make things happen accidentally but never deliberately so it's always like oh that's that's cool but that's not what i would have wanted i would have wanted this other thing

it's all good but it was it was fun to write on that and and also you know i did volume three as well and that I don't think it had any ripples but I do remember just this sense of like cosmic serendipity because I was kind of struggling to write some things about the games of the collection besides bubble bubble um and I was in an arcade in Tokyo it was tito hay so of course it was there uh I came up upon a cabinet playing poolie rula I was like oh well okay I have heard about this game and never actually experienced but now I can play it and then write about the sound track so it was just like this perfect timing because i think it was due you know to you were like i really need this in like you know a few days so it just uh it all the stars lined up for me

yeah i was i was really um happy with all of those tito releases that we were able to do because those also um tito had a huge archive of artwork and and materials so it was great um to work with them and you know really build that series of albums around like archiving tito's arcade history and i mean you're the reason that i know what elevator action too is from talking about it on the podcast you were the only person i ever heard discussed that game and it made me seek it out and i actually remember you saying this was i think this was when i was listening to retronauts in high school and you were saying that you had played elevator action returns at an arcade in East Lansing, Michigan, where I went to college, and I later went to

Pinball Pets in East Lansing and did play it there. Nice. Wow. So when it comes to elevator action, too, I am the Oroboros. Yes. I just continue eating my tail over and over again. So delicious. Yes.

But yeah, yeah, both of those were, you know, I mean, I remember going to, you know, the Square Enix building in Tokyo to meet with Taito. and they for that first album and they were like you want to license night striker why then like those those three titles it just they were just very baffled by it but you know they're uh they were very pleased to see uh somebody taking an interest in the older stuff that's good I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. So,

so, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. The final thing I want to mention is something we haven't really touched on,

but I know you kind of got your start doing, working in vinyl releases with film, you know, horror movies and stuff. But somewhere along the way, you added one other format of music to the sort of ship-to-shore lineup, which was Japanese city pop, something that I had not heard of and did not think I would like, but I tried out a few of those albums and I was like, oh, this is like, this is pop and it's, you know, almost vaguely disco, but there is some real like jazz influence complexity to it. It's got a lot more going on under the surface than it seems. And also, half of these songs, I swear to God, I've heard them as

outros to slice of life anime series, like TV shows from the 80s. Maybe not, but they just have that vibe to them. And so I don't know what piqued your interest there. And if you were like at the forefront of the city pop revival or just, you know, kind of caught up in a wave of resurgence. But it, you know, that definitely exposed me to albums like Wimoku Kikuchi Adventure and Piper Summer Breeze and so on and so forth. And, you know, importing those albums, even now from Japan with the week yen, it's still very expensive. Japanese album releases are very, very pricey.

So I don't do it a lot. But every once in a while, I kind of dip my toe in and I'm like, this seems interesting and give it a try. And I'm very rarely disappointed. Yeah. I mean, it's, it has been fun bringing that stuff out. It was, I remember, I think the first one we did was an album called Memories in Beach House, which was credited to a group called Seaside Lovers, but was like some of the best studio musicians around collaborating on that album and a few others that were done. It was like an anniversary project for CBS Sony at the time.

There was that one. there was one called Pacific, the agency, and one called New York. But we had only done memories of Beach House because that was the one that I just personally loved the most. And licensing from Sony isn't cheap. So we can only do one. But that album had such a great response. And I had sort of noticed this city pop stuff sort of getting very popular on YouTube with albums. like adventure and especially summer breeze so i took it upon myself to track down who owned these

things um with piper luckily the band had retained their ownership of the music so it was a pretty simple thing and we still um we still have a good relationship now materia is going to be putting out the Piper albums again and actually right before Shepter Shor ended and luckily we're going to keep the relationship going but they

had found soundboard recordings of like three or four Piper live shows that have never been released I don't think there's been any live material of them released at all so we're going to be putting out a project

next year that will sort of combine and collect the best parts of those shows into one album. So still very interested in putting out more city pop. You know, it's something that I am very fond of. And yeah, I'm looking forward to doing more of it. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be.

We're going to be able to be. Girl, shoot me up from here, to do you know, from here to toe. Girl, shoot me up from here to toe. of you who knows is the morning rain that's waves in the southern trees my hearts

jumping up and over love love is melting over you looking tall and show I'm out of mind my baby stay fancy free

someday in love we could share each other's heart just the thought of the heaven shining even brighter Love in the sun my island girl puts me to the farthest

I turn my hat up in the air To feel the clue there in my hair Summer's taking me up high Lover's paradise I'm lost In your chance my island girl We're going to be able to be. We're going to be.

We're going to be able to be. We're going to be able to do. You know, Thank you. Thank you. Oh, oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm going to be able to be.

Yeah, I'm curious to see what new horizons you can explore with Materia Collective. You know, I mentioned that big Famicom collection that Konami put out. It's like all of their Konami soundtracks or all their Famicom soundtracks, except anything that was licensed. So stuff like the Goonies 2, King Kong, so forth. Those are not accounted for. So I feel like that's the new horizon for video game soundtracks as getting stuff like that, like the Batman soundtrack from Sunsoft. I'm sure that'll be easy, no problem, just a fun afternoon for you,

get those rights sorted out. Easy breezy. I mean, yeah, I would love that. That's kind of my dream, my dream there. And also, you mentioned live recordings. you know, there are groups like the SST band and, you know, Zunata and so forth that did a lot of live performances and some of those made it to CD, but I don't know that they've ever been released on vinyl, so like... No, and that was... There's a laser disc I have, a couple of laser discs of, you know, like Super Scalar, Sega, arcade releases, just super play footage, and then they'll end with like live performances of those, that music by SST, and,

Like that, you know, Outrun and Galaxy Force and so forth, I feel like that music was meant to be performed live. So I'd love to hear that on vinyl someday. Just putting that out there. I mean, I would, you know, I love all that stuff. I mean, the live, the Zuntata live footage that you can see on YouTube is so incredible. There are such talented musicians to play that stuff. To do all that stuff in, like, the context of a game and then do concerts of it is just,

insanely impressive to me. And those are things I would definitely love to put out at some point. But yeah, I mean, in terms of the licensed stuff, I totally agree. You know, so many of the songs that I remember from my childhood

are tied to those licensed games. You know, Duck Tales. Yeah, the Ninja Turtles games, which now are coming out, thanks to limited run. So, you know, I think there's definitely opportunity on the horizon to see

a lot of those come out. Hope so. Yeah, that'd be great because I remember when I wrote the liner notes to Kid Dracula, I had to really write around the fact that the underwater theme sounded a lot like the underwater theme to the Goonies too. But I had to express it in a way that did not explicitly mention the word Goonies

so that they wouldn't come back to me and say... A movie with the children. We don't own this property. You can't talk about it. about it. Yeah. Well, it was interesting when we did Y, Why, Why, World One and Two, because, you know, Mikey is in it. King Kong is in it. And we could, like, we could draw them on the cover, but we could not talk about it. We could discuss the word Goonies or could not say Goonies or King Kong. But, yeah, that was a, I was surprised that they let us draw Mikey on the cover. I mean, it doesn't actually look like Sean Astin's. True. It's a boy, random boy. Yeah, it's a kid in a red jacket.

It could be anyone. Yeah, and it's just a giant monkey. It could be any giant monster. Exactly. There's so many of those. Maybe it's McGillah. Maybe it's, you know, grape ape. Yeah.

Exactly. All right. Well, I do not want to keep either of you any longer. There's a lot of music to splice into this episode, so I don't want to overload people's bandwidth for the stereo version of this. So I'm going to call today here. But thank you both for taking time out of your morning to talk about video games and video game music. And we'll end this by giving our usual bona fides.

As you may well know, you can find Retronauts on pretty much all of your favorite podcasting devices, just about every single platform out there. But most of all, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. That's how we support ourselves and eat meals and things like that. So your subscription helps fund this podcast and the humans who create it. Patreon.com slash retronauts. There's all kinds of bonuses if you subscribe at any tier above $3 a month. So check those out.

It's very exciting, very fulfilling. You could, for example, hear this podcast in full bandwidth quality with stereo and enjoy that music I know you want to so check it out anyway our guest Aaron where can we find you on the internet and support you in your work as I said I work for

Materia music you can find us all over the internet and our store is materia dot store so go check out the Castlevania release if you have any gaps in your ship to shore collections the entire catalog of

existing stock is available at material as well. And we're putting out new great material all the time. So thanks for having me on. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing future projects and cool new horizons like live SST band albums or something. Anyway, Nadio, where can we find you on the internet? Mostly on Acts of the Blog God, which was mentioned on this show. And we talked about this theme. It's all about RPG's old and new Eastern Western. It's me, myself, Kat Bailey, and Eric Van Allen.

We go live now every Saturday at, let's see here, 9 a.m. PT, 12 p.m. E.T. Yeah, I got that. So please join us, and of course we have a whole whack of like stuff you can listen to as a free subscriber and a paid subscriber. Please support us.

Also, as I guess you can surmise from this episode, I write words so if you need words written i am i am your word writer that's a good pitch isn't it yes you write good very good very good words very good words i write words i write words i write words i highly recommend thank you uh and finally you can find me jeremy parrish at here at retronauts at limited rungames dot com you can find me on social media on blue sky as j parrish very exciting and also on YouTube as Jeremy Parish. Sometimes it's a full name, sometimes it's initial. You never know. I like to keep you guessing, but I have many things that I do on the internet when I'm not listening to

video game music on vinyl. And I think I'm going to go do some more of that, actually. Sounds good. So thanks again, Aaron. Thanks again, Nadia. And thanks again, everyone for listening. We will be back again with more episodes like James Bond, except he doesn't podcast. He shoots people. Thank you. I don't know. I'm going to be able to I'm going to I'm going to

I'm I don't know. I'm going to be able to I'm going to I'm going to I'm Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.