Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 138: Ship to Shore's Konami jams & NES Maker

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

Jeremy speaks to Aaron Hamel about Ship to Shore's efforts to bring classic video game soundtracks like Lagrange Point, Darius, and Bayou Billy to the U.S. Then, Joe Granato shares the inside track on his successful Kickstarter project, the do-it-yourself 8-bit game creation kit NES Maker.

This week in Retronauts, that sure is some fine music. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts, and it's one, in a style I haven't done in quite a while it's a retronauts radio episode and we're going to talk about music but this one's going to be a little different

than the ones that I did last year instead of just me talking about music for a while I'm actually going to talk about music with one of the people responsible for bringing it to America on vinyl I'm on the phone with

Aaron Hamill of Ship to Shore Phono what's your role at Ship to Shore exactly Aaron I guess I'm nominally the vice president, but me and my partner, Justin, we just both do everything, basically. Okay, that's kind of like at Retronauts. I think I went for the title Mission Control, and Bob is co-imperor, so whatever works. That's pretty much the same as it is at Ship to Shore. So it's a small outfit, is what you're saying.

Yeah, very small, very small. You guys are one of the, I don't know, like a handful of things. companies that are really making a significant effort to bring classic video game music to the U.S. stuff that's never been released here officially before sometimes. And it's always on vinyl for you, isn't it? You're not one of the companies that does hybrids, right? No, well, we did a CD version of the mother soundtrack, but that's the only CD we've done. And we do try to do digital when we can, but oftentimes the licensing agreements just don't work for it. So that's the big consideration as licensing?

Yeah, especially for a lot of the retro titles. For whatever reason, it's often not easy to get like a digital license to do like streaming or iTunes or whatever. And in a lot of cases, like in the case of Taito, most of their retro. stuff is available on the U.S. iTunes store already. Oh, yeah, that's true. Taito, Zuntata, they're really good about putting their stuff up internationally for people to buy. So that's good on them. So I guess that does kind of limit your possibilities. But I'm not complaining since I've really grown to love music on vinyl. And in fact, your release of Axiom Verge is one of the first things that made me kind of sit up and say, oh, game music works really well on vinyl. Yeah. Well, that's great to hear. I mean, you know, I'm a vinyl devotee, so I'm happy to put stuff out only on vinyl. But, you know, if we have the opportunity to put out digitally, we like that too. But both Justin and I are big record collectors have been for most of our lives. So vinyl is really our passion. I'm sure I've talked about this before, but I liked listening to my parents' records when I was a kid. And then, CDs came out and became affordable. And I was like, ah, that's that's much better. And it wasn't until

more recently that my parents brought me a bunch of old records that I bought back when, like, you know, record stores, used record stores, were just getting rid of them for a dollar a piece. So I'd buy albums that I liked just to have the artwork, you know, at a big scale. So they brought that and dumped a couple of milk crates of music with me. I was like, I should get a record player and, you know, listen to this. And then I realized that the reason vinyl music in the past always sounded bad to me was because we never cared for the needle and we never, you know, used a brush to clean the surface of the records.

So it was always, you know, there was a lot of dirt and crud, just in static affecting the sound of the quality, sound quality of the sound. But, you know, once you listen to vinyl properly, it can sound really good. And the idea of digital music, you know, video game music. music in an analog format, like vinyl, used to seem really bizarre to me. I remember seeing you know, Dragon Quest albums from the 80s in record, not record stores, but like vintage game shops in Tokyo. Yeah. Actually, I think that that, I remember, I think it was you and Chris Kohler did a video where you showed that, that Dragon Quest at Super Potato. And I think

that was the first time I ever even saw that there. was game music on vinyl. So, you know, you're responsible for my career in a way. That's, uh, that's quite a tidbit. I didn't realize that. That's awesome. Yeah, I remember that video when we did the retronauts, I think it was called bonus stage videos, which were like a little five to ten minute videos that, um, I threw together in some crappy Apple software and, uh, eventually became so time consuming that we had to stop. And then they shot down one up, so, you know, whatever. But, um, those, those were fun to do. And yeah, we did definitely do one at, um, a bunch of places in Tokyo. We were in Super Potato and then there was a place out near where

Tokyo Game Show is conducted. It's like one stop away on the train and you get off at an IKEA and walk like half a mile and all of a sudden there's this just like huge warehouse of old stuff and they have tons and tons of old games. Yeah, it's like it's a I don't even know how to compare it to anything in the U.S. It's it's just a massive sprawl of used stuff and it's amazing what you know how good the condition is and just what people will will resell and and buy over there but yeah um yeah when i went there when i went there it's yeah it is a bit of a sidetrack but yes totally when i went you know just going to all the bookoffs is a treasure trove of music and old games and dvds it's amazing the condition of

Yeah, it's funny. When I went to Japan last year, last spring, I was like, man, I'm going to pick up some classic video game music on vinyl. It's going to be awesome. And it turns out that's really hard to find. The big thing over there now is cassette music, like vintage cassettes. And I don't ever see myself pining for that particular medium. That was never, to me, like, the good option. It was the option that I bought because it's what I could afford and it worked in my car. But yeah, it's the same with me. And the same with like VHS cass cassettes. when I see, you know, new VHS cassettes come out. I'm like, I don't understand this at all. There are still some people who own VHS players. They never moved to DVD, but I think there are a pretty vanishingly small number of people. But anyway, yeah, this is all kind of a digression. But I have been, you know, a big fan of the music you've been putting out to the point that, you know, I've written a bunch of liner notes for some of your releases.

So I guess I'm. I'm, it's kind of inside pool or inside baseball at this point. But yeah, I've been really impressed with some of the license you've, you've picked up and how eclectic your selections are. Well, thank you. We definitely pride ourselves on that as well, especially with some of the more obscure things like Lagrange Point or even Kid Dracula, which never came to the U.S. on the, on the NES. We got the Game Boy version, but, so we definitely like having an eclectic library and it all, you know, like LaGrange Point. I think that's another Retronauts connection, actually. I think I remember an episode where Shane Bettenhausen talked about it and that's what got me to look it up

and I was obsessed with it from that point on. Yeah, that could very well be. I mean, that's one of those that I knew about by reputation because the, you know, it has that specialty chip in that gave it more like somewhere between master system and Sega Genesis quality sound coming from the NES. So I don't know that I'd never ever actually want to play Lagrange Point all the way through because it is an 8-bit RPG with all the unfriendliness that entails. But the soundtrack is amazing. Having tried to play it, you don't want to.

Yeah, but having the soundtrack, which is definitely the most remarkable thing about the game, like having that on vinyl is pretty amazing. that was a great get. It's, it's interesting because Mondo music is also, they've also picked up a lot of Konami licenses. So it seems like you guys are kind of, I don't know, like, how does that work out if you can talk about the behind the scenes licensing? Like, they seem to have ended up with Castlevania, Contra, Silent Hill, whereas you have, Kid Dracula is Castlevania by another name, but then you have, you know, Bayou Billy and LaGrange Point, and I see you guys just announced Graddeus.

So that's, you know, there's some pretty heavy hitters in there. It's not like they got all the good licenses. So, yeah, I'm curious about that. I mean, it's, I got the licensing manager at Konami's email from a friend who works at another record label. And I emailed them. I think the first deal we did was for Snatcher and Lagrangelo. LaGrange Point. I just emailed them and talked about it. They were very confused that anyone

would want to license LaGrange Point in America, certainly. But it was a pretty simple process, a pretty standard licensing process. You just send a proposal. They, you know, you negotiate on that proposal, and then you work on them with the art. And as you know, dealing with them with the liner notes and stuff as we've dealt with in the past. Yeah, I mean, their liner notes process hasn't been too painful. They're very particular about things they'll allow you to say. But it's nothing that surprised me having worked with Japanese corporations before. I kind of have a feel for what is considered, oh, please don't mention that.

Please don't mention the existence of other corporations besides ours, that kind of thing. That's just kind of, you know, it's like boilerplate almost. Yeah. So, but yeah, you know, it's, it's pretty, it's like dealing with any other company. I mean, we've dealt with like movie companies and other, you know, bigger music companies licensing reissues. It's really no different than that other than, other than the confusion that the Japanese side can have sometimes that, you know, Americans would want this stuff. But yeah, I mean, Konami just put out today on virtual console for Wii U an unlocalized PC-engine RPG. It's like an RPG, like a Dragon Quest clone called Necromancy, I think. And it's never, I don't know if it's ever been fan-translated, but they just dumped the Japanese ROM onto the American Virtual Console. And everyone's like, what are you, what are you guys doing?

What? So weird. I mean, I'm shocked that I didn't even realize there were still a virtual console games going up on Wii U at all. That's, alone is kind of insane. pretty much just Konami at this point they're really going heavy on their mostly their HUDs and stuff and their PC engine stuff

I don't get it the speculation that I've heard is that there's some licenses about to run out so they just want to get everything up as fast as they can and try to get a little cash out of it but it's weird like you know to get stuff on virtual console you have to run it through ESRB if I'm not mistaken like

I don't know how much it costs to go through ESRB. I know it's not as expensive as it used to be, but still, like, do they really think they're going to make back their money on necromancy, a Japanese language RPG in America? Did you buy it? I did not. I have no intention of buying it. Like, I don't want to encourage that kind of thing. Don't. Don't get me unlocalized games. I mean, you know, if it's like Rondo of Blood, I can do that because, you know, the plot's not that important and it's about, you know, killing stuff with a whip. But an RPG that plays like Dragon Quest, maybe not.

Yeah, that's crazy. Maybe they'll dump Lagrange point at some point. Probably not, though. It's all been PC engine stuff. I don't get it. It's weird. Anyway, another digression. Yeah, I was hoping we could, uh, you know, do kind of like the basics here and talk about what, what the origin story behind ship to shore is and how you guys got into, uh, uh, public.

game music. Like, what, how did, how did you go from saying, oh, look, there's Jeremy Parrish and Chris Kohler joking about a Dragon Quest record that they saw in Tokyo to 10 years later, you know, like publishing, not Dragon Quest, but, you know, video game music on vinyl? Well, when I graduated college in 2012 and moved to New York and got a job at trauma entertainment. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Oh, yeah? Yeah, okay. Yeah. So, Yeah. So I worked in the, I was, they were producing a movie at the time. So I was the assistant director on the movie. And then when we got back to New York, I worked on the office. And that's where I met, uh, met my business partner, Justin. And Justin is the world's foremost authority on, um, Tiny Tim. He wrote his biography and has a, has an immense collection of tiny Tim, abelia. Um, and he had a, he had a, he had an act. of an unreleased Tiny Tim song and one of Tiny Tim's greatest, you know, dreams when he was alive was to release a song on an Edison cylinder. So he proposed this idea to me and we pulled

our, you know, I thought it was a fun sounding idea. So we pooled our money together, made that happen. We made 75 copies of it. We found a guy in California who can make Edison cylinders today. Yeah, I was going to say, how do you even make an editing? and cylinder, like a hundred, however many years later? Well, basically, from what I understand, what he does is he finds old ones that are too moldy to play, and then he shaves down the wax a little bit, so he can write new, you know, you can make new grooves. I don't know exactly how he writes the grooves, but I did see a video of it playing

on a Victrola, so that was pretty cool. But anyway. It's crazy. So have you ever actually heard the cylinder that you guys put out? I've never heard it in person, but he sent us a video of it playing on his machine. But we included a download card in the cylinder so that, you know, for the 99.9% of people who bought it who don't have one, they could still listen to it. But yeah, anyway, after we got, after we did that, and it was a pretty, you know, reasonable success we you know started thinking well we could do vinyl

vinyl records we're both interested in it and would like to do it so the first thing we did was work with trauma on a release and then that went well and then we did a we did a couple other releases and then i i started thinking you know i would love to do video game music on vinyl uh and that's when i started trying to working with sony to do the mother and Mother 2 projects. Yeah, you guys, you guys started big. Like, you didn't go for, you know, the table scraps from the start and work your way up. Like, you went for these two games that are deeply beloved by the Nintendo fan base and that, you know, their music has quite a legacy, especially for Earthbound for Mother 2.

So the impression I got, you know, looking at the vinyl for Mother 2 is that you basically took the CD release that Sony put out. out in the 90s and sort of turned that into, you know, the, an equivalent vinyl, like a blown up, you know, not blown up. Well, yeah, like the packaging is basically, you know, I'm assuming you worked from the original photography or whatever, their archival files and stuff. Yeah, they had, I was actually really surprised that they still had a lot of that stuff, you know, and in very, very good high-res versions. So we did have a lot to work with.

For the audio, they I don't know exactly what they did because Sony handled all of the audio themselves, but I do know that they went back to whatever the original files were and made a completely new master for

the vinyl version. They actually had to do it twice for Mother 2. The latest repress, they went back and did it again because the plates we used to press the first press of it were destroyed by accident. So actually, I think the second press of Mother 2 is the best it has ever sounded. Okay, so they did not just master it from the CD, which is often a problem with people who are jumping on the vinyl research into bandwagon. They're like, oh, well, we can just, you know, take the

the CD rips, the AIF files or whatever, and turn those into records. So it's always, it's always encouraging to hear from, from publishers who don't take that approach and actually go back to, you know, the studio masters or, you know, source files or whatever. Or in the case, I know for a lot of the things you've done, you've recorded them yourself from hardware. Yes. Yes. I mean, well, in the, but in the case of Mother 1, they did go back to the, you know, because that's all, most of it were studio recorded tracks. So they were able to actually go back to the studio masters and do that. I'm not 100% certain exactly what they did for Mother 2,

but I know they went back to, they didn't just use the CD Master, which was something that was very important to me for them not to do. So, yeah, I think most people don't realize, like they see, you know, the mother soundtrack and they're like, wow, Nintendo's putting music on vinyl. Yeah. But that is kind of an unusual case because I don't know exactly why. the original CDs were put out by Sony, but they were. And this was, of course, after the Nintendo PlayStation deal fell through, but Sony is like a hydra and has many heads.

And so I'm sure that was like Sony Music Group as opposed to Sony Computer Entertainment. So there was probably no bad blood there. The music people may not even have known that there was a falling out with Nintendo. Who even knows? Yeah. I mean, it's, it is interesting. There were many other Nintendo soundtracks released by Sony at that time. I always hypothesized that it had something to do with the Sony PlayStation deal, that it was, or with the, or it might even go back to, because Sony produced the sound hardware in the Super NES, right?

So it may have something to do with that, perhaps, because there's a lot of Super NES soundtracks released by Sony on CD. There's, there's a Super Metroid one. There's a link to the past one. I think there's another, I think there's another one too. But oddly, those are not available anymore. They don't own those anymore, but they do own Mother and Under 2. I think it might have something to do with E. Toy, perhaps. It's hard to get a straight answer sometimes. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Mother is an unusual Nintendo title because there's a lot of fingers in the pie. So, like, the composers no longer work at Nintendo, and E. Toy was never with Nintendo.

he's just a friend. Yeah. And it was co-developed by, you know, outside studios. So, yeah, I don't know. That's interesting. You would think, though, that having so many different entities and people involved in the soundtracks would make the rights more difficult, not easier. Well, that's what I, I mean, that's what I thought when we,

when I initially, you know, sent the request to Sony for this. I thought they would just come back and say no. But surprisingly, they didn't. It's good for me. Right. And so that was the first time the mother soundtracks had been released on vinyl, correct? Because I know certainly Mother 2 was, like, it's too long to fit onto a single vinyl disc. So it was mastered for CD originally, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, both were released on CD. I think Mother 1 was also released on cassette, but definitely not. Definitely not vinyl. So, yeah, this was the first part. So did these releases of yours make it over to Japan also? Or has someone in Japan, like a Japanese publisher, said, oh, someone in America is releasing these on vinyl, we should also do that. Our releases did make it over to Japan.

And, in fact, I Toi has one in his collection. The fan gamer guys were shooting a documentary. And they went over to interview him and they gave him a copy. And I guess he just looked at them. for a minute and just went, you guys are so weird over there. And I know that Keichi Suzuki has one as well,

which is cool. I saw a picture of him in his office, and he had them behind him, which was really neat to see. And actually, when I was over in Japan, I saw a few in some disc union stores around, so they're over there.

So you said you've looked after the rights to the other Sony many Nintendo soundtracks, but none of those are available? Yeah, I've put in requests for every other one I can find information on anyway, and yeah, none of them are currently owned by Sony, so. Okay, so after that, how did, the next game release you did was Axiom Verge, right? Mm-hmm, yep. Yeah, so that's not retro, obviously.

How did you land on that one? that one I just I was actually talking with a guy who was representing like the licensing for Axiom Verge at the time his name's Jesse Dostasio and he he had a lot of things including Shovel night at the time which we didn't end up putting out but Axiom Verge was one of them and I had seen the trailers for the game at the time I hadn't yet played it and it certainly looked up my alley um and i loved what i heard of the music so he set up a call with thomas and we had a long nice chat and we were pretty much good to go i mean he was very easy to deal with he did uh he you know the the soundtrack as it stands on his band camp and on the digital versions is too long to fit on a disc so he cut a few tracks that he didn't you know think we're really necessary for a physical release um and he made like his you know i wanted to make it his out you know his perfect album and uh i think we i think we got there so from there

how have you you know made selections on what you want to release like i i feel like there's probably a behind-the-scenes scramble going on with different publishers going after different licenses like data disks seems pretty much, you know, wed to Sega. But, you know, then you have Brave Wave, you have Mondo, you have you guys. I think there's a couple of others who are, yeah, like Scarlet Moon. There's a few others who are kind of in the same line of work. I AM8Bit does some metro stuff. Yeah, there certainly is that.

but I think we go after things that are a little more off the beaten path that a lot of like a bigger like a bigger company like Mondo for instance I don't think would put out LaGrange Point so I felt safe requesting for a Lagrange Point or a Bayou Billy or you know whatever stuff like that so I think that's kind of where we found our niche and I like that I like putting that stuff out because I find it very interesting and um they do so you know they do surprisingly well i'm always amazed that people will buy you know are buying a la grange point a game that never came out here and is fairly obscure even in japan uh so uh i think that's that's where we've landed and i i like that how obscure do you think you guys are willing to go uh i mean i think we've already gone pretty obscure. You can always go further, though. Yes, that's true. I mean, there's some, there are some more Konami stuff in the future that we're looking at that I think is even more obscure than the Grange Point. Some Taito stuff as well. I mean, there's a wealth of obscure

Zunata material out there. Yeah. Yeah, I had to look up some of the ones. that I wrote liner notes for. I was like, oh, yeah, elevator action too. Awesome. But what is metal black? I actually got to play, crap, what was the third one of that? Night Striker? Yes, I actually got to play that at a, I think, Akihabara Hay or Taito Hay or whatever it's called. Yeah, I played it there too. I actually went with these, with Zuntata to Taito Hay to play that, you know, that floor of all the old games. Yeah, that's awesome. It was great. Yeah, I had a great moment last year when I was kind of like needing to do research on Pooley Rula for liner notes on that Zunata release. And I walked into, I think Taito Hay was.

And like as soon as I came up the stairs, there was Pooley Rula. So I was like, okay, this was meant to be. I need to play this. I'm going to finally sit down and play this game in an arcade. I can't actually hear the music but at least now I have a feel for what the game is like and it did not disappoint

it's super weird yes it is very weird that's cool though that you I don't remember seeing it when I was at Taito Hay I wish I You know they they do that thing where they have the Astro City cabs or whatever they're called the candy cabs and

they just swap out titles all the time like every time I go there every you know last year I went in February and then again in May and the games were like half of them were totally different than what they had been three months before. So, you know, they just keep things cycling and circulating, but that was just great timing. I was like, oh, okay. This is, this is Kismet here. Yeah, that's awesome. I remember being there. I don't know if they still have

these, but every, every cab had a headphone jack, so you could listen to the music and headphones while you played. So, yes, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, you're, you're, you're, you're very right that there's, uh, you can always go more obscure. And I think, I think we'll get there. So with, with, with Konami, you know, they own Hudson and Taito, of course, you know, that's part of square. Orinix, have you been able to explore any of those corporations and their histories through that connection? We're definitely exploring Hudson. You know, there's a lot of great stuff to mine in that library that hasn't been really explored yet by anybody. And I think that there's definitely going to be some things coming out from in that realm.

That's interesting. I can't say exactly what. but I think in the future there'll be some Hudson material as far as Square Enix goes have not been able to crack that nut yet but who knows they're pretty heavily invested in their own music publishing

so that may be that may be difficult I mean that they reissue old soundtracks and reiterate on soundtracks and you know remix and so on and so forth to no end and that's a big part of their business so yeah that might be that might be difficult but it's cool that you guys have Taito at least

Oh yeah I mean they've they've been tremendous to work with I've I when I went over to Japan I met I met with them at the Square Enix building and they were just So so so lovely it was great to go out with them and talk talk game music with Zunata It's like a wish for the moment thing Yeah yeah I mean it's it's it's a this is again a digression but I found it interesting that in my experience and you know what what few times I've met with them.

The title folks don't really seem to have been absorbed into Square Inix. Like Square owns the company, but hasn't really pressed the issue. So they kind of still exist in this independent bubble, sort of doing their own thing. You don't really, you don't really see that all that often. But I guess they got to keep their own kingdom. Yeah, they had their own conference room in the, in the Square Inix building that has a space invader wall paper and like it's a very tito focused conference room

which I found interesting. So yeah I think they do have some sort of level of autonomy that that is great for us at this point. So shifting gears I'd like to talk about some of your most recent releases like you recently sent

over a care package pretty much of let's see what was in it. Kid Dracula and Rocket Night and welcome to the fantasy zone and then the little promo flex-a-disc of bubble-bobble and something else. I'm scared to use that.

I'm afraid it's super fragile. I don't know. I was actually surprised at the resilient, you know, because I have a few flexies from, you know, way back and they are very brittle. But these actually came out pretty resilient. I don't know exactly how long they'll last,

but they feel a lot more substantial than the old ones did. Yeah, I mean, those are plastic as opposed to wax. So plastic formulation has gotten a lot better over the ears. Like modern plastics are lighter, more flexible, more durable, less likely to turn into, you know, like yellow dust after a few years. So yeah, I think you're safe to play it at least once. Okay. But yeah, let's see.

The Kid Dracula soundtrack, I was really happy to contribute the liner notes to that. because I've always been kind of fascinated by that game. It's like this weird splinter offshoot of Castlevania that kind of plays like Mega Man, but it's still definitely Castlevania. And in fact, the first stage is like a parody of like a run-through Castlevania 3, and you play as Allure card. But then they drew on that game for Symphony the Night, and the super boss at the bottom of the inverted castle is, in fact,

Gallimoth, the final boss. from Kid Dracula. So, like, in a weird sort of sideways manner, they have paid tribute to it in the actual canon Castlevania Games. But, like, the whole game is just kind of bonkers. Like, it's all over the place. Oh, it's insane. And I, I mean, I always liked it, you know, when I was younger going through the Castlevania games, I was really drawn to that one because it was the one that I could conceivably beat. Because it is, it is much easier than the more, you know, than one through three, anyway. So I always like that.

And just the bizarreness, I mean, you talk about it in your liner notes, too, but just that sort of Japanese tradition of the parody game, which is, you know, it's not a thing here. And Konami seemed to be the masters of the form in a lot of ways between parodies and this. It's interesting because the parody game over there is never satirizing other people games it's always making fun of your own it's like hey you love our game well here's us making fun of it which is such an interesting approach but yeah like like you said castle o'conami is sort of the master of the form you know you've got sd snatcher you've got um kid dracula

why why why world yes why why world which is like the whole shebang right there which we're going to be that's we're going to be working on those two the one one and two and i'm very excited for two. I think that's got the best rendition of bloody tears on the NES. Huh. Interesting. Okay. So, yeah, like, I hadn't even considered, you know, the soundtrack to those games, but that is kind of like Konami's greatest hits right there. Exactly. That's why I really wanted to put those out because, you know, for that reason, it is, it's Konami's greatest hits. It's fantastic. But, yeah, back to Kid Dracula, the music starts out as, how would you even characterize that first stage, you know, it's, it's beginning from Castlevania 3.

yeah but like what what the hell genre is that like what style of music is that it's not like a it's not like you know mombo or calliope but it's it's kind of a little bit It kind of has that Mamba Mamba feel with that jaunty beat, but it, I don't know, to me, it just is emblematic of like, you know, an old cartoon or something. I just, it's so, it's so very catchy. I love the, that, that, that, that bouncy, bounciness to it. Yeah, like that's, maybe that's its own genre, just bouncy music. Yeah, yes.

But, yeah, like, I had the hardest time. when I was writing about that, like trying to characterize it because it doesn't fit into any specific musical genre. But it's just like this weird, like, upbeat,

happy rendition of one of the coolest, you know, most butt-kicking Castlevania tunes ever. Yeah. It's so inappropriate. It's like a fun house mirror version of it. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, very carnival-esque. All the music the game is it feels like you're at a carnival or something. Well, not all of it. That's a thing, though, is that it does kind of, like, have this tonal shift. And, like, I feel there's a difference between side one of the record and side two. Like, side two, you flip it. And you've got, like, this, you know, proto-Egyptian music. Yeah, when you're on the ground. Yeah, like, that could come from any, any NES game that has an Egypt theme. Like, if you stuck that in, you know, the life

force level that they added where you're, like, you fight Tutankhammon at the end. And you could just put that in there and you'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, this works. But no, it's in the same music, the same game that has the goofy cartoon rendition of beginning from Castlevania 3. It's, it's, it's, it's eclectic, but it works. Yeah, yeah, I love the ending, the very last song. It has that same kind of bouncy feeling to it. It's an interesting song for the end of the game. Definitely not what you would expect from Castlevania.

Yeah, I've, I've never actually Yeah, I've never actually finished Kidrek is that like the end credits theme or is it like the boss music it's the end credits theme yeah the the the the boss music is more like a more traditional sort of boss any s boss song but yeah the end credits music is a very interesting yeah it kind of brings things back full circle like Thank you. Rocket Night, on the other hand, I feel pretty familiar with Kid Dracula music. I think my first encounter with Kid Dracula soundtrack was the Japanese version of Castlevania Symphony The Night.

I don't know if you ever saw that edition of it, but it came in like this big, thick, not like a container, but a case. Yes, that's the word, that had like a booklet with art and manga in it. And then the CD itself was, had this really great. silk screened illustration of ala card on it. But then it also had a soundtrack CD that had just basically like, you know, best Castlevania music to this point. And all of it I recognized except this one like super cheerful, happy music. And I was like, what the hell is this? So it wasn't until sometime later that I was like, oh, okay, that's from Kid Dracula. Now I know. But yeah, like even though it's a game that never came to the U.S. I still was familiar with the

music before I played it, but before I, you know, sat down to listen to the record. But Rocket Night I'm not as familiar with. It's the, the version you published is just the the Mega Drive version, the Genesis version, right? Not the Super NES. Yeah, that's the sequel. Yeah, it's the Genesis version. And that's just Rocket Night, right? Not Rocket Night and Sparkster. No. So yeah, it's Rocket Night Adventures and then the sequel on Genesis It's called Sparkster, Rocket Night Adventures 2, and then on the Super Nintendo, there's just Sparkster. So it's kind of confusing. But those two are two completely different games.

It's very strange lineage. As often happened, like, you know, the Aladdin's or whatever. Yeah, yeah. But this version, this record is just Rocket Night Adventures. Yes, yes. Okay. Just the first game. So is that something like a series that you have a strong?

personal connection to, or did you just kind of jump in because, you know, kind of like a lesser-known Konami soundtrack that sounds great, but it still doesn't have, you know, the kind of mainstream cachet of Castlevania? Yeah, I mean, I didn't have a Genesis as a kid or anything like that. And I only knew one other kid who had one, and I never played Rocket Night. but as I got older, just getting more into video game music in general, and particularly Konami's stuff, eventually I came across Rocket Night, and, you know, the Genesis can sound so crappy in many ways, and I think Konami's stuff is, I think Konami's stuff on the Genesis is just as good as some of Sega stuff.

on the Genesis as music what music wise. the complete the um especially on rocket night the uh i was so impressed by all the different genres of music that they were able to go through and do so well with that fm fm synth sound like there's that uh it's the last song on the first side but it's that jazzy number it sounds like lounge music and it's just totally not what i would have thought would have come come from a game about a rocket-powered possum. Yeah, calling Sega Genesis music occasionally crappy is kind of a sore point with a lot of people.

I always tread very lightly when I characterize Genesis music, and I'm always very careful to say, in the right hands, that sound chip was amazing. Oh, certainly, yes. In not the right hands, it could really hurt. Yeah, which is true of the Super NES as well. Robinning robots is a popular description. Yes. Yeah, Super Nias.

It was a different problem. It was more like, oh, you just went with a slap-based sound font that was built into the system. That's boring. Yeah. But, yeah, Genesis had this tendency, like, in the wrong hands to be really shrill. And there were some hardware issues there where different consoles can have different sound quality, too, which is tricky. Oh, yes. But Konami, like, they, yeah, I agree.

They didn't do a lot on Genesis. It was definitely sort of the, you know, the deprecated system in Japan. So they didn't focus on it that much. But, you know, the games that they did produce, you really felt like the people working on those games, you know, even though that wasn't necessarily going to sell huge numbers for them in their home territory, they were still like, you know, we're going to do our best here. So you get, you know, a really great classic, classic Castlevania. You get a crazy multi-character congera game. You get Rocket Night, which is totally original and clearly was their take on the sonic phenomenon, but in a completely unique way that feels very, it feels very Konami. And then, you know, the soundtracks matched.

Like the soundtrack to, I know, Castlevania Bloodlines is just like amazing. You listen to that and you're like, this is. This is the same hardware that gave us, like, I don't know. I can't think of a terrible. Is that a bad soundtrack? I can't. It's very shrill. All I remember, I just remember the game over music, and it's just the most shrill.

I used to drive me nuts as a kid. Yeah, but Konami just didn't make bad soundtracks back then. Like any, you can play the worst NES game that's, that, you know, Konami or Ultra Games published, it can be complete garbage, but the soundtrack is still going to be awesome. Like, um, Skate or Die Bad and Rat. I recently, you know, did a retrospective on that, uh, for video. And like, that game is not fun, but man, the soundtrack just cooks. It's so good. It's like the sound work they did was sometimes so much better than the game's deserved.

But Rocket Now, you know, that's a great game in and of itself. I haven't played all the way through it. But, you know, what I have played of it, I'm like, man, this controls really well. It's inventive. It has a very technique-driven design. Yeah, it looks great, and it sounds great. Yeah, it's just a solid game all around, and it's a shame that it's not as well known

as I think a lot of the other big Konami franchises, even though it seemed to sell very well because the cartridges aren't that expensive. There must be a lot of them out there. Yeah, it's weird because, you know, the lead designer on that was, I can't remember his full name, but Nakazato, the guy who also worked on a lot of Contra games. So it's got, you know, it's got like, it's got creed in there. It's got that baked into it. But yeah, but yeah, just, I guess maybe people were just so burnt out

on marsupials with attitude by that point after all the sonic impersonators, you know, like Zero the Kamikaze squirrel and Arrow the Acrobat and you get, you know, Bubsy the Bobcat. After a dozen of those, you're like, okay, I get it. Fuzzy animals that kill stuff. Okay, that's boring. So, you know, by jumping on that bandwagon, maybe Konami kind of limited their audience to people who were still willing to get that, that idea, chance and not realize that, oh, hey, it's, you know, peak Konami. Maybe this game is going to be good no matter what. Yeah. Yeah. Was Rocket Night ever put on virtual console? I don't remember ever seeing it.

I feel like it must have been. It's been a long time. But, yeah, Konami, you know, actually, It may not have been. Konami is supported virtual console and has. And there was Genesis virtual console on Wii. But as I think about it, I'm not sure if Konami released any of their Genesis games. Yeah, I don't remember seeing bloodlines on there either. Yeah, that was the, that's, yeah, that stands out as the one Castlevania game, the vintage Castlevania game. You can't buy in any digital format. So, yeah, I think the company just kind of was like, a mega drive,

whatever, who cares. Yeah. Which is a shame because Rocket Knight is really cool. Yeah, I mean, all of their Genesis games have a tremendous amount of polish to them. I mean, I think it is like what you said, that, you know, there were just so few that whoever, you know, they knew they would be, you know, they wouldn't sell as well. So whoever was doing them must have put a lot of passion into them and it shows. Yeah, I mean, Kahnami almost supported the 32X. Like Symphony of the Night was originally going to be, I think it was Symphony was going to be a 32x game. And then they were like, ah, no, let's not do that. So they win a different direction. Yeah. But yeah, like, I don't know. It's an odd one.

But the, you know, again, the soundtrack's always great. And yeah, actually kind of speaking of, you know, sort of mediocre NES games with great soundtracks, I'm glad you guys picked up Bayoubilly because the NES version of that is deeply broken and not actually that much fun. because of all the changes they made from the Japanese version, man, that's another really great soundtrack. And they really used the sampling channel in that particular soundtrack to create kind of like an electric guitar sound and not like a, you know, not like butt rock. It doesn't sound like a Capcom megamaic soundtrack. It's got a different character all of its own. It sounds like the strumming of like an acoustic guitar or more like, you know, more low-key sound guitar than, you know, you know. know, the butt rock style. Yeah, I think the notes I got back on the liner notes from Konami was like,

please use the word strum or something along those lines. Like they found that was very important. that you, you characterize it that way, which I thought was interesting. I don't know that I've ever gotten an edit quite like that from a corporation. Like, please describe our style in this fashion. But they were very specific about that word. Yes, I remember that. I remember finding that amazing that they had, they apparently have somebody on their staff that work, that's still there that worked on the Biobilly soundtrack and remembers working countless hours trying to figure out how to get that strum sound out of the NES is amazing.

Yeah, that's, Konami is such a strange company. Like they, I don't really get them, but there is still some of that very classic Japanese corporation mentality built into them where, you know, you're a lifer once you start here. And you see the high profile departures like Hideo Kojima and, you know, Kojiigarashi. to go do their own things. But I think a lot of people who work there have been there a long time and they've just, you know, they've, they've moved in the company to places where they never interact with the public. But, you know, they can, they can send an office courier over

there to say, hey, can you can you explain this to us? You know, they're probably working on like some marketing program or something for a gymnasium. But, you know, they still remember when they were 23, uh, working 14 hour days and sleeping under their desk to make that, that Bayou Billy game happen. Yeah, I do get, you know, it's, I get strange notes from them sometimes. Like I remember working on snatcher. Um, and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, lineup of all the characters. Um, and my first draft of it just had all of them the same size, except for metal gear, the little robot. And their note on it was they just sent back a list of all the characters and their heights.

And they were like, it has to be relative to this. I found that very interesting. Yeah, I can actually see that, though. Yeah. They probably would have sent you their blood types, too, if that had somehow been relevant to their presentation. I believe, yes, their blood types are in the manual. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the kind of world building that you see. and a lot of games of that era probably still now too but it is such a very specific like anime you know late 80s early 90s kind of kind of thing to do like these characters are you know they have

their parameter set they are this height yeah this is their personality this is their favorite food yes but it just impressed me that there's somebody over on the Japan side that saw it and cared enough about Snatcher to

send that. So somebody over there still really loves Snatcher, at least one person. Yeah. I have to imagine that, you know, people who worked kind of in the trenches on these games when they were a lot younger, like they still have a soft spot for it. They probably don't get to work on a lot of video games anymore, you know, being at Konami. So, yeah, I can see that being kind of like, oh, yeah, that was a good time. I remember that. I love that. that. Like, you know, if someone needed me to provide commentary about specifics of working at oneup.com 15 years ago, I'd be like, oh, yeah, well, here's what I can tell you about that, even though I haven't been there in ages, just because that's like a, you know, a fondly remembered time

in my life, too. So I get it. And it's cool that they still, you know, have these people in their employ and that they're willing to put you in touch with them. And whenever I get notes back from Konami. And it's like very specific from someone who clearly worked on the game. It always makes me happy. I'm like, I wonder who this person is. I would love to just talk to them. They must be so, they must have so many interesting stories. Oh yeah. I think about that all the time when I get no end. And it's the same when I spoke with, uh, uh, Hiseyogura for the Darius soundtrack and working with him on his liner notes for that release. And just like the, the technical minutiae he would go into, I found just endlessly fascinating, like working, you know, that soundtrack is very

experimental. And just hearing him talk about using this very primitive hardware to be, to make such ambitious experimental music was really fast. So just one of the most recent One of the most recent soundtracks you guys have published was, that's not a soundtrack actually. It's Welcome to the Fantasy Zone by Krista Lee. Yes.

And I had, I was not familiar with that before I sat down to listen to it. I was under the impression it was like some sort of, you know, like covers of game music, but it's not. It's like original compositions that have elements of game soundtracks in them, which, it's a really good sound. It's not soundtrack. It's a really good record. It's a great like sort of modern chip tune sort of, uh, piece of music, you know, set of music with

little hints of familiar sounds. A lot of it very Sega-ish. But it's, how did you guys get it's, how did you guys get linked up with that? Well, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I just had you guys get linked up with that? What's, what's the story behind that record? Well, I just had found the album just browsing through band camp, like maybe a year before we put out the record. And one day I was just on the subway listening to it and just thought, like, why don't I just email her

and see if we can put it out on vinyl? Because at that point, we hadn't really done a lot of non-soundtrack stuff and it's something we wanted to experiment with. um and you know it was a really great album so i thought it was the perfect and it's sort of tied into the video game stuff so it seemed like a good place to start um i just got in touch with christa and she had just released it on cassette through a label in germany but they didn't have any plans to do a vinyl release and she was thrilled to uh you know get a vinyl release out there and we just went from there she ended she had to cut a few of the track of uh like about

a couple minutes out of a couple of the tracks. But it came out really good. I'm really proud of that one. Yeah, I didn't notice any like seams or anything, not having been familiar with the longer versions of the tracks, I wasn't like, oh, wow, something's missing here. It all holds up really well. It's very cohesive.

And even though, you know, it's all pretty chip tune oriented, there's a lot of diversity within the styles that she used. So, yeah. I feel kind of bad for not having been familiar with this, but it's a great set of music. And I was actually kind of frustrated by the packaging because I wanted to find out more about this as I was listening. So, you know, I like pulled out the record sleeve and was, you know, trying to find any kind of information about it. But it's just this very cryptic, like a smiling, pixelated woman's face that says, welcome to the fantasy zone. And you pull out the sleeve and it just says, welcome to the fantasy zone over and over again.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's, uh, that's, uh, that was the, that was the direction we decided to go in and, uh, I, I do know, I have heard from people that they want to know more about it. I've heard that, that before, but, um, you know, maybe the next, I know Chris is working on a sequel album. Um, she's calling it Welcome to the Fantasy Zone Model 2. So that should be, that should be pretty interesting. So I'm sure we'll be working together on that as well. Thank you. Yeah, well, I really like the vinyl pressing that you guys went with, the white with pink spatters. You don't see that a lot in video game music. It's always, you know, manlier colors like burnished gold or ox blood or something. But, like, it fits the visual style. even though it's not a Sega release, like the color scheme feels very Sega-ish. It's got that kind of, you know, fantasy zone pastel that's that really stands apart.

Yeah, that's definitely, I mean, it was done by a woman who goes by data erase. I don't think she, she didn't want to be actually credited on the sleeve for whatever reason. But, yeah, it was done by her. and yeah she really did a fantastic job capturing the feel of the album in the artwork especially as I particularly love that that inner sleeve with Welcome to Fantasy Zone and over and over again So to wrap up. So to wrap up, can you talk any about upcoming plans you have or ambitions that haven't been realized?

Like, if you had a, well, first let me ask you, like, if you could bring any one game soundtrack to vinyl for the world to enjoy, what would that be? Metal Gear Solid. Or? The original? The PlayStation 1? Yeah, the PlayStation 1, but I would love to do that, and I would love to do Metal Gear 2, Solid Snake. I think that is a masterpiece soundtrack on the MSX. It's so good.

so who knows that those two are my real i mean the nintendo stuff as well but you know i'm not i'm not holding my breath to get me nintendo stuff right yeah but yeah i'm actually now that you say it i'm i'm surprised we haven't seen any metal gear on vinyl from anyone is that something you've asked about and you can't get access to it or is it just something that you can't even talk about i'm curious Yeah, I can't even really talk about it at this point, but it has been asked about. That's all I will say. Interesting. All right. So what future projects do you have that you can talk about? I know, like you said, or like I said earlier, Gradius, I just saw an announcement for that a couple of days ago. Yeah, we're going to be doing Gratius 1 through 3. Is that going to be a single release or is it like individual?

Yeah, there'll be separate releases. So for Gratius 1 and 2, We're going to have both the NES and MSX versions. Oh, not the arcade versions. Not the arcade versions. Particularly for Gradius 2, I love the MSX sound. Interesting. Okay. And then for Gradius 3, we'll do S&ES and Arcade.

And we're going to be, and we're working on Salamander as well. Great. Okay, I was going to ask about that one. I love that soundtrack. Yes, and that will be the NES and. and MSX versions. NES or the FAMICOM? The FAMICOM.

The FAMICOM versions. I think the soundtrack is a little different in the FAMICOM version. I know it has one of the enhancement chips, but I can't remember if that affected the sound. I know we are getting the Famicom version. We haven't gotten them. I mean, we just finalized this deal like earlier,

or late last week. Oh, okay. So fresh off the press. Yeah, breaking news. So yeah, we're working on those. As I said, we're working on Y, Y, Y World 1 and 2, which will be really fun. That'll be one release because the Y, Y, Y, Y, World 1 is very short. So I think it will be, I think it could all fit on one record, both games.

This is the same thing with Esper Dream 1 and 2, two Konami RPGs. Okay, wow. That's getting pretty obscure there. Yes. Well, Esper Dream 2 is fantastic. it was the same composer as Castlevania 3. So it's got some really great tunes. So that and then to take it into a more current direction,

we're going to be doing the soundtrack to Celeste on vinyl very soon. That's very contemporary, like last week. Yeah, Lena Rain, the woman who composed it, she's friends with Krista Lee and Krista Lee actually introduced us. So we're going to be working on that. Yeah, she's a friend of the show. She did the intro theme for one of our podcasts back in the one-up days. Oh, really?

So, yeah, she's awesome. Yeah, she's great. Yeah, we're going to be putting out Celeste. And we're also putting out one of her solo albums, singularity, which I'm really excited about. It's like Celeste is very ambient, but more like kind of a dark ambient. sort of thing. Yeah. So I'm very excited about those two. Yeah, I haven't had a chance to play Celeste yet because I was working on iconoclasts and a couple of other games for review. But I keep hearing good things about it and supposedly her score for it is amazing. So I'll look forward to that for

sure. Yeah, I've been, I was, I picked it up over the weekend for Switch and I've been playing it nonstop. It's fantastic. And her score is really, her score is really, really good. So I'm very excited to be working on that with her. Well, I don't want to take up any more of your time, and it's getting late here, and I could use some dinner, so I'm going to cut this interview short. But to wrap,

where can everyone find you online and your company? Well, we're by our records at ship to shoremedia.com, and then we're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as STS Phono Co. So you can all find us there.

All right. Well, thanks a lot, Aaron. I appreciate you coming out of the show and all journalistic integrity aside I've enjoyed working with you on these projects and hope to collaborate again on some other things in the future I'm sure we will be but it's good after working together for the past year to actually talk to you

what a rarity that is in the day and age yes for sure and thank you for having me on I mean like I said I've been listening to I've been listening to Retronaut since I was in high school back in the one-up days. So being on the show is a real, being on the show is a real dream come true for me. So thank you for that. Well, you know, having great obscure Japanese game soundtracks released in America that I can buy with my own cash money, that's a dream come true for me. So we're just, we're all in the dream fulfillment business these days.

Yes, indeed. All right, thanks again. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate.

Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just 100. $100 a month. Plus makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

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I used to host the Art of Charm podcast, but now it's time for something new. The Jordan Harbinger Show. Did you know you can be entertained and actually get a boost in your life at the same time? On this show, we dig into the superpowers of the world's most interesting thinkers and top talents. Then we deliver them to you right into your ears. But I get it. We're not all superheroes. That's why we give you their blueprint so you can live what you listen.

After a thousand interviews, learning five languages, and getting arrested in a country that doesn't even exist anymore, I'm now more ready than ever to introduce you to the Jordan Harbinger Show. Listen free to the Jordan Harbinger Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcast.com, and the Podcast One app. All right. So for this next segment, we're going to shift away from game music and talk about game making with something that's not actually retro, but kind of is. It's a project that currently is on Kickstarter, and I think it is at about five or six times its intended goal. So it seems to be something that's caught on with a lot of people, and that is NES maker. And I've got one of the developers here, Joe Granato. And yeah, I was hoping, Joe, you could just tell us a little bit about the origin of this project and what it's about. I mean, it's kind of,

Mario Maker for the 8-bit set in a way? Sort of, yeah. It's so it's fascinating. I started a project a few years ago called the New 8B Heroes, which essentially I'm a documentary filmmaker. I ended up finding all these artifacts from my youth about when me and some neighborhood kids were making designs for NES games. And there was one summer we actually were emboldened to send them to Nintendo of America

and say, make our game, you know. And a lot of us have that story from, you know, if you grew up in the 80s and they sent him back with this nice little form lighter and said, oh, yeah, you know, we can't take unsolicited game ideas, but do good in math and don't do drugs, you know, that sort of thing, right? And so they got followed away and you just kind of forget about them. And then, you know, over life, I became, you know, a musician, an artist, a filmmaker, a programmer, all these things. And eventually found myself back at my parents' house visiting and found that whole box of stuff and said, wow, you know, I'm a programmer now. I could make this. And

started to make it for like an iPhone or something and it wasn't it wasn't gratifying and I said I wonder if I could actually go back and make it for an NES a real a real system playable on real hardware as if they had said sure kid we'll make your game you know and so that started a three year project called the new eight bit heroes which was a documentary that sort of chronicled the homebrew community which is still sort of unknown it's more it's more known now than it was when we started the project but even now you can go to a convention like like DragonCon right DragonCon is the nerdiest convention in the country. I mean, it is just every, everyone turns into a cosplay artist, everyone, and you've got these people that are, that will,

we'll sit there and they'll be like, oh, I love the NES, yeah. So I still have 600 games from my youth and I play them every day. And you're like, what's your favorite,

like newer game? What's your favorite homebrew? And they have no idea what you're talking about, you know? And so we thought it was a great idea to sort of expose, um,

the world to what all these people were doing and sort of what went into developing an NES game. And that, film, we finished a while ago, did really well in festivals. It actually hit Amazon on New Year's Day. So that's out in the world, whatever. While we were making our game, we ended up having to make a lot of tools to mine for the data. For instance, it was all written in assembly, just like Nintendo games were back in the 80s. But, you know, we would get to a point where we're designing a screen, let's say. And a screen, the way that the nest sees it, is just a giant table of hexadecimal values.

One table for the graphic data, one table for the attribute data, which is like what color palates it's using. And one table for the collision data, which would be different from game to game, depending on how the, you know, how the developers developed it. And in order to create a screen, we would be writing, you know, thousands of values for one screen and trying to keep track in our head. You know, what was the number for the top left corner of a tree? It was seven. Okay. What was the collision number for a solid for a tree? that's you know binary value one zero one zero one zero oh like it was so hard to keep track of

and then you'd render it out and you play it at an emulator and it would be wrong and you're like god damn you'd have to go back make the changes blind and try and fix it and whatever it took forever so we started to develop some some screens uh some tools to make these screens and the same kind of thing with animation tables you know we built an animation routine and then we you know went crazy trying to make a tool that could output the big tables of hex values we needed and so on and so forth. And we just kept adding these sort of little tiny tools to our workflow that sped up the process and made it easier and made us able to do cooler stuff.

So about 18 months ago, we were at Portland Retro Gaming Expo. And we were showing our film and we were showing the game that we were working on. And everyone in the panel was like, oh, yeah, how'd you do this? that how do you do that and so you know we broke out we showed them the assembly code and then we showed them oh and you know to make screens we made it a little easier we made this tool and after the panel everyone was lined up at our booth and we're like oh wow you know everyone wants the game everyone wants the film awesome this is great and it turns out everyone was like yeah how do i get that nest maker thing and we're like we're like what they're like that that thing that you showed we're like oh no that

that's just an in-house tool we made that wouldn't even do you any good you know you need the engine and and whatever that just works with what we programmed and and you know like oh yeah I really want that. You know, and enough people said it. They were like, huh, you know, if we actually, I mean, it would take some work. But if we started combining these tools and made, made it so that we could write some of the assembly data on the fly or pull in particular code on the fly based on user decisions and things like that, we would have Nessmaker.

We would have a tool that someone could create a Ness game without ever having to write a single line of assembly programming. And so we, you know, we talked to our tool developer. Is this possible? Can we do this? And we spent 18 months sort of formulating something and seeing if it could work. And it got to the point where we were working with a lot of the homebrew community. We were working with Paul from a company called Infinite Nest Lives, who does a lot of cart manufacturing and things like that. And we made a tool that you can, we showed proofs of concept where we were building entire games, clicking one button, it flashes it to a cartridge, you pop it on, you know, hooks up to your USB, pop it out and play it on real hardware without ever digging into the code.

And that sort of leads us up to showing this for the first time at Pax South. We're like really showing the newest version at Pax South and letting people see us doing it on the fly. Like letting people jump in and make characters and monsters and change their AI and, you know, change the style of game that they were making and build levels and, you know, all these things. And then just one click and then we're playing it over on Real Hardware. And seeing it live, I think, is what, you know, compelled a lot of people and why it's, it has been so racist. It's not some hypothetical. It's already done. We're just making it better at this point, you know?

Yeah, your stretch goals were all like modules for different genres, basically. And it's really, yeah, it's sort of hard to explain that. A lot of people are getting the wrong idea and it's really hard to, our tool is a front end that deals with whatever assembly code is underneath, right? If you, if anybody, if any of your listeners deal with emulating and they have like a maim cabinet or something, the main cabinet works where you've got like a front end that accesses emulators, that accesses the ROMs, but you're just looking at this one front end. You all do all this set up in the front.

And to you, it looks like this seamless interface where you can play all the different emulators and all the different games and all that stuff. You can kind of think of the tool like that. It's a tool that chooses which assembly code and writes the tables that you need in order to get the output that you sort of saw in your screen when you were building in the tool. So we get a lot of questions like, you know, can you make this kind of game with NestMaker? And it's, or can you do this thing? And it's like, well, that's a hard question to answer.

Yes, you absolutely could. You'd have to get into the code and manipulate the code. And then Nessmakers front end could do all those things. But, but yeah, you could do that. It just depends on how much assembly code you want to write, you know. But natively, no, we can't, you know, have a game that works where you, you know, use the Zapper to move your character left and right and has Ninja Guideon type cut scenes that are fully animated with CD quality audio. No, we can't do that natively.

I'm sorry, you know, but what can you do underneath whatever you can code? So the modules are kind of like that. They're kind of our templates of these different genres of games, a platformer, an RPG, a beat them up, a shooter, adventure game. And then the idea is, you know, they're going to be very versatile as far as what you can do within those genres, but they're not rigid boundaries. They're just, okay, this is what you're, like the banks and the memory that is set up for this style of game, like an RPG.

needs more text for NPCs, whereas a platform game doesn't need all that text, you know, that kind of thing. So here's a template. It's set up for this. And then you take it and do whatever you want. Maybe you get in the code. Maybe you don't. You don't necessarily have to. You can stay all in drag and drop and point and click and have a game. You know, your character is running around telling your story and whatever. But the genre modules are just that. They're just templates. They're not like, the tool can only do these things. You know, they're just starting points. So the NES was limited in a lot of ways based on the kind of chip, the memory mapper that was in each cartridge. Do you have the ability to write to different virtual memory mappers?

Like if someone wants to create like an MMC5 game, cool, but otherwise, you know, they can stick to MMC 1 and do something simpler. Here's the giant asterisk when it comes to mappers. I would say that that's the one thing that that, you know, is non-changeable in, in the development, when you set out to start making a Ness game, that's one of the first things that you have to ascertain is what memory mapper that you're using and what, and what that is for the people who don't know what a memory mapper is, the NES could only see 32 kilobytes of data at a time. It doesn't matter how much ROM you have in your cartridge. The actual hardware can only see that much data ever at one time, no matter how complex you make the

game. Okay, well, that presents a problem because a lot of games are a lot bigger than that. So what you end up wanting to do is, you know, loading in something and then, loading it off so you can load in other stuff and loading that so maybe you have level one through level 10 on one bank and you have you know 11 through 20 on another bank and you have music on another bank and you load your graphics in from another bank and the memory mapper goes and fetches that data and loads it in the right places and then unloads that bank and loads it the different one in so it's going along it loads the level one data and then it offloads a bank and loads the graphic data so it can load the graphics and then it unloads that then it loads the music data so that it could play the next

note in the song and then it unloads that, et cetera. So that's what memory mappers do and how they work. And when you're building a Ness game, that's one of the first things you really have to do is figure out, okay, what's my memory mapping scheme going to be? And the thing is, is that will take you months, if not years, to figure out exactly what's going to fit in what, especially if you're first game, you know, what's supposed to go where. And there's no right answer.

There's no like, this is the way it's done. And that's what's really frustrating because you have unlimited possibilities of how this memory could be lined up and you don't know what questions to even ask. You know, you're, um, so you end up really frustrated and sort of spinning your wheels for a while trying to figure out what's going to work best for you. We wanted to get users beyond that point and beyond the point of learning assembly and beyond the point of dealing with addressing modes and all this stuff and just get to the part where they're creative as if they were using game maker, right? A person can jump into game maker or unity or or any or RPG maker or these modern tools,

they don't necessarily need to dig into the API. They don't need to dig into Windows XP or, you know, the newest Mac operating system to deal with it on that level. They're literally just creating graphics, dropping them in and creating them in an object-oriented environment. So those choices already exist in modern development tools, but nothing like that exists in the NEST because that's not really how the NEST works. So we wanted to create a tool that could approximate that sort of development and you can bypass that technical stuff to be able to jump right into the creative part. Start telling your story. Start working with your graphics in an intuitive way rather than in a text editor. So what approximate memory mapper are you working?

What is the target there for, like someone who wants to flash their own ROM based on what they create an NES maker? Absolutely. So the quick answer is our system works with a mapper called Mapper 30. Mapper 30 is a post-market mapper. And I'm saying this with sort of an asterisk here. It's a post-market mapper. It's an aftermarket thing. Retro USB, I believe it was Brian Parker who designed Mapper 30. And what Mapper 30 does that's amazing is that it allows you to use flash memory for saving. So you don't have to have a battery backup if you want to save your game.

It also allows for character RAM bank switching, which in simple terms allows for really versatile, easy animated background tiles and things like that. And it does a couple of other things. And this mapper didn't exist in, you know, the 80s, but it's basically a mapper two, which is like one of the most common types of mappers, which is called a, um, uh, uh, UX ROM. Um, and it's very, very, very popular. And, uh, it's very, very versatile. And the, it's very popular for a reason because it did, you know, so much. Um, so technically, uh, your easy output, um, that takes advantage of everything Nessmaker can do is going to be a map or 30. The problem with Maper 30, is that older emulators and some like ever drives and stuff that it doesn't play very well because it didn't used to exist. So it's not, that mapper was omitted from, you know, whatever BIOS these systems have or, you know, the, the sort of log that the emulators have. So what we've done is we've made a way for you, and this is just a recent development as of today. Actually, we perfected it.

We made a way for people to be able to export it as a Mapper 2, and they lose the functionality, like I said, of saving and animated tiles. But other than that, it runs fine, and then it sort of runs on those devices and those emulators if that's really somebody's main goal that they want to work with. And, you know, I can conceive of ways that people could still build password systems and other ways that people could develop to animate tiles that won't be as cool as what Mapper 30 does. But, you know, a lot is still doable within that subset. But that's sort of the tradeoff. You know, works on more emulators but has these limitations or has all these benefits, but, you know, is really meant for hardware. So one of your goals with this is that it should your games, you know, the games that you output with NES maker should function on real hardware. So if you have like an NES or even something like an analog in T, like you should be able to put these games.

I think you updated a couple of days ago and said you can put it on an Everdrive. Yeah, that was that we just play. a game based on that. Yep, we did testing of that yesterday and I actually perfected it today and we've gotten positive from every emulator that's been checked. One of them had a slight graphical glitch, but I'm calling that that's on the emulator because if they're all working, Everdrive's working, I'm waiting for somebody to test it on a power pack. But at this point, once we've sort of dumbed it down to a map or two and sort of, you know, sacrifice that functionality, it'll run fine in anything. But yeah, the main goal of this is not to run an emulator. Like, that's not there. If you

want to play a game on a computer, well, if you want to make a game on a computer, there are many tools that are going to be much more versatile and not as constrained as this tool will be. The thing that this tool does that no other sort of whizzywig, drag and drop, point and click type tool is ever done is with one click deployment, you can flash it to a cartridge. Literally, when you're happy with your game, you go up to the test button and you click on MakeCart and it flashes it to the cartridge. You pop it off and you put it in any hardware base system and it works. And one of your, one of your, uh, Kickstarter tiers is, uh, it actually includes a flash card. And that's the, that's the most popular tier right now. We, we are actually

anticipating that most people would have gone just for the software, but most people want the whole shabang right out of the gate. They want the software, the flasher and a blank cartridge. And it's, it's a rewritable cartridge. So you can flash it. I mean, it's got limits. Like I think you can only flash it 10,000 times before it starts to get funky. But it's, you know, it's like it like a thumb drive, you know, like, after a couple of years, maybe you might need a new one. But they're also readily available for replacement cartridges through Infinite Ness Lives. Right now, if you were to go to his site and look at Mapper 30 boards, it would say, coming soon or something like that. The reason for that is, and he's actually chimed in on our social media, a bunch to questions. Nobody knows

what Mapper 30 is unless you're a home brewer. And if you're that deep into it, you already know him. You're emailing him personally and saying, yeah, can I get this? So he's never really made them available to the store just to avoid confusion. But he's had them for years. Many home brews use it and go through him to make their boards. And he's not the only one who makes 30 map for 30 boards. It's just that's the person that we've been working with. So that's the person that he knows exactly what our tool does and how it outputs and we're using his cart flashers. And, you know, so probably what we'll have is on our site, we'll have a link that'll say, you know, if you want replacement cartridges or the or the flasher or whatever. And all it's going to do is just put

an order in through him, but it'll route through us to make sure that the person gets the right thing. Right. So your campaign ends in about a week or so as of this recording. I think by the time this episode goes public, it'll actually already have been over by a day or two. But what are you kind of looking at for the actual like, you know, distribution date for this thing? It sounds like it's pretty well in the can. yeah so it's it's tough because basically i we want to roll it out as soon as possible however um it's probably going to be a gradual rollout like there's going to be versioning that's going to be happening and every everybody who has is going to have access to all the you know version one

versions so as far as it goes with this before we do a complete rewrite or something um it's not like we're we're going to up charge or you know anything like that that. But yeah, so our goal is that our first beta testers get their software at least. We're not sure how long the hardware is going to take to turn around. But we get the software at least in March. And it's very possible that we will be showing off the first beta at South by Southwest this year. So how does one, how does one become a beta tester? Is that part of a Kickstarter goal also? Yep, it's part of the Kickstarter tier. Yep. It's one of the Kickstarter tiers. And it's just, you know, it was sort of to incentivize that to sort of the what's nice is they also get some cool perks like

the flasher that they get is going to come in a in a nice NES styled casing that's it's actually a laser cut thing it's not like a cheap 3D printed thing it's uh it's made by the guys at rose colored gaming um so that's that's really a neat little artifact if you will um but it also you know it helps us get the development time our our uh our tool developer i'm the guy who does the family language. Austin is our artist and Josh is our tool developer. And that's his full-time job. Like he does, you know, freelance development for full-time jobs. So that's how he keeps his electricity on. That's how he feeds his kids, you know. Right. The money raised goes to us being able to make the tool better by being able to sort of, you know, not have to take on other freelance

jobs and focus completely on Nestmaker as a full-time job, which is amazing. Um, but, Yeah. So, you know, to become, we're probably still going to extend, you know, people who are interested in beta testing after the Kickstarter. So if people are interested, they could definitely check out the site and probably still get involved. We're working on who we're going to go through with that. We've been looking at a couple different options. But, you know, there will be a continued push for Nessmaker after the, after the crowdfunding's finished. So actually, the one thing we haven't really talked about is how exactly this thing works, not not like the, you know, the back end, the nitty gritty. But just like what is the interface for this? Like, how are people going to. be creating games? Is it like a Windows application? Is it multi-platform? Unfortunately, it's only Windows at this time. It'll run fine on a boot camp or a parallel. I have two computers, one running on Windows 7 on boot camp on a, what, 10-year-old Mac, and one here on a really, really, really low spec PC running Windows 10, and they both run fine. So any Windows-based system is going to work. I'd love to add Linux and Mac support, but it's not at all in the cards anytime soon. And part of that is

because some of the things that we need in order to function like some of that like our custom emulator was written for windows are the cart flasher software right now at least is written for windows all the like all the things that it depends on to work the way it's supposed to that's part of it and it's a big part of it why it's not even worth it for us to do it because it'll break when you try and actually make something so um but as far as windows you open it up like any other program and and you know for those who've used programs like Game Maker and Unity and RPG Maker and these sort of front-end tools that run object-oriented things that are tethered to some kind of code underneath, like in Unity you're running C-sharp or JavaScript, Unity's version of JavaScript and code underneath objects.

But you're dragging around objects. You're not worried about the transformer, how things are positioned or whatever. You're just moving into place with a mouse, you know, and then it's doing all the background calculations and it's the same kind of thing you know um there's a graphics editor uh we've been we've got reached our stretch goal for music composer which i'm super psyched about because um we've used fami tracker which is awesome it's a great tool the only problem with it is if you're a musician coming from the composition world uh it's like programming a spreadsheet so it's a little it's a little sterile for somebody who's used to looking at piano roles and very musical ways of

composing. And I am as a musician. So I want to create a supplemental tool for the, for the community that will be sort of geared towards people who are musicians that want to create music as well. And it's not the slight FAMITracker at all. I think it's an amazing tool and it's super capable. Yeah, I mean, FAMI tracker is very sort of authentic to how people actually programmed music for retro consoles back in the day. Exactly. Exactly. And I guarantee the people who built it are programmers and we're thinking in terms of the sound channels and and thinking and that's smart because that's what it is but you know and everything that we're doing with this we're trying to appeal to the people who aren't programmers that's the whole

point so you know um you're creating graphics in what feels like a photoshop environment it's not obviously not nearly as into or as involved because it doesn't need to be but um there's a lot of your functions uh that you would see in a program like that uh in a graphic setting program like that um and then it actually on the back end uh for instance how it's how it's how that works is you're pulling in a BMP, a bitmap graphic, and it needs to turn it into three colors, essentially, that are indexed to the different sub-pallets. So the NEST doesn't actually see the graphic. The NEST sees a whole bunch of byte data. And so we've built a tool that takes a bitmap, and then you can manipulate that bitmap.

And the entire time, it's actually rendering a four-color image of that, a black, red, green, blue image of that. that then when you hit export exports it to what's called a CHR file, which is the file that has the bytes and bits that the nest needs to see for graphics. And then when you're actually on the tool or when you're actually designing screens, that graphics now available to you and you can apply the different pallets to it. And color zero is black. Color one is, you know, correlates to whatever is red. And color two relates to whatever on that bitmap is green, et cetera.

etc. So we want to do something similar to that with the music tool where it's really doing all the nest stuff, but to you, it feels like you're composing in a modern composition environment. So do you have the ability to do, you know, more complex things with, like, sprites? You know, Mega Man, the Mega Man Sprite is actually layered so they can get more colors in it. Do you have the ability to, like, link sprites and set priorities, like, which one is, you know, forward and which one is more in the background and that sort of thing? So, again, we run into the question of, you know, can Ness make? or do X, Y, Z.

So natively, the way that it's intended to be used, I would say no, but that's not true. I'll give you a perfect example of how you could take the tool in its form right now without touching any code and get that effect. There's a bunch of game objects that exist. And you could parent certain objects to the player object. You could just have that permanently turned on and put its position of where it's parented to his face and have it be eyes and then there you go it totally would work it's really meant for things like um if your character creates his projectile his you know ray gun and during his

attack frame you see the ray gun pop out you know and and you and it's tracking where his hand is depending on his direction or whatever that's what it's really meant to do but you could totally tweak it to do it for whatever you needed to do and that's going to be the most fun part is seeing how people break the tool to do things that it's not meant to do to do cool and new things. But other than that, if you really want to dig in and say you wanted to write your own Sprite Flickroutine to help have more than 64 sprites per screen or have it look that way or something like that, you can dig into the code.

You could use your own sprite, your own animation routine. You could absolutely do that and still use our front end to mine for the data. And we know that more advanced programmers are probably going to go that route. And hopefully the idea is a community evolves that is sharing. Here's how I did this. You know, here's my, here's, you know, this guy's, here's Greg's animation routine. And, you know, and you can substitute it by copying it into this, this file. And we're going to expose the more common ones right to the tool.

So like if you wanted to update the collision or how about the, the physics engine, right? We've got a simple platform or physics engine, but you don't like the way it handles collisions and you think you can write a better collision engine. Well, okay. You just get in there and you, you know, there's a section, you know, handle collisions, And you can edit that tool. You can look at what's there and then edit it the way that you think it should be edited. That sounds, yeah, like the kind of thing where the more you dig into it, the more you can get out of it.

Right, exactly. So, you know, I want to be clear. It seems there seems to be some misconception that this is a tool where you can download it, double click, hit a button and be like, ooh, my game. It's awesome. It just made The Legend of Zelda by clicking three buttons. You know, obviously this tool is still going to require a lot of effort in order to make a compelling game. But the thing is it gets you past the years that you would spend learning assembly language, learning memory mapping, dealing with the bank switching and what to put in what bank and all the technical stuff that just don't want to think about. You want to jump in. I've got an idea for a game. You want to sit down and start creating that game. And that's sort of what we wanted to get nest developers, aspiring nest developers to that point, rather than them losing sort of confidence and running to something like Game Maker to make it. Not the there's anything wrong with that, but we know that there's a lot of people that want their game

on a cartridge. They really want to develop for the system, and they just give up on it because there's just way too steep of a learning curve. What if we could skip all that? What if we can get you to the same point where you'd be, if you started working in Game Maker, obviously you've got the nest limitations, but you know, you can start developing and being creative right away. And that's the point. That's the goal. Yeah. And, you know, speaking for myself, I was one of those kids who, like you, drew out his NES games. I made an amazing looking sequel to Metal Gear. I'm sure it would have been amazing, but have never really sat down to create games. And I've been joking for years on this podcast about realizing my dream game, Jetpack Goonies. Awesome. The sequel to Goonies,

but you can fly with a jet pack. We're going to call it. People keep telling me, people keep telling me, like, you need to make this game. So I'm telling everyone here that I am pledging my support for this Kickstarter. I'm on board for the beta level and I am going to make Jetpack Goonies somehow. We're going to make. So everyone has it in writing, so to speak. We're going to make Jetpack Club of 80s kids. Original intellectual property only. Yes. Please do not steal. Exactly. We're trying. We might even have a splash screen in the tool that that says that because there's two reasons. I mean, obviously, we don't want it to reflect poorly on the tool that everyone's using it to make Zelda clones. And, You know, and just clogged.

And then we have Nintendo that pissed off at the tool itself. And, you know, that's, that's really not what we're going for here. We want to see people's original ideas. What was the idea that you had as you, when you were a kid? Were you inspired by Zelda? Awesome. Then make, you know, make your adventure game in your world that was inspired by Zelda. That's great.

But we don't want to see like somebody, you know, making a Stranger Things game without permission, you know. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's inevitable. And my plan here is obviously to file off the serial numbers enough that Warner Brothers is not going to be like, excuse me, we're shutting down on your podcast now. Nothing along those lines. But I am excited because, you know, I have wanted to make my own NES game for ages and like an actual NES game. So having the tools here with this project, that's very interesting to me.

So that's, you know, really wanted to talk to you about it and hear more from the man himself. So, well, you know, if people are curious, like what kind of games can you make with it and things like that, if they check out the campaign or, you know, even the website at the new abetheroes.com, they can check out. We made a game called troll burner. And that was kind of a fun little jab at the trolls that were popping up about the campaign. We were in the San Francisco airport and we just said, hey, you know what? Let's build a game and just see how far we can get. And then, you know, about a week's time. We had. a little platformer where you were uh blasting away uh the trolls that were making comments negative comments about nestmaker is just a little little fun but it demonstrated you know this is what we can do in seven days think of what you could do if you take months you know if you actually really devote yourselves to this and are serious about it you know um so if people want to check that out um they're they can definitely check it out if they're curious um and then also mystic origins was created with it which is our sort of current flag

ship as we work towards its big brother called Mystic Searches, which is going to make full use of the tool and really show what it can do. All right. Awesome, Joe. Thank you for your time. Everyone can check that out. That is at new 8bit Heroes, you said? The new 8bit Heroes.com.

All right. And the Kickstarter campaign, if you happen to be listening to this through the Patreon feed, still has another week to go. So check that out and consider contributing. I'm sure you have something, well, you'll have something set up like a GoFundMe or something along those lines where people can continue to pledge even after the Kickstarter has ended. Likely, we'll have a pre-order setup for the actual toolkit itself, and I'm just not sure what our platform. There's three different platforms that we're considering. But yeah,

if not immediately following, pretty soon thereafter. Okay, cool. So even if people don't make it in time for the Kickstarter, they still have an opportunity to get their hands on this software once it launches. That's correct. All right. Well, good luck with the rest of the campaign, Joe. And I'm looking forward to making my totally copyright infringing NES game of my dreams. Awesome. Good to talk to you. Yeah, thanks a lot. And now, and now, an ad for the ad from dad.

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if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral.

Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.