OK. Minibosses is a gamer-metal band out of Phoenix dedicated to playing nothing but the themes from the 8 bit Nintendo (actually NES) console game system with 2 guitars, bass and drums. They’ve got some sample mp3s up on their site and a new CD out. Thing is, the band actually seems to play the tunes in 8 bit somehow - which gives a whole new meaning to minimalist.

If you played a lot of “Megaman” in your youth, check them out.From a site entitled History of Game Music Veli-Pekka Tätilä has this to say about 8 bit NES music: “Rob Hubbard, a well known C64 composer has said that the limited polyphony of the sound hardware in consoles and home computers forced you to write in a certain style. When you listen to early game music, it is indeed in a certain, unique style. THe composers had only 3 to 4 voices they could use to express them selves and this forced them to do as much as possible with a certain voice. A typical bass line in a musically great NES (Nintendo entertainment system)game (such as the Megaman series), for instance, is really groovy and walking, creating harmonies to the basic melody and functioning as a one half of a bass drum sound at times. REally fast, pseudo-polyphonic arpeggiated chords were the traidmark of the Commoder 64 to give you another example of unique characteristics of game music. And really amazing is the trick how the C64 is able to play digitized sound even though it is not designed to do so. The composer modulates the volume of a voice so fast that a 4-bit sampled sound is created. And one of the strangest things in game music was that the game composers could compose almost exactly the music they wanted to compose. In other words, the game companies didn’t usually care too much about the music as long as the game had music. That being said, you can in some cases even tell who is the composer solely by the style of the music. Mark Cooksey who is one of my favorite composers did, for instance, folk song like and almost classical music on the C64 and his music is either very cheerful or depressingly melancholic in a good way).”

Kiitos! (that’s “Thank You” in Finnish)