News

Composer makes Metroid even more eerie with new synth soundtrack

In 1986, Metroid was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since then, Hirokazu Tanaka, Metroid’s composer, has been revered for helping create the game’s iconic, eerie atmosphere. To up Metroid’s creeping feeling of loneliness some 30 years later, composer Luminist is rerecording the game’s music using actual synthesizers. “My initial interest behind doing this was thinking that if the technology were available back then to put hi-fi recordings into a videogame, they might have done it this way with Metroid,” Luminist said. “I’m just interested in bringing out more of the inherent alone-in-space factor that the original gave us with bleeps and bloops.” So far, Luminist has…

Hyrule subway map
News

Classic videogame worlds reimagined as subway maps

Few moments are more familiar in an old-school dungeon-crawler than the opening of a treasure chest, only to find a dungeon map. But if—for whatever whim of your fancy—you’ve been hoping instead for a subway map to unfold itself from those chests, you’re in luck: graphic designer Matthew Stevenson has created six sprawling “subway” maps, based on his favorite NES games. revel in these maps’ ability to evoke warm nostalgia Each map is unique, encompassing the specific visual appeal of the game they seek to compress. The Legend of Zelda (1986) subway map, for example, is intricate and sprawling—based loosely…

News

This thread devoted to videogame scanlines is a reason to wake up in the morning

“Scanline screenshot thread. Because 240p is all the p’s I need.” Thus begins NeoGAFfer Peltz’s thread devoted to capturing pre-HD games using pre-HD equipment. Now at 6 pages and over 250 posts, scanning through is a coffee-break-long crash course in the ongoing defetishization of high-definition equipment and resolution. Like learning German to read Nietzsche’s pure, unfiltered thoughts, this can all seem a bit ridiculous: finding beefy old cathode-ray-tube TVs and RGB cables in order to play games at a significantly less crisp image quality. But—like, say, learning German to read Nietzsche’s pure, unfiltered thoughts—it’s hard to argue with the logic…