Back to the Future: 8-Bit Culture and Nostalgia

note: the songs embedded throughout are not particular to the paragraphs they follow, they are intended to serve as listening music for this post


Growing up, I never had videogames. But every Christmas Eve, I'd go over to my cousin’s house. She was a few years older and allowed to have the videogames my parents never let me play. Christmas Eve meant being with family, but mostly it meant playing SNES or N64: MarioKart, Yoshi’s Story, Sonic the Hedgehog. Not coincidentally, it was my cousin who turned me on to 8-bit music. A number of years later, when I was in my early teens, she showed me the GameBoy program she was using called LSDJ. It was a game cartridge, but people used it to make music. I was spellbound. Excuse me as I wax nostalgic, but as I go on you’ll see that chiptune music, and 8-bit culture as a whole, is all about nostalgia.

composing music in LSDJ

Zach Robinson is 22 and a senior at Northwestern University. He makes his own music under the moniker D/A/D, and while his music admittedly draws on “a different kind of nostalgia,” he’s an avid fan of 8-bit music and often dabbles in 8-bit production as well. Zach’s been listening to 8-bit music “since 1994,” when he was “playing videogames, GameBoy, all that stuff” and explained to me that “everyone who’s making [8-bit] is in a ten year radius of the early ninties.” While saying “ten year radius” opens up questions of where the first 8-bit music really started, what Zach means is that everybody making 8-bit music is doing so based on a shared experience: growing up in the early 1990s.
Too Dramatic (Anamanaguchi Remix) - Ra Ra Riot

The NES, released in 1985, presented the most complex musical system in a video game console at the time of its release, delivering “a built-in five-channel PSG [programmable sound generator] delivering two pulse waves, a triangle wave, a noise channel, and a sample channel” (Collins, 2007). Going past the technical jargon, what this meant is that composers for videogame soundtracks had access to an unprecedented wealth of musical creativity. Discussing the music of video games, K Collins describes the aesthetics of 8-bit music as “the result of a culmination of knowledge, creativity, and constraint” (Collins, 2007).

The NES’ predecessor, the SNES, is now one of two main tools (alongside the GameBoy) for composing 8-bit music. Notably, both are Nintendo products. As Zach explained to me,

“Nintendo has been way on top of this since the beginning. LSDJ on GameBoy is a sequencer, Mario Paint was a big sequencer when you were younger. These are music machines. And it goes back to these Japanese composers just writing music on these four-track [machines], they only have a sine, a triangle, a noise and a square wave. And they're writing on these soundchips, it goes back to that--they just had nothing, and they created some of the most iconic melodies in music. If it makes noise, if it makes rhythm, you can make it into an instrument... I think that 8-bit music is part admiration, part nostalgia, and then it's mostly, like, innovation.”

You can hear Zach’s enthusiasm when he references the music-making process. His three criteria for 8-bit music—admiration, nostalgia, innovation—sync up nicely with the three put forth by Collins—knowledge, creativity, and constraint. Zach’s conception that the GameBoy and SNES are “music machines” signifies some larger ideological shift in the way the 8-bit generation thinks about what it means to create music. 8-bit contains original compositions, but it is undoubtedly a remix culture, appropriating elements from disparate media and pasting them together.

Nullsleep - Salvation for a Broken Heart

8-bit also involves a strong element of hacking. The songs produced on video game consoles are generally called “chiptunes” (which can be used interchangeably with 8-bit as a genre tag). René Lysloff defines chiptune as “mod music… in which composers create full-blown mods using only computer-created sounds, often simply modified sine or square waves” (Lysloff, 2003). Lysloff also makes note of the “challenges and limitations” of making chiptunes, which results in compositions that are “astonishingly creative and rich in expressive nuances” (Lysloff, 2003). This video by Extreme Animals (who played at the show in Queens in October) illustrates the points made by Zach, Lysloff, and Collins quite well.



Here, Extreme Animals combine elements of heavy metal, chiptune, mashup, and even a film theme (Harry Potter) to create an original composition. When on stage, they perform with a guitar, a computer, and an SNES buried in hacked connections and wires—no doubt they’ve destroyed the mental block that says a videogame console cannot be a “music machine.”

John Egenes defines remixing and remix culture as “the 21st Century’s new folk process… a return to communal way of experiencing our art and our intellectual creations” (Egenes, 2010). 8-bit targets the core of the population who feel that “on some level, everyone is a musician” and operates by providing a truly alternative mechanism for music composition and creation (Egenes, 2010). This communal experience and exchange of art occurs in the online sphere. Sites like 8bc, 8bitpeoples, and micromusic serve to facilitate the sharing information, music, and images amongst members of the 8-bit community.

8bc is 8-bit culture's main online hub. We’ve come to see 8-bit as a mod culture, and as a remix culture, and by looking at 8bc, we can begin to see it as a fan culture as well. Both a site for uploading and sharing compositions and a forum for communicating with other members, 8bc features 664 pages of musical submissions and the most expansive 8-bit forum on the internet. Every song uploaded to the site is available to download for free. Most musicians who use the site use it to test out new compositions and get feedback. Users can comment on tracks and offer their views and constructive criticism (the site makes a point of calling it such). Almost all of the comments are enthusiastic and encouraging, asking the uploader for more or telling him/her to keep at it.

Hexadecimal Genome - Bit Shifter

Lysloff writes that hierarchies exist on these kind of sites, and that those hierarchies are “based primarily on prestige and authority” (Lysloff, 2003). 8bc is not exempt, and more notable bands like Anamanaguchi have pages filled with comments and questions. While, like nearly all virtual communities, there is a hierarchy based on length and quality of participation, 8bc is an overwhelmingly positive place. It is rarely subject to trolling or vicious arguments, and its users are committed to keeping it as a safe space to share music and ideas.

8bc also acts as a point of entry for a new member looking to get into the scene. Right on the home page anybody can download the latest music and enter the forums. And everything is free. This situates 8-bit as more than just a fan culture, but also a gift culture. “Made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, to reciprocate,” a gift culture takes fan participation to the next level (Hellekson, 2009). Giving, receiving, and reciprocation can be found on 8bc in the form of feedback, musical compositions, or original images. Users readily and happily swap their creations. In 8-bit culture, the consumers and producers blend. They generally are of the same age group (the ten year radius of the '90s), and participate in the same online spheres (8bc, 8bitpeoples, etc). At the Anamanaguchi show I attended in October, nearly everybody was under the age of thirty, and many musicians could be spotted in the crowd for other acts while they themselves weren’t performing. Members of the 8-bit community give back.

Pokémon Red & Blue - Gym Leader Battle Music [HQ] by Cocodayc

But that’s just how it appears on the inside, and I must admit, my affinity for 8-bit music and culture (though I’m not an active participant), renders my position toward picturing 8-bit in positive light. Many people outside of the culture view 8-bit as a gimmick, and don’t think it’ll last as a genre. Perhaps that’s why Zach felt the need to defend 8-bit to me in our interview,

“You wonder, ‘How big can it get?’ and then you realize, wait, this is like, videogame music. People are gonna have a really hard time with this, this couldn't be on the radio. I feel bad in that sense…"

But not everyone on the outside views chiptune badly. 8-bit rock band Anamanaguchi have steadily ascended to popular status, scoring the music for the Scott Pilgrim video game last summer and touring throughout the US. The Village Voice describe Anamanaguchi as chiptune’s savior, touting that,

“If chiptune does finally go mainstream, Anamanaguchi will surely lead the charge, and if they pull it off without relying on the nostalgia crutch, they could survive even after the games that inspire them are forgotten—or, in their case, never even remembered: All four band members are younger than the Nintendos they program.”

Which brings us back to nostalgia. A 2010 study on music-evoked nostalgia postulated, “the triggers of nostalgia during musical episodes are the particular associations the individual has formed between a given piece of music and both past events (i.e., the autobiographical salience of a particular song for a given person), as well as basic emotions that these events evoke” (Janata, 2010). This serves as a proper explanation for 8-bit indebtedness to pop-punk. Bands like Weezer and Blink-182 serve as core inspiration for a number of 8-bit bands, simply because that’s the music they were listening to at the time they were playing videogames. It’s not too far of a stretch to say that 8-bit aims for nostalgia by attempting to create autobiographical salience instantaneously. When Anamanaguchi perform live, the almost always include a cover of Blink-182’s “Dammit,” resulting in large mosh pit and singalong. Everyone in the crowd with whom “Dammit” resonates experiences an intense rush of pleasure, a result of nostalgia and the linking of a song with personal emotions and associations. Even though Anamanaguchi may be “younger than the Nintendos they program,” they definitely haven’t outgrown the pop punk phase, nor do they seem to want to.



In The Village Voice, Anamanaguchi frontman Peter Berkman said 8-bit culture “reminds [him] of car culture in the '50s, back when cars were simple enough to open up and fuck around with. That’s kind of the appeal of the system in artistic ways as well: It's almost like breaking electronic music down. Who needs high-end production when you can do it yourself?" That’s the ethos of 8-bit right now. It’s DIY, it’s a mod culture, it’s a fan culture, it’s a remix culture, it’s a gift culture: it is many things. 8-bit has its niche and its following, as Zach explained, “They're nerdier, really tech savvy, love videogames, love nostalgia. It works really perfectly.” To those core constituents, going mainstream is of no concern, all that matters is (re-)creating memories. And why not? I’d listen to anything that reminds me of Christmas Eve with my cousin.


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Works Cited

P.S. Merry Christmas!