a little reminiscence before ol' Tommy Tendo delivers the goods tonight...
the other day I loaded up F-Zero on the MiSTer as a late night treat, played a few cups and had a great time. my nesting partner can attest to my childlike glee: every forthcoming track was met with "oh BOY but the music on this one is ALSO SO GOOD THOUGH"
so while I was zooming through the races and getting into a good flow state, I was transported back to being 11 years old or so, getting obsessed with the copy of the game I'd borrowed from a friend, and got into the music in a way that I rarely did with video game music until I grew up a little more. but I couldn't stop there. I needed to hear this music without all the sound effects and extra noise. this deserves to be an album. when I realised I could just pause the game and the music would keep running, I knew what had to be done.
so I made do with what I had: a cassette player/recorder, a conservatory which I could isolate relatively well, and stealthy ninja skills to not make extra noise for the mic while recording.
I put the cassette recorder up real close to the TV, turned the TV up, paused the game, waited for the natural loop in the music to restart, hit record, snuck out of the conservatory and slowly slide the glass door shut to create the world's most hilarious recording studio, and repeat for every music track in the game.
and there it was: the F-Zero OST, lovingly bootlegged onto cassette and certainly the first time I'd ever had or even considered video game music as a standalone art piece. at the time I was able to download underwhelming Final Fantasy MIDIs to my heart's content at a mere couple of kb, but downloading mp3s was a little too prohibitively slow if I wanted to get any more than a couple tracks. I was so proud of it I asked to put it on in the car while my parents drove me places.
have some DEATH WIND: