13/12/2025
As I continue my look back through all of our releases (with huge gaps between each post), let me tell you a funny story. It's about The Dark Side of the Moon - The 8-bit Album.
After the success of the Weezer tribute, we wondered what else we could do in the same vein and I was going through a big Pink Floyd phase at the time. Because of the nature of TDSOTM and all of its experimentation and textures, I knew it would make for a great chiptune tribute. I even wondered why it had never been done before.
This one would be different to the Weezer tribute though, and it required more planning. I knew it needed to basically track to the original, in the same way that each song flowed into the next in one giant sequence. That's kind of complicated when you're planning to use different artists, but I thought that would be a selling point of the release too. So it was a little tricky getting the right artists on board and having them commit. Inevitably some people dropped out and needed to be replaced.
People were working on their tracks, but I remember it taking longer than I'd anticipated. Then the funniest thing happened - someone else released their own chip version of TDSOTM and beat us to the punch! That person was Brad Smith with his MOON8 release. And it seemed to get picked up everywhere - I guess similar to what had happened with our Weezer release. The idea of chiptune tributes was still novel around 2010/11 and they seemed to really hit the zeitgeist.
I was pretty dejected about it to be honest. Had I known someone else was working on it, I wouldn't have bothered with ours. It almost seemed pointless to carry on, but in the end I felt ours did offer something that the original didn't, i.e. variety in the styles and sounds. For example, we had tracks like Money by sergeeo with the sound font from Sonic the Hedgehog's Casino Night Zone (very clever), alongside Game Boys, the Speak and Spell etc.
Steve Jenkins from Telefuture did the art, which I, again, think is really clever. I thought we'd engaged and bounced off the original well.
But then something even more ironic happened - one of the tracks that got submitted utilised audio from Brad Smith's release so I had to go to Brad and get clearance to use this. He graciously said yes, so that's why you see his name on the last track, but in the end I was just happy to see the back of the project.
It was weird being the second chip TDSOTM, and I definitely felt ours could have been a bigger deal had it been first. Looking back now, I do feel it's a great release, and I believe we achieved that flow with the way it all sequenced up and matched the original.
