Awesome Chiptunes

veridiz vz•tv put together a full-length recreation of Pink Floyd’s classic album Dark Side of the Moon using 8-bit synthesizer sounds. After a very monotonous start with Speak to Me, things kick into gear by the time they hit On the Run and Money. veridiz has also made chiptune covers of Another Brick in the Wall, Echoes, and The Final Cut.

Now you do what Robotnik told ya. Chiptune musician fxsnowy took Rage Against the Machine’s track Killing in the Name and programmed it to play with the 16-bit sounds of the SEGA Genesis game console. It’s time for Sonic and Tails to rise up and take the power back.

It’s always fun to hear our favorite albums played with video game sounds. FXSnowy took the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 smutty masterpiece Blood Sugar Sex Magik and covered it using the 16-bit sounds from the Super Nintendo games Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, and 3. All the best tunes are here, from Funky Monkeys to Breaking the Gorilla.

Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral is a dark industrial masterpiece. MawinSwag took the entire album and performed it using the sounds from Nintendo’s Mario 64. The Mushroom Kingdom descends into madness with tracks like Mr. Self Destruct, Closer, Reptile, and Hurt. Piggy got a copyright strike, so skip over that part and find it here.

We know how great Radiohead sounds played using the sounds from Mario 64. Now enjoy MawinSwag’s 64-bit chiptune version of Metallica’s 1988 album And Justice for All. We can totally imagine Blackened playing during the Dark World level while Bowser laughs maniacally, and One would be perfect as Mario explores Princess Peach’s castle.

Do you need a break from your regular music playlists? Then open up this video, hit play, and drop it into a background tab. Jorf assembled this epic 10-hour and 53-minute mix of 227 tracks programmed by various chiptune musicians and played with the classic 8-bit sounds of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

We’ve heard Radiohead’s In Rainbows played with the sounds of Super Mario 64. Now enjoy another classic alternative album played in Nintendo style. Something is Real put together this epic remake of Nirvana’s Nevermind using the 64-bit game console’s sounds. The chiptune version of In Bloom is something special.

Radiohead’s In Rainbows was some of their most experimental and best work. Now you can listen to the album as if it was the soundtrack to Super Mario 64. On4word created this amazing interpretation of the entire album using the game’s soundfont. It’s available as a pay-what-you-want download on Bandcamp.

Living Colour is one of those great bands that doesn’t get the kind of retro love that they deserve. The genre-defying group gave us songs like Love Rears Its Ugly Head, Glamour Boys, and their biggest hit Cult of Personality. 8 Bit Universe created this chiptune cover which gives the track a totally different and unexpected sound.

Known for its graphical and sound abilities, the Commodore 64 personal computer was home to some of the best games of the 8-bit era. Engineer Linus Åkesson took advantage of its audio capabilities to build this unique accordion which consists of two C64 computers connected by bellows made out of floppy disks and tape.

The 1970s disco era collides with 1980s video game sounds in this great chiptune cover of the Bee Gees’ hit You Should Be Dancing. We can imagine a pixelated John Travolta lighting up the dance floor while Mario, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong cheer him on from the sidelines.

The Muse track Knights of Cydonia is one of our favorites. It sounds especially great as a retro video game song. 8-bit Universe created this stellar chiptune version of the 2006 track which would have been perfect as the theme music for an old school Atari game like Ballblazer or M.U.L.E.

The 1980s brought the first 16-bit PCs, and advances in hardware brought better graphics and sound. Programmers went on to create music synthesizers and sequencers called trackers, which became a demo and hacker scene staple. Ahoy looks back at the history of trackers and the ear-pleasing chiptunes they produced.

It’s been more than a decade since Swedish band Rymdreglage released their stop-motion LEGO animated video 8-Bit Trip. Now they’re back with a follow-up video that celebrates 8-bit and 16-bit games (and haircuts). It incorporates some cool 3D effects achieved with a motion-controlled camera rig.

Daft Punk may no longer make new music, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the musical masterpieces they’ve left us with. Stylophone expert maromaro1337 pays homage to the robots with an electronic medley of 10 classic tracks, including Robot Rock, Digital Love, Technologic, and Aerodynamic.

Created by Brendan Becker aka Inverse Phase in 2012, Pretty Eight Machine is an awesome tribute to the music of Nine Inch Nails, performed on 8-bit gaming and computer sound chips. Now, you can pre-order it as a vinyl double album. The set includes 13 tracks from the SE release, and will be pressed on splatter art discs.

The Boston track Foreplay/Long Time is a masterpiece of 1970s prog rock, kicking off with an epic instrumental intro, leading into a rock-and-roll classic. 8-Bit Universe presents an equally entertaining chiptune version of the nearly 8-minute long track.

(Loud) The track Megalovania from Undertale is one of the most frantic and challenging to play pieces of music in the history of video games. It sounds especially great when performed on high voltage tesla coils, as demonstrated by Franzoli Electronics.

Electronic musician Maro Maro lets his hands fly with an impressive medley of video game music performed on pair of stylophones. He had to tune the rudimentary analog synthesizers to different ranges in order to produce a wider range of notes.

Look Mum No Computer has been working on and off for over a year on this incredibly complicated electronic music maker, a wall full of Nintendo Game Boys which work in perfect sync to produce richly-layered polyphonic chiptunes. It’s still not finished, but even as a work in progress, it’s still quite impressive.

While the Super Nintendo system provided us with countless hours of memorable gaming, it turns out that making music for its games was extremely difficult given the system’s memory limitations. The Nerdwriter explores some of the clever workarounds composers employed.

After filling our ears with his wonderful classical and Disney medleys, Grant Woolard is back with an epic composition, which flawlessly blends 46 different melodies from Nintendo games in a single track. See if you can identify them all.

Enjoy some of the best Japanese video game music from the 1980’s and 1990’s in this 34-track compilation album. A spinoff of the eponymous Red Bull music documentary, the album traverses both synthwave and symphonic music.