How a Russo-Nigerian Stallion Found Video Game Music, Part 4: VG Frequency (The Radio Show)

After a semester of my "(Insert Name Here)" radio show, split between my favorite mainstream tracks and tracks from the amateur VGM arrangement community, I realized that most of my listening audience stuck around for the video game music. Having promoted my show more thoroughly on OverClocked ReMix's message boards, I managed to secure a tight-knit group of listeners who I'd gather up on AOL Instant Messenger in a chat room. Among them were Scott "SeattleOverCoat" Porter (later just "OverCoat", my first regular listener), a.p. "analoq" matthews, Candy "Juverna" Bullard, and Danny "SuperGreenX" Adler (now "SGX").

I honestly don't remember if any specific track prompted me to also follow the original music that amateur VGM arrangers made. Having done a great amount of personal research on the artists' homepages, I was able to familiarize myself with the fact that many of them also had original works on MP3.com or personal homepages.

As far as I recall, it was around the end of the 2002 school year when I decided to do an episode of "(Insert Name Here)" exclusively featuring original tracks by artists in the OC ReMix community. Mixers who had already heard of my show quickly turned out, so I ended up with material from all the names mentioned prior. SGX's stuff in particular was very impressive (and continues to be to this day). I was also excited to receive material from top names like Disco Dan, Ailsean, Injury, DarkeSword, Protricity, and Star Salzman.

One particular thing I remember in preparation was that I printed notes on each musician and track to reference for the introduction of each song. Not to sound egotistical, because my shows were both very loose and tongue-in-cheek, but I'm impressed at the degree of seriousness that I gave to the subject matter at the time. I was able to note real names, music competitions that they had recently taken part in, as well as previous works and relevance to the community. There was no moment where my audience went "Damn, he respects the community. He knows his stuff," but I feel those things were inherent and unspoken to those from the VGM arrangement community who tuned in.

In the summer of 2003, I finally made the move to focusing on video game music and the amateur VGM arrangement community entirely. After being stuck on a name for weeks (the best I could initially come with was VGM: Very Good Music, which I allowed Steve "D-Lux" King to steal years later), my friend Joe bantered out a few radio sounding words, including the word "Frequency." As soon as I put "VG" in front of it and said it aloud, I knew I had a very strong name for the show.

Looking back to my first episode's playlist from VGF, I'm certainly astonished by a few things:

*I forgot about my penchant for inserting songs into my playlists on the fly when requests popped up; my first track of the show was a request for Gröûp X.
*Just friends at the time, "The Lady", Paige, called into the very first show. Though basically a hater (you'll hear more from her when the time comes), she was impressed by the music of Jared Hudson and Quinn Fox.
*My selection was nowhere near as deep back then. Most of the tracks were favorite OC ReMixes.

It would take too much time to go through all the various developments in the show that were very important to me at the time. The ball started rolling with people I had known beforehand, and soon enough I was joined by people I didn't know well but knew of the show. The show clearly became more important over time as ReMixers started going out of their way to catch it, started providing me with audio bumpers, tracks to play (many times, before anyone else had heard them), works-in-progress to provide feedback to or interviews, and started treating the show's chat room as a important place to be to interact with lots of community members.

Memories of those 3 years, in shorthand:

*The headache that was streaming in RealAudio
*Commercials for Zwings 'n Things ("Miss the old days when a wing was a wing?", which Spencer Koch later admitted he had no idea how he came up with that when recording the ad)
*Bubb Rubb during all of the early aftershows
*Coining the term "e-penis" while interviewing KyleJCrb and reading the chat room window contents over the air; if you've ever heard the term anywhere, I somehow invented it
*The Wingless explains the meaning of bukkake
*The Valentine's Day shows
*Being saved in a big way by 5 interviews when audio from my computer was a no-go one week
*Interviewing Protricity, the arrival of Jim Holland and newly being able to record the shows myself, leading to jump in popularity once show MP3s became available every week
*Having friend, Emory student, WMRE DJ, and old-school OC ReMixer Electron on board as guest host
*The yearly "Best of the Best" episodes capping off each year's run
*Interviewing OC ReMix founder, David "djpretzel" Lloyd
*The surprise return for one more season after graduating from Emory University in 2005

VG Frequency certainly was a memorable experience that fueled my love for broadcasting to this day. The radio show kept me in tune with the goings-on of the amateur VGM arrangement community for quite a long time in an Internet age where people move fast and events move faster. The casual fan misses out on the high quality, diversity and vast selection in arrangements outside of OC ReMix and especially original works from artists' homepages. It made me respect the community's musicians even more, and bringing those tracks awareness they may have otherwise not received is something I'm proud of doing.

Though I served an unconventional role in the community as a radio DJ, the role was one that provided me not only the opportunity to observe the community's contributors, but ultimately the ability to actively shape the community's direction in my own small way. After doing community music reviews during the summer of 2004, I entered a few people's radar as a serious candidate for a position on the OverClocked ReMix Judges Panel. That'll take us to Part 5...

How a Russo-Nigerian Stallion Found Video Game Music, Part 3: Discovering OverClocked ReMix

When Matt Kertz mentioned to me to check out remix.overclocked.org in early 2002, I was definitely interested, but never became a hardcore fan of the site until the following summer. The first newly posted track I remember being interested in back then was DarK PurPLe's Super Mario Bros. 2 "The DarK Underground."

When I first browsed OC ReMix, I only downloaded and kept about 30 tracks. All were from games I was familiar with, including Super Mario Bros. 1-3, Super Mario 64, Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3, Streets of Rage 1-2, F-Zero, Street Fighter II and Mega Man X (which I had downloaded a ROM of). Any other games I had played had no mixes at the time, and I only played a limited number of games growing up. I quickly added enjoyable tracks from OCR to my radio show playlists, impressed at the sound quality and creativity of guys like McVaffe (Mike Vafeas). Even as a newbie, I could instantly tell the guy was treated like a huge deal there.

The advent of torrenting years later would make OCR's catalogue much more accessible than when I first arrived. But in retrospect, what's funny to me is that I initially treated the site rather nonchalantly, armed with downloading habits I'd chastise newbies for having nowadays. In that sense, I wasn't there broadly looking to find good music, I was strictly there for nostalgia. My attitude wasn't rude or dismissive, but other mixes on OCR might as well have not existed; they simply weren't on my radar.

Even when I got my first taste of ReMixes that were from games I didn't know, my horizons weren't broadened at all. I simply downloaded the new tracks that I liked and did no further exploration. My roommate back then, Dave Share, managed to download Chris J. Hampton's Chrono Trigger "New Zeal" and McVaffe's Castlevania Adventure "CV2k" (since removed from the site, no thanks to me) searching for cool stuff himself once I told him of the site. When he played those tracks on his comp, they were so catchy that I asked him what they were from and was surprised that they were also from OC ReMix. You'd think I would have learned to check out everything, but then again the task of amassing every mix back in 2002 was time-consuming and potentially not worth the returns.

Some n00b things I remember about my earliest days:
*Before realizing he was the site creator, wondering how egotistical djpretzel was for being the only person using the first person in the ReMix writeups
*Visiting VGMix shortly after learning about the ReMixer Exdous, downloading several mixes there, realizing most of the tracks sucked and subsequently never visiting it again; they had no quality control system in place at the time, and it showed
*Severely disliking Super Mario World "Flat Goom Beat" (also since removed) for being uncreative
*QuasiKaotic & Jade Gemini

Luckily I passed on the good word about OC ReMix onto my best friend, Joe Mauri. If Matt Kertz was the one who guided me to OverClocked ReMix in the first place, then Joe was the one who's actions ended up making me a hardcore fan. Back in the days when bandwidth was costly and speed was inconsistent, OCR's downloading policy strongly discouraged people hitting the site hard and snagging lots of tracks within a short period of time. About a week after telling Joe about OC ReMix however, he had unabashedly downloaded everything, the site having around 600 songs by that point. He was there for nostalgia, but he was also broadly looking to find good music.

The summer of 2002, Joe came to stay with my family during summer break, which was great for both of us. One of the most influential activities of mine that summer was taking three days to sit down and listen through all of the nearly 700 ReMixes he had, starting from the letter A and working my way down through Z. It was definitely a rewarding experiencing, as I ended up keeping about a third of the mixes, becoming familiar with lots of the artists there, and becoming indirectly familiar with a lot of popular game soundtracks. I didn't know Mega Man II's "Dr. Wily Stage 1" or Final Fantasy VI's "Terra" beforehand, but I definitely knew them now. From that point forward, OC ReMix was a daily visit. Once I lurked the forums, I decided my best approach for becoming a community regular would be to post a handful of mix reviews first to have some posts to my name; you can still see those archived posts today.

Much like my habits with mainstream music I liked, I meticulously tagged the OC ReMixes I held onto. While the framework was good, OCR's informational database was really lacking back then as it was only as complete as djpretzel's spare time or interest could manage. Thus, my curiosity had me researching the source tunes of the mixes at Zophar's Domain, original composers, ReMixer real names, email addresses and homepages; whatever wasn't readily available, I worked hard to track down out of my own personal interest.

My burgeoning interest in OverClocked ReMix quickly led to me altering the divided focus of my radio show singularly to the amateur VGM arrangement community. That'll take us to Part 4...

How a Russo-Nigerian Stallion Found Video Game Music, Part 2: Starting in Radio

Along with using Napster to seek out the occasional video game tracks, I also amassed a collection of mainstream tracks that I had liked over the years. Being detail-oriented, I always changed filenames, and I used Winamp to tag my tracks pretty meticulously: release year, album, publisher. But also being a very particular fan, I didn't have anything more than maybe 275-300 tracks, most bands or artists having only 1 or 2 tracks. Still though, whenever I found something good enough to keep, it was always a big deal. Especially in music, I'm of the view that one should be open to all new music, but also feel one's preferences to be the most interesting out of anybody's.

In late 2001, I guested a lot on my friend Anna Scruggs' radio show at WMRE, Emory University Student Radio. She played a good deal of pop music, but within the mix she had a lot of interesting bands, including Coldplay just before I was familiar with 'em. She picked her music well, and at the time she was a particularly big fan of Guster as well as the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. I don't even recollect why I first joined her on the air other than to hang out; I hadn't been bitten by the radio bug yet.

Due to WMRE having a webcam and being broadcast on Emory on-campus cable system, Anna, much like any and all females visible on WMRE, was frequently propositioned to flash the webcam by horny male students, always funny and/or mildly annoying on- or off-air. Thems were the breaks.

One aspect of WMRE I particularly enjoyed was working with its primitive soundboard (which was eventually upgraded to a very professional one). Using it to broadcast was pretty fun, and joining the station to be allowed to actually work with the equipment was one reason I joined. The other reason went back to my earlier mantra: one should feel one's musical preferences to be the most interesting out of anybody's. Discovering the opportunity to share my favorite music with people and spread the good word about it was all the impetus I needed to ask about having my own timeslot on the station in February 2002.

One thing job-seeking websites and books promote heavily for hungry individuals looking for opportunities is to grab tenaciously at even the smallest bite, in order to get one's foot in the door. At WMRE, that meant eagerly accepting the Thursday night, 2-4AM timeslot when it was the only one offered to me. While an objectively lousy slot, the time wasn't bad relative to my Friday class schedule, so I went for the hand I was dealt. My original show name, "(Insert Name Here)", sounded witty enough given that I couldn't come up with anything else. In any case, that's where seizing the opportunity factored in.

Where luck and the ability to stand out eventually factored in was in how diligently I filled in for DJs who couldn't make it to their scheduled shows. Most of the time, whenever a DJ announced they couldn't make it, I would swoop in and reply offering to cover their slot. Most of the time, it didn't matter how short notice it was; I was able to compose a fresh playlist in half an hour that I felt had pretty good flow and subsequently hotfoot it with my laptop over to the Longstreet dorm where the station was housed. Being committed to only 4 two-hour shows per month, within my first month at WMRE I instead managed to host over 40. By that time, I frequently got calls from people recognizing me, telling me that they saw me in the studio all of the time, with most people liking what I was playing.

My format at the time was a mixture of mainstream music, mostly UK-based bands (Travis, The Verve, Coldplay) and video game music that I could find at reasonable quality in MP3 format. That limited me to stuff like Street Fighter Alpha 3, GoldenEye 007, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK and other assorted goods, but I still had a fairly deep selection.

After coming in on one occasion to cover for a timeslot after another friend of mine, Matt Kertz, Matt asked me what my show format was and I mentioned the video game music portion of the playlist. Particularly a fan of the CastleVania series mixes available there, Matt recommended me to http://remix.overclocked.org, emphasizing that the tracks available there were abundantly free. Making a mental note of it, I followed up on it a few days later, which I'll elaborate on next time around.

After that month of constantly filling in for people, I received an email from WMRE's then-Program Director Caroline Riegel, who had also provided me my initial DJ training. It turned out that the Saturday night, 10PM-Midnight slot had been freed up and she had noticed my dedication to being on the air. She had sent me the email letting me know that the timeslot was free and that, due to my enthusiasm, she was offering me the opportunity to take it over or decline it before she publicly put it up for grabs. I quickly thanked her and accepted my new slot. And of course, I kept right on plowing through and substituting for other people. I loved being on the air.

While I felt it important to plug video game music on my radio show, it truly took on a life of its own once I became familiar with OverClocked ReMix. That'll take us to Part 3...

How a Russo-Nigerian Stallion Found Video Game Music, Part 1: The Games

I thought it would be appropriate to give some background on myself and why I decided to start a blog about video game music. Or, more accurately, how my girlfriend (a woman you'll hear more from known as "The Lady") encouraged me to start a blog about video game music. It's been a relatively long road getting to VGM listening as a life's hobby.

I was never big into video games as a kid. I loved the ones I did have, but never owned too many or spent way too much time playing them. In short, loved 'em, just not fanatically. And it continues that way up until the present day. I don't own a Wii, a PS3 or an Xbox 360, though I've played Wario Ware: Smooth Moves for a few minutes and loved it.

My uncle bought my (fraternal) twin brother & I an NES in 1988 for our birthday, which came with the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cartridge (naturally). Despite playing Nintendo together at the same distance from the television, my brother's eyesight stayed 20/20 and mine started getting worse for whatever reason. I needed glasses in 1st grade (didn't end up getting them until years later).

The music of Super Mario Bros. definitely stuck with me and remains an instant bit of nostalgia, but while it planted a seed, I never sat down and tape recorded the music like a lot of colleagues I know.

Other earlier memories involved:
*a friend of my brother's, Nnamdi Ifejika, having a ton of NES games, which allowed me to sample a lot of 'em and get to know bits and pieces of several titles
*3rd grade, where my friend Eric Hole had a huge Nintendo Power strategy guide and letting me borrow it for a few days, as just reading about the games was amazing enough
*playing the Sega Master System, particularly the footbag portion of California Games, at my uncle's house (the one who bought us the NES)
*playing Duck Hunt at a brother's friend's house and chancing on a sweet spot in Clay Shooting that allowed me to hit each target no matter where it was on the screen; I eventually got nervous around Round 90 after I sportingly let one clay pigeon almost get away, then somehow got nervous and tried to shoot it directly
*Receiving both Super Mario Bros. 3, and the excellent Nintendo Power Strategy Guide for it in 1990
*Playing the SNES at Dave Riccio's house back when it first came out, especially Street Fighter II years later
*Choosing Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a birthday present (a difficult choice at the time, an excellent choice in retrospect)
*Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV
*My friend Hayden Mixsell bequeathing me his Sega Genesis after moving onto the Nintendo 64, hooking me up with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Streets of Rage 2 in the process

It's difficult to encapsulate the entire mish-mash of games of my childhood, but so many of them had really memorable themes, Streets of Rage 2 in particular. Some of Pilotwings comes to mind. Road Rash. Super Mario Bros. 2. Street Fighter Alpha had a really big impact on me. There's a big list eventually waiting to be recollected.

It wasn't until Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Napster in 2000 during my freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta, GA that I really got into trying to find video game music. As far as I knew, back in the relative infancy of the internet, there weren't any concentrated websites to buy game music let alone simply find it. But on a whim, I figured that if mainstream music was available, maybe somebody had some video game music from games I used to love.

There was no luck finding Street Fighter II, but Street Fighter Alpha 3's "Brave or Grave" came up once somehow and I decided to check it out. I'd never played the game at the time, but I loved the track. In retrospect it's not an A-grade piece of work, but the energy was pretty crazy the first time I heard it. I was gradually able to amass most of the soundtrack by searching for Street Fighter Zero 3 and becoming lucky when certain users would show up. Karin Kanzuki's theme "Simple Rating" quickly became my favorite, along with Cody's "Stripes," Vega's "Crimson," and Cammy's "Doll Eyes."

A friend of mine who lived in my freshman hall, and who I stayed friends with throughout my 4 years, Dave Share, had a Sega Dreamcast and quickly got me back into the Street Fighter game series, far and away my favorite bunch of games. Eventually, I was playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK (truly a dream game when I first saw it) and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, loving each one of the soundtracks even more than I loved the games.

It wasn't until 2001 that I became interested in spreading the word on VGM through the radio. That'll take us to Part 2...