Tag Archives: meme

8-Bit Beast’s Haunted House

Uncategorized, , ,

Haunted House (also known from its NSF header information as Castle Boss) is the first (and so far, only) FamiTracker track uploaded by CM.O user 8-Bit Beast. It was posted on June 13, 2013, and the user has since abandoned the account. Since 8-Bit Beast requested constructive criticism, I can say this: the song is a mess. The lead instrument is shrill and obnoxious, the time signature seems to break frequently (likely 8-Bit Beast was copying and pasting notes without making sure the beats lined up,) and there are only two instrument patches. The main instrument, commonly referred to as the “gadunk,” plays on each channel, whereas the second instrument is a jumbled mess of notes and only appears near the end. This song is so perfectly bad, it’s beautiful.

Video courtesy of SiIvaGunner.

At first listen, the song is uncomfortable to get through. It seems to go on for far too long, despite being under a minute and a half long, and it’s too inconsistent to follow along with. It may have been done unintentionally, but 8-Bit Beast created a terrible masterpiece.

In 2014 my friend Ap0c brought the song to my attention, and we couldn’t get enough of it. He made his own remix, and even incorporated Haunted House in his live sets. In 2015 Ap0c released “8-Bit Beast’s Haunted House Remastered,” a joke EP featuring the original song, a version with heavy reverb, and his remix. He commissioned me to make some album art, which is when I designed the 8-Bit Beast’s pixelated silhouette.

In 2016, Ap0c was a judge for ChipWIN: Volume 5. He and I joked around about submitting Haunted House, and I started working on “Cache Boss,” a Bit Shifter styled song using a slowed down “gadunk” as the melody, before abruptly becoming a piano midi of Haunted House. From what I’m told, the ChipWIN judges were intrigued to see a submission coming from Bit Shifter, then furious when they thought Ap0c was behind it, then entertained when they figured out it was me. The track was included as a bonus track for downloading the album, and the artist was renamed “8-Bit Shifter” to avoid misleading anyone.

A few months later, I was invited to SiIvaGunner, after submitting a handful of my own rips. One night, I tried bringing Haunted House to the group’s attention, but the response was lukewarm. I figured the best way to show the song’s potential as a meme was by example. Using the midi I wrote for Cache Boss, I submitted eight (ha) video game rips using the song, each with words like “haunted,” “castle,” and “boss,” to hint at the source material. A few team members who were awake at 3am saw “Joke: Haunted House (AKA Castle Boss) by 8-Bit Beast” pop up 8 times on Discord, and it caught their attention.

Most of my submissions were garbage, and they insisted that if I was going to force the meme on their channel, they would have to be As Quality As Possible. I reworked some of the low-effort ones, and on September 16th 2016, Haunted House was introduced on the channel, in the form of a bait and switch Castlevania rip. Unsurprisingly, the fans were confused. Some were upset and started dislike-bombing. The first Haunted House rip came just days after the “bean” fiasco, and fans were likely still upset from that. In the coming weeks however, other SiIvaGunner members began submitting Haunted House rips, and more clever Haunted House rips were submitted to the channel. Fans were referring to it as the “mystery meme.”

The team allowed me to use 8-Bit Beast in the Halloween event, and I planned on revealing the source of the meme at the end of the event. Eventually a fan traced the meme back to Cache Boss, and the community thought they had solved the mystery. I held out hope that this would throw fans off the trail until I could reveal the true source, but on September 21st, 2016, the fans had found Haunted House.

The 8-Bit Beast became one of the main characters of the Halloween event, and in what was originally intended to be the channel’s final months, Haunted House became one of the channel’s big memes. It reappeared in the Christmas event, and occasionally showed up in regular rips throughout the following year. The beast character would occasionally return for Halloween events and other promotional artwork.

In short, if 8-Bit Beast hadn’t uploaded that FamiTracker experiment, I wouldn’t have gotten a lot of the opportunities I had. I was the designated “ChipWIN bonus track” guy for about 8 (HA.) different albums, which allowed me to keep practicing making chip music, and even write a few Shyabeetus tracks for ChipWIN. SiIvaGunner made me the Quality of Control guy for Haunted House rips, and eventually made me a member of the backroom, allowing me to contribute to channel shenanigans from behind the scenes. I even got to do signatures with the team for a couple years at MAGFest, because of that.

So, thank you 8-Bit Beast, wherever you are. Gadunk gadunk gadunk, gadunk gadunk gadunk gadunk……

8-Bit Beast’s Haunted House Fusion Collab

Animation, Collaboration, ,

This was a collaboration with the YouTube community SiIvaGunner. In 2019 we were responsible for a bonus track for the ChipWIN album 8-Bit Best, in which we spliced together various video game style imitations of 8-Bit Beast’s Haunted House. For Halloween of 2020, we released visuals for the track, and revised the audio, adding more segments and fine-tuning some sections.

Many of the character sprites were existing video game sprites which I silhouetted and resized, and some were done from scratch. I was responsible for the beast’s graphics, the environments, most of the logo swaps, and compiling the entire thing. I also animated the Atmospheric and Caramelldansen segments in Flash.

MAGFest 2020 – Open Mic performance

Music, , , , ,

Here’s footage of my only Chipspace Open Mic performance in 2020, courtesy of Nerdfit. I didn’t have a set theme this year, but I made sure to play the 2020 version of my All Star remix, a new version of my Gourmet Race/Superman cover with SimpleFlips memes, and by Sam Mulligan‘s request, my ChipWINter Wilderness track. The full set list is as follows:

00:36 – Haunted Mouth
04:01 – 1-2 Superman
08:32 – Spaghetti in my Stocking

ChipWIN Bonus Tracks

Music, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Chiptunes = WIN was an online community and music label that would put out large compilation albums of chiptunes. Since 2012, the label released a big annual album, as well as a few side-albums. My friend Ap0c was a judge for Volume 5, so I decided it would be funny to submit a joke rendition of 8-Bit Beast’s Haunted House, disguised as a popular chiptune artist, Bit Shifter. At first the album organizers were mad, but when they figured out it was my doing, they decided to use it as a hidden gag track. We tweaked the artist’s name a bit, and thus began my job as the bonus track guy.

Before this point, Haunted House was an inside joke amongst a handful of folks in the chip scene. After Volume 5, I went on to use the song in SiIvaGunner rips, where people started recognizing it, pushing it to meme status. ChipWIN even went on to release a Haunted House-themed album (after we teased that the joke was retired), and SiIvaGunner themselves even teamed up with me to create a grand bonus Fusion Collab. After which, following Ap0c’s suggestion, I started submitting covers of the Matlock theme instead.

ChipWIN has presumably been shut down since 2020, and unfortunately there isn’t an archive of the albums anywhere, to my knowledge. However, I was able to gather my joke tracks and release an album. So… Here’s that. Highlights include an Auxcide-themed Haunted House/Sandstorm mashup, a seven minute Christmas medley of a wave channel singing “dick butt,” and a spaghetti western rendition of the Matlock theme.

The Beast Awakens

LSDJ, Music, , , ,

This track was featured on the ChipWIN April Fools album 8-Bit Best, an album comprised entirely of Haunted House remixes. I tried to capture the essence of Haunted House’s weird time signatures, and attempted to make them seem more… Intentional. I also tried to tell a story with ambience and sound effects, almost like a cutscene in an NES or Game Boy game. I even turned the lead instrument (which I refer to as a “gadunk”) into 8-Bit Beast’s laugh. To bring the whole thing home, I sprinkled in some references to Cache Boss, my first ChipWIN bonus track.

Mario at a Crab Rave

LSDJ, Music, ,

This is an LSDJ cover of Crab Rave, by Monstercat. This started as a joke over on Twitter, where I combined the sarcastic text Crab Rave memes with a meme from the chip music community, “chiptune is dead.” I wrote the hook in LSDJ, crushed the video into Game Boy-esque graphics (160 x 144px, 4 colors, pea green tint), and added a caption using the LSDJ pixel font. The tweet started gaining traction, so I finished fleshing out the cover and put it on SoundCloud. I used custom waveforms to recreate the steel drums from the original song, and layered waveforms to create a double-octave effect.

Chiptune is Dead!

Gourmet Skate

LSDJ, Music, ,

This begins as a straightforward cover of Gourmet Race from Kirby Super Star, but becomes a cover of Superman by Goldfinger. This same joke could have been explored as a SiIvaGunner rip, but I was already working on a cover of Gourmet Race and decided it would be fun to perform at Chipspace Open Mic.

The following year, I performed a version where the Gourmet Race portion of the song has 1-2 Oatmeal samples. You can hear that set here.

Scarlet O’Hara? – Uninvited

High Quality Video Game Rip, Music,

This is the theme that plays during the ghost lady’s scene in Uninvited, but with the melody and bassline replaced with Basket Case by Green Day, and later Superman by Goldfinger. I used Basket Case because the first few notes and chords sounded so similar. I used Superman because there are parts of that which sound very similar to Basket Case. Since the source is an NES song, I had to learn to use FamiTracker to make this rip.

This rip was featured on SiIvaGunner’s Highest Quality Rips Volume A.

Red Canyon – Kirby’s Dream Land 2

High Quality Video Game Rip, Music,

This is the music that plays in Level 5 of Kirby’s Dream Land 2, but with the melody and chords replaced with Take On Me by a-ha. This is actually an LSDJ cover of an existing rip, Yogurt Yard – Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land. It was submitted during the Nostalgia Critic Takeover. The Nightmare in Dream Land song and the Kirby’s Dream Land song are both recreations of Yogurt Yard, from Kirby’s Adventure. I wanted to submit a “de-make” of the Nightmare in Dream Land rip, but since I’m more comfortable working in LSDJ than FamiTracker, I used Red Canyon.

This rip was featured on Inspector Gunner 2 With Critic.