For a Follow Up, a Pirate Plays Daft Punk on 8 Rubber Chickens
November 25, 2013 2:52 PM   Subscribe

The Monkey Island Theme, as performed by eight 3 1/2 inch floppy drives.
posted by Copronymus (18 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's everything I never knew I wanted.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:59 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


They did the stereo sound really well here, too.
posted by poe at 3:03 PM on November 25, 2013


The James Bond Theme one is really quite good.
posted by true at 3:12 PM on November 25, 2013


That dude has a whole bunch more on his YouTube channel (including a bunch that took the wind out of the sails of my Daft Punk joke). The Mortal Kombat is another good one in the general area of 90s video games, but there's a bunch of Disney and a decent variety of movie themes and even a Christmas carol. I would dearly love to see a Space Jam theme one, but I'm worried it would be like seeing the face of God and ruin my enjoyment of all other musics.
posted by Copronymus at 3:15 PM on November 25, 2013


Oh, this reminds me of one my very favorite "hacks" I guess you could call it. Here's Radiohead's "Nude" performed on a variety of old hardware from 2008. (The song proper gets started about 1 minute in.)
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:16 PM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


This sounds better than the actual game did on the pc speaker.
posted by aubilenon at 3:21 PM on November 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


I love this interpretation of the Monkey Island(TM) theme. Really takes one back.

The Radiohead "cover" linked by Celsius1414 is very dear to me too and I listened to it a lot back in 2008. For whatever reason these old obsolete machines were always better at provoking a melancholy mood than the original by Radiohead ever could.
Thanks for reminding me.
posted by bigendian at 3:26 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I love the way those hard drives GROWL.
posted by beau jackson at 3:43 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


This is just such an amazing tune, truly a classic of video gaming music. This and the first level of Doom.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:03 PM on November 25, 2013


Comic Bakery is my favourite bit of video game music.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:12 PM on November 25, 2013


The Monkey Island theme was probably the first bit of music that I heard coming from a computer that wasn't played via the pc speaker, I'm reeling a bit at the nostalgia of it combined with the now lost sound of floppy disk drives. The ingenuity of the single channel version still astounds me though - I remember being amazed that someone had written something that could be formed so clearly with just beeps, but which was also this whole, actual piece of music.

I've had a section of MI3's title track as my ringtone for absolute yonks, though this made me realise I'm missing the actual theme from it.
posted by lucidium at 5:07 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I LIKE THIS!!!
posted by BlueHorse at 5:49 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh, and the menu screen midi for System Shock, that's another keeper, had that as a ringtone for ages too.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:29 PM on November 25, 2013


You can find pretty much every song played by floppy drives now. Like, here's the Smile song from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
posted by cyberscythe at 7:04 PM on November 25, 2013


Hardware? Hardware? But that's cheating …
Back in the 1980s, on a computer with no sound hardware (just a Z80 with a piezo beeper toggled through a ULA), Tim Follin composed vastly prog polyphonic pieces like the themes for Future Games, Agent X, Vectron and Chronos. Some of them even played which the game was busy loading from tape, because we couldn't afford floppies.
posted by scruss at 7:32 PM on November 25, 2013


my heart bursts with joy!
posted by thirtyeightdown at 10:20 PM on November 25, 2013


This sounds better than the actual game did on the pc speaker

Hear, hear. The music was always a highlight of the series though. A Pirate I Was Meant to Be.
posted by ersatz at 4:37 AM on November 26, 2013


The Monkey Island Theme, as performed by floppy drives.

A perfect song to listen to when ending sailors' lives!

♫ a pirate I was meant to be, trim the sails and roam the sea.... ♫
posted by painquale at 6:38 AM on November 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


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