Eggerland Swagger (Main Theme) - Eggerland Mystery (MSX)
26When the OCReMix "Impact of Iwata" companion album project was announced, I was immediately drawn to the track list and especially Iwata's early period at HAL Laboratory. I grew up with the MSX home computer, and a good amount of now beloved HAL games made it to that platform. I have very fond memories of two HAL games in particular: Rollerball (a pinball game) and Eggerland Mystery. The latter being a puzzle game that started the Eggerland series and later evolved into multiple sequels and the Lolo games. I played both of them for countless hours, and the music of Eggerland Mystery has been stuck in my brain for decades. So when the album project started, there simply was no choice... I had to pay tribute to both Eggerland Mystery and my MSX roots.
Eggerland Mystery doesn't have much music, a jingle or two and a 30 second main loop during the game, all played on a 3 channel PSG. So stretching it out into a full remix was a bit of a challenge. I decided early on I wanted to give it a swinging feel and some swagger, and I wanted to honor both the place on the tracklist and theme of the album/book by using chiptune sounds. I sampled the drums of my MSX-Music expansion (a Yamaha YM2431) from my MSX, slapped some processing and swing on it, added a lot of FM and chiptune instruments, did some layering, figured out it needed a chiptune solo too, and this is what came out. A bit ecclectic perhaps, but I think it fits the source and the album concept.
Arrangement-wise the source track consists out of 3 square wave channels, a bass, a lead part and a harmony. All of these are used liberally throughout the track; sometimes as-is, sometimes just the harmony or lead part playing solo, sometimes just the bass. And sometimes in an embellished form with extra notes and/or a healthy amount of swing. Also various smaller phrases and patterns were sprinkled throughout the track; see if you can spot them all!
It was a lot of fun to go way back to my childhood nostalgia and remix a song from my beloved 8-bit MSX computer for an OCR album. Hope you enjoy!
Credits:
Jorito: arrangement, mixing, production