Sean Monahan

About a month ago Boing Boing had a call for “games inspired by music”. Contestants need only create a game inspired by chiptunes — a style of music that limits itself to the 8- and 16-bit bleeps and bloops of yore — and submit it for judgement.

My submission is a game called Beat Boost that has a little surfer guy flowing through blocks of music that are generated from the game’s soundtrack. In true old school fashion the game is solely about achieving the highest possible score. To do this you boost the surfer into the colored blocks (called “beat blocks”) in each level or perform full, 360 degree front flips. You can check it out on Boing Boing (don’t forget to vote)!

The catch is that boosting and flipping depletes your boost meter and when this runs out you fall to the floor where you hemorrhage points (1000 points for hitting the ground upside-down or otherwise mid flip; 1500 per second afterward), but replenish your boost meter. Hitting boost blocks also refills the boost meter and hitting these blocks just right will give you a boost for free.

Successfully completing a level allows you to enter your name, classic arcade style, where it will be stored in a remote leaderboard. This leaderboard shows only the top five scores and player names and requires no logins, accounts, etc. — it’s just like when you were a kid quickly tapping your initials into that Pac-Man arcade cabinet.

All that tracks in the game are by Tettix, you should definitely check him out as he’s done a ton of great stuff not the least of which was to make his music available for this contest. The full track list in Beat Boost is:

• Earth’s Assault on the Central AI – Technology Crisis
• Infiltration at Dusk – Technology Crisis II
• The Slave Rebellion at Genesis Point – Technology Crisis II
• Carotid Restraint – T.K.O.E.P.
• Scissor Kick – T.K.O.E.P.
• Dragon Punch – T.K.O.E.P.