I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs. I mean, the idea of eating a mushroom that grew on the shady side of a cow’s turd sounds just as appealing to me as the next guy, but the opportunity never came up. So when I saw what looked like the iPhone app equivalent of an acid trip in the App Store, I got half a chubby. It’s called Bitboxland, and it’s a mix of faux retro game graphics and chip tunes. Now, being that I spend a good portion of my day reading, listening, and thinking about video games, I have seen my fair share of wannabe retro game stuff. Capcom’s selling Mega Man games that look like they were developed in 1988, half the PSP games coming out of Japan look like they were built with 2-D LEGOs, and morons in America called their game studio Gaijin Games (translates as Foreigner Games in Japanese), and those jerk-offs can’t be foreigners in their own country! So while part of me was excited to see NES-style visuals and music that sounds like something from Rhythm Heaven, another part of me was thinking, “JESUS CHRIST! Not another hipster retro project made by hipsters.” But once I let go of my nerd rage, and pretended to be a normal human being that didn’t have two decades of gaming under my belt, I was able to relax and actually enjoy playing around with Bitboxland.
Now that I’ve finished my brief trip down memory/nerd hate lane, let’s take a look at Bitboxland. First, it’s not a game. Second, it’s not a music app. Not in the usual sense anyway. There are no notes. There’s no metronome. There’s no pitch and octave meters. It’s a toy box of sounds that you can record. It’s more like banging on pots and pans with kitchen utensils and squeezing rubber duckies than tickling the ivories. If you’re interested in messing around with sound, you’re in the right place. But the first time you fire up Bitboxland, it’s pretty bare. You look at the screenshots in the App Store, and you’re expecting Godzilla taking a shit on Mount Fuji. You turn on Bitboxland for the first time, and it’s cloudy skies and an almost empty cow pasture. It wasn’t exactly obvious to me at first, but to unlock sounds other than the eight that are under the meadow the cow’s strolling around on, you have to start tapping the clouds. The more clouds you touch, the more stuff you unlock. You’ll be annoyed by the repetitive tapping on clouds for the first five minutes, but after you’ve unlocked Godzilla taking that shit on Mount Fuji blowing its load all over a hamster on a ferris wheel, you’ll start having some fun. Tapping on the background sets will start bleep-blop loops and the touchable items in the foregrounds all emit individual sounds that you can build your melodies on. It’s seriously fun and quirky. Even one of my musician friends wanted Bitboxland after just a minute of goofing around with it.
The downside is that there’s no way to send your creations anywhere unless you run it out through the headphone jack into something else. You can’t email or upload the tunes you make. I’ve created all sorts of genius that I feel are lost in the ethers. On top of that, because there’s no documentation in the app itself, just figuring out what kind of recording capabilities it has wasn’t obvious. The app is more of an art piece than anything, but I try not to question the artsy-fartsy types. If you like 8-bit graphics or chip tunes; or just crazy music, Bitboxland is a blast to play with, and you won’t even have to go digging around a cow’s backside to get your high. It’s available for $1.99 in the App Store. You can also check out the Lite version called Cloudie for free. The db-db-db folks have made a video demo which you can check out to get a feel for the app.
