An appreciation of the 8-bit sound aesthetic has of course been around for a long time, partly through nostalgia for our formative gaming years, and partly because there was actually some geninely unique and cool-sounding audio tech on ‘80s home computers. The Commodore 64’s custom SID sound chip in particular has always been the subject of heavy fan appreciation, sites such as Remix.Kwed offering vast databases of user-submitted remixes. Graeme Norgate, composer at Free Radical Design, of Timesplitters fame,, is a big fan of what was achieved on the format. “For people like me, interested in electronic music at the time, it was such a far cry from what the other popular home computers could offer. It brought music making into the home from what was the previously financially unreachable route of the “proper” synths of the day.”

Above: It doesn't look like a musical marvel, we know. But trust us, the C64 sounded great.

But of course, programming directly to retro Commodore and Atari home computers is relatively easy. Otherwise ‘80s videogames would have had no soundtracks. Possibly the biggest jump for chip music came in 1997 when an industrious German art student by the name of Oliver Wattchow began work on a sequencer program for the original Game Boy. A year later, and the little green-faced brick was thrust into the spotlight as Wattchow used his finished Nanoloop software to play a gig in Cologne’s Liquid Sky Club. Since then, Nanoloop has been joined by the other most popular Game Boy music program Little Sound DJ, and both have been released on cartridge worldwide for direct use in the original hardware. Similar tools are available for consoles such as the NES and Sega Master System, either as cartridge-based tech or PC software.

Naturally, a scene of enthusiastic retro tunemongers has exploded over recent years, and a very real community has appeared around the genre (MySpace is good for something other than chain-letters and spam, after all). Start clicking around and you’ll find a vast network of artists of every style. Some work exclusively with the original hardware. Some mix 8-bit sounds with modern music technology. Some prefer to remix classic tunes, and yet others integrate the bleeptastic into compositions for a full live band. It’s fresh. It’s exciting. It sounds fantastic. And best of all, in contrast to the sanitised, washed-out pop-dance polluting our modern airwaves, it feels real.