kidkanevil wrote the soundtrack to an imaginary RPG
Bubble maps a psychedelic dimension-hopper that exists only in Gerard Roberts' head—and in fourteen tracks of it.
During lockdown, in a Berlin apartment, the producer Gerard Roberts—kidkanevil—was playing so much Nintendo Switch that the dimension-hopping started to feel autobiographical. Out of it came Bubble (2022): fourteen tracks scoring a psychedelic RPG that does not exist, about a girl in a kitsune mask who travels between worlds inside a swirling dark bubble. The inspirations are Masaaki Yuasa's unhinged anime and Moebius's hallucinatory comics, and the cast is real even if the game isn't—Cuushe, Iglooghost, Daisuke Tanabe, and the rapper Nakamura Minami all pass through.
The imaginary game got real music videos. "Coin Game," directed by TAKCOM with animation by RuffMercy, orbits Tokyo's legendary Mikado arcade; "Kyomu" came from the anime studio sankaku. An excerpt is below—watch the full video with sound on.
Silent excerpt from "Coin Game" (dir. TAKCOM, animation by RuffMercy). Watch the full video with sound
The album resurfaced this summer because the School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe brought Roberts to Berlin to teach game sound inside the alt-ctrl program we covered in August. The school's interview—and the announcement post that tipped us off—includes the best description of game audio's founding problem I've read in a while: Koji Kondo inventing the sound of Mario jumping, "a really strange almost existential task," one that changed how popular culture hears a body leaving the ground.
Killscreen has a soft spot for this genre. Ten years ago we wrote about Deep Space, a soundtrack to a videogame that doesn't exist; the form keeps producing, because a score is the cheapest possible game engine. And this one may not stay imaginary. "There is a Bubble game in my mind for sure," Roberts says.
Imaginary games, real scores, arcade music videos: Radar covers where game sound goes when it leaves the console. Free, three times a week.
