It's National Video Game Day!

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September 12, 2022 4 min read

It probably won't be too much of a surprise to any of you to learn that we actually quite like video games here in Ship to Shore PhonoCo Land. In fact, I would go as far to say that we damn well love 'em. Luckily it was this passion for "joystick tussling" that inspired us to start releasing VGM (Video Game Music) in the first place, and boy howdy are we glad we did: the ancient curse inflicted upon us by a ten centuries-old warlock pretty much demands it.

Every year, when one of the several National Video Game Days our country has comes around, we each grab a handful of video games, don our special gaming gear (extra durable pants, sweat-wicking shirts and, most importantly, Nipshields), gather a cornucopia of selected sweet & salty snacks, drown our eyeballs in Visine and get to work. And by work, I mean play.

You see, gaming has been a part of our lives for as far back as we can remember. For some of us, the Atari 2600 was our first taste of the delights that Video Games can bring us. For some others it was the 8-bit joys of the NES or Master System, and for one poor soul it was the Apple Bandai Pipp!n (coincidentally this staff member is due to be this year's annual sacrifice at the Winter Solstice).

The Atari 2600. Back when consoles were partially made from wood.

When times have been tough, and we've gotten into drunken rages arguing about which George A. Romero film was his best, it's gaming that's brought us together. What better way to settle a dispute than doing a Sonic The Hedgehog speed run, player vs player Mortal Kombat tournament or slapping each other around the face and shoulders with unwanted old Philips CD-i consoles? What better way to let off some steam than logging in to, well, Steam and losing miserably at Darkest Dungeon or marvelling at the meta bewitchment of Pony Island? And is there anything better than bringing a team together than murdering other teams time & time again with massive guns... but in a video game? We all know the answer to this, it was a rhetorical question.

National Video Game Day is not just a celebration of the medium which has given us countless hours of joy, entertainment and a much-needed escape from reality, but also a celebration of days of gaming past. With this in mind, I thought it would be nice to put together a selection of tracks which represent our rich history of VGM releases for our Mixcloud channel WSTS Picaroon Platters Radio. 25 tracks taken from some of our numerous VGM releases, hand-picked & mixed by yours truly and covering a wide gamut of titles from our very first video game soundtrack album (MOTHER) to our most recent (BREATH OF FIRE III). It's completely free to listen to and can be enjoyed by going directly to our channel here or by using one of the handy widgets embedded into this webpage's soul.

It makes a nice companion piece to our previous National Video Game Day blog, where I put together a mix of my own personal favourite VGM tracks from my personal gaming history (which you can see & hear by clicking this hyperlink). I really should do a second one of those at some point...

Anyway, enough about the old mix, here's the new one! As always, going in blind could be more fun for you, in which case you can dive straight in by pressing play on the widget below! But for those of you who aren't familiar with every piece of music from all of our VGM releases, you can find a more detailed tracklist underneath the embedded player. Did any of your favourites make the cut?

LEVEL UP! A Brief History Of Ship to Shore PhonoCo's VGM Releases!

(A Retrospective For National Video Game Day)

by

WSTS Picaroon Platters Radio

The tracklist: