The day after I saw the movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World, I got the game that was based off the same comic the movie was. After playing the demo, I was convinced it would be a good game to purchase and I was right. It is a throwback to classic beat em ups like River City Ransom, Double Dragon, and the Konami games. It’s not just nostalgia factor; it takes a lot of game mechanics that worked for beat em ups and puts them into one nice package for up to four players to enjoy. (I hope to write a retrospective on the genre in the near future.)

Anyways, this post isn’t so much about the game as it is the music for the game, composed by chiptune punk band Anamanaguchi. (Man, has the definition of “punk band” mutated heavily.) Anamanaguchi makes music that sounds very similar to what you would hear while playing an NES videogame. It’s very synthesized, using a hacked NES and Game Boy to create those sounds, with live electric guitar, bass, and drums added in. It has an upbeat pop feeling to it, as you can hear it in the above piece, Another Winter, which serves as the theme for the first world of the Scott Pilgrim game.

Another World is my favorite theme in the whole game. It plays with changes in tempo and volume while you travel the streets of Toronto while beating up bros, hipsters, punks, and emos to make it to a concert in time for the boss battle. It has more variety in composition than the melodies that loop in most NES games and it also puts out this surreal feeling that you are in a familiar world yet at the same time, you are not.

The music sounds kind of like something you may hear in a Capcom NES game like Megaman or even Duck Tales, but the high pitches of the synthesizer and the addition of live instruments make Anamanaguchi’s music sound unique. It’s the same thing with the game; it feels a lot like a classic beat em up- and there are plenty of homages to many of those games -but something about the scenery and the characters you play as and fight against are not what you would be used to if you played beat em ups twenty years ago. (Of course, fashion and society has changed significantly since then!)

Another Winter may go down as one of the greatest game compositions of this generation. It’s not only has a memorable pop sound that serves the purpose of capturing nostalgic feelings for classic gaming, but it is lively, uplifting, and full of heart. It is the exact opposite of everything the movie is, which may be why I love hearing it so much.