The Free Time of an Indie Developer and Musician: Photo Story
Throughout Pixels and Paychecks exploration of James Hamilton (Chunderfins Games) daily life, one thing has become abundantly clear. Hamilton leads an incredibly busy life. Whether he is working overtime for his most recent contract job, or spending hours a day working on his newest game project for Chunderfins Games, Hamilton seems to have little free time. However, when visiting Hamilton’s home, one thing becomes apparent quickly; James Hamilton is a musician.
Hamilton’s small apartment, tucked away in a back street of Old Town Fort Collins CO, is packed with keyboards, synthesizers, and custom instruments made from old game consoles rigged together to find the exact sound he is looking for. James spoke highly of a synthesizer built using the soundchip of an original Game boy which he uses for live performances.
I Finally got the opportunity to see such a performance when I attended the Super Game Music Festival, at the Boulder Library Canyon Theater on Sunday, November 30th.
Chunderfins (The band) opened up the music festival, choosing to perform even when only about half of their band could make it to the event. James with his special synthesizer and the bassist of the band Jay, strode proudly onto the stage, backdropped by a series of flashing video game graphics on the screen behind them.
Chunderfins, when in the form of a band, is responsible for the music present in Chunderfins Games projects. They bring a totally unique blend of chiptunes reminiscent of old NES and GameBoy games, and traditional rock and ska music. Using both glitchy synthesizer sounds and hard hitting base and drums to create a pumping sound that is irresistible to the ears.
Before the ending of their first song, a live performance of a song from James’ first game “Hazelnut Hex”, James had already performed a solo on his pair of synthesizers.
James and Jay make a remarkable performance duo. Playing off each other’s movements and crafting funny bits on stage as if they were all pre planned.
The band moved on to play covers of other well known video game songs, playing tracks from games up to the Nintendo 64 era of gaming. The band used a simple drum machine to make up for the lack of their fellow band members, and still put on a performance that had the crowd moving, sounding as if there had to be more than just the two musicians on stage.
In the spirit of cooperation the organizer of the festival, Daniel Florez of Boulder group Audio Mocha, arrived from backstage with his guitar for Chunderfins’ fourth track of their set. The duo of Hamilton and Florez went back and forth playing solos over Johnson’s heavy bass playing.
Florez finished the fourth track with a triumphant solo, before walking off stage as if he had never been there in the first place. As Chunderfins went on to play their fifth and final track, the lights went down to a deep red color, and Hamilton pulled out an old landline phone from the side of his synth rack, proceeding to use the phone like a vocoder.
Hamilton opened the last song of the set by asking if the crowd remembered the game “Superman 64”. A notorious Nintendo 64 game known for its poorly optimized gameplay, and repeating and droning soundtrack. The band played a very poorly done rendition of the horrible sounding song from the game, before looking at the crowd in sync, and bursting into playing their cover of Goldfinger’s “Superman”.
This series of events displayed the personality of Hamilton and Johnson perfectly, showing that even when the two of them were missing multiple other members of their band, they knew exactly how to put on a great show for an audience that loved every moment of their performance.
