Prince is an artist that doesn’t need any introductions, but I will nevertheless attempt: he was a freakish genius, a multi-instrumentalist, a producer, and a one-man talent agency. He maintained a career that spanned four decades, cut short only because of his untimely passing in 2016. There were peaks and valleys in his popularity, like all great musicians, but he consistently managed to catapult himself back into the conversation due to his adaptability to changing landscapes. When The Revolution—the backing band that helped propel him into superstardom with Purple Rain—dissolved, he didn’t waste any time getting back into the studio by himself. He put together one of the best albums of his career, Sign “☮︎” the Times, while his personal and professional relationships were in a mercurial state. This period was so prolific that the label executives at Warner Bros. had to negotiate with Prince to cut down the length of the album; it ended up releasing as “only” a double LP instead of an absurd triple-record affair.

Prince’s versatility wasn’t limited to his musical talent. His headlong embrace of new technology was undoubtedly a major factor in his ability to stave off irrelevancy. He was an early adopter of the Fairlight CMI, a synthesizer that few musicians could even afford in the mid 1980s. Prince’s vault where he hoarded his vast reserves of unreleased music had a DOS-based computer cataloging system on its front end, affectionately called Mr. Vault Guy, that accounted for the contents of every tape, disc, and hard drive. He was also much earlier than most to the idea of internet distribution, stubbornly insisting on selling his triple-disc box set of non-album rarities, Crystal Ball, through his own website in 1998, to the detriment of sales potential. (A rarer edition of Crystal Ball contained his first album of orchestral arrangements and his first album of acoustic singer-songwriter ballads as fourth and fifth discs—a very Prince move to make some of his most interesting material the hardest to get your hands on.)

Given his love for the bleeding edge of progress, it only makes sense that Prince would become interested in video games. In 1994, when Prince Interactive was released, it was yet another volatile period for the artist. To set the stage a little bit: his final album with Warner, Come, was set to release in two months. He purposely refused to promote the new project as a means of spiting the label, ending his contractual obligations by cooperating as little as possible. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol the year before, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.” The name of the game, technically, isn’t even Prince Interactive, but until the purple one’s signature glyph is properly adopted in a Unicode set we have to call it something.

Cyan’s genre-defining adventure game Myst released a year prior to Interactive, and the similarities are more than superficial. You find yourself in a fictionalized version of Prince’s home and recording studio Paisley Park, solving arcane point-and-click puzzles. Broadly, the objective is to search the mansion and assemble the scattered pieces of the musician’s eponymous symbol as if they’re fragments of the Triforce, though in practice this amounts to a flimsy excuse to poke around and uncover various Prince-related easter eggs. There are an abundance of music snippets, photos, and interviews with other musicians—Eric Clapton, George Clinton, and Miles Davis all make appearances. The game even kicks off with an exclusive song called “Interactive,” ostensibly a song about being a song in a video game. (He would pull a similar move years later with “Cybersingle,” a recursive song about the fact that you could download it from the Internet.)

So how much input did Prince actually have in the creation of Interactive? In his own words, not much. When asked in an interview published on his official website about his role on the project, he flatly responded: “Eye had virtually nothing 2 do with it.” I’d believe that he wasn’t doing any active consulting, but Prince’s words should always be received with healthy skepticism. Parts of the digitized version of Prince’s estate are startlingly accurate, long before visitations were available to the public. Look up photos and you’ll see just how much the interior looks like an adult playground; I find it hard to believe the developers would have gotten it so right without a guided tour. There are also several then-unreleased songs that would appear on forthcoming releases (Come two months later, The Gold Experience in 1995, and Crystal Ball in 1998), which betrays a level of access.

The next year, the publisher would face stiff headwinds. Graphix Zone chief executives Charles Cortright and Angela Aber gave up their positions following a merger with another multimedia firm, leaving the new management with a mountain of debt. They reported losses of around $15 million in the preceding couple of years. Another merger was attempted with the developer Inscape, most famous for their own multimedia artist game Bad Day on the Midway featuring the eyeball-masked experimental group The Residents. The company seems to have shuttered in 1997 without finding a path to profitability, releasing an educational disc chronicling the career of Herbie Hancock as their swan song. Ultimately, Interactive wasn’t successful, nor was it especially unique; JUMP: The David Bowie Interactive CD-ROM was of similar fare and released months earlier. Graphix Zone would even outdo themselves in scope shortly after with Highway 61 Interactive, their virtual Bob Dylan museum.

What ends up being most interesting about Interactive is not necessarily how it innovates, but how it’s indicative of its time. Functionally, it does little to stand out from contemporary adventure games like Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, or Day of the Tentacle. Historically, it acted as an important document for fans and scribes looking to document the inner workings of Prince’s operation; despite all the fantastical embellishments of his Minnesota home, like sprawling underground catacombs and staircases reaching across galaxies, this was the only way to get a somewhat accurate walkthrough of his studio. Thematically, it tells a story of Prince’s legacy as it stood in the mid ‘90s—full of references to his unassailable accomplishments, but also serving to build up hype for the second act of his career. ✿

Thanks for reading this fifteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy, purple people.

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Compilations were the backbone of my musical education. When I wanted to get into a genre but didn’t have the slightest clue where to start, it was always a safe bet to trust the judgment of someone who cared enough to put together a primer for you. Before the advent of sprawling genre or “vibe” playlists on platforms and Spotify and YouTube—at first curated by real humans, though rarely the case these days—collections of related music had to be assembled by people that knew their stuff. As a kid, I would often see a series called Hard to Find 45s on CD populating the bargain bins of department stores and the seldom-disturbed CD racks in thrift shops. Each disc would focus on a narrow period of time in pop music history (sometimes as vague as “the ‘60s” or as specific as “1957-1959”), with liner notes providing some quick facts about each artist featured.

The More Sixties Classics edition was the first one I purchased, and I was surprised to find a lengthy essay inside by music historian Greg Adams which laid out the mission statement for the series. The parent label, Eric Records, was founded in 1986 on the conception that it would only publish 45 RPM singles of oldies pop hits, with the intention of keeping them available in perpetuity. When the arrival of the compact disc pushed vinyl record players out of American homes, the label needed a new strategy—and so they started publishing their vast catalog of yesteryear’s songs on CD compilations, keeping them accessible and affordable. At a glance, these compilations look like cheap junk. It’s entirely likely you’ve glossed over them in record shops, their unassuming and near-identical covers making them invisible to your eye. But these things were the backbone of oldies stations; if you ever heard a disc jockey spin “Look for a Star” by the late ’50s crooner Garry Miles, there’s a high likelihood it was one of these discs in the console.

For international music, especially before the internet was as accessible and populated with information as it is today, a well-curated compilation was especially important. Labels like Sublime Frequencies completely transformed my idea of music from the Eastern Hemisphere, and I’m not sure I’d have even a passing interest in North African music if not for the anthologies Sahel Sounds put together. My strongest enduring interest is in Japanese new wave, though my introduction to it was strange. In my teenage years, on a blog I’ve long forgotten the name of, I found a curious little omnibus called Tokyo Mobile Music I. It’s sort of the total antithesis of a useful compilation for getting you up to speed about something brand new to you.

Let’s have a look at the liner notes, which is only three sentences:

Collating the tracks for this album has not proved to be the easiest of tasks. However I hope these tracks will serve as a foretaste of what is to come from Japan in the future. The Mobile Suit Corporation will be focusing on the East and unearthing as much new talent as possible.
—David Claridge

It says nothing about the artists comprising the tracklist and peddles a promise of prospective importance rather than attempting to illustrate a cohesive picture of an existing scene. I’m not sure why I should trust Mr. Claridge to be the guy to surface new talent from Japan, either. So who is he?

David Claridge is best known as the creator and puppeteer of Roland Rat—a name unlikely to ring a bell to most, but if you were a wee lad or lassie in the UK in the 1980s he was a bigger deal than even Kermit the Frog. Unlike his most comparable peer in the industry of puppetry, Jim Henson, Claridge stayed out of the public eye and let his rascally rodent friend do most of the talking. He kept public appearances to a minimum and scarcely did interviews, seeming content to focus on his craft.

A scant few details about him do exist, mostly about his activities outside of puppeteering. As a young kid he immersed himself in theater, studying mime arts and stage acting from the age of 12. After moving from Birmingham to London he became fascinated with the local club circuit in the late ’70s, right around the peak of the New Romantic movement. It seemed like a logical fit for someone with an interest in the performing arts; the style and attitude of the emerging scene drew heavily from the aesthetics of cabaret and commedia dell’arte. He became a regular at Blitz, the nightclub considered ground zero for the New Romantics, until its closure in 1981.

Claridge tried to fill the void by planting his roots at other clubs, but eventually grew bored of the New Romantic milieu. He felt it had adopted the problems that led to its creation as a counterweight to punk culture: it had become stale and predictable. His desire to create something new was partially inspired by a burgeoning interest in Japanese music, which he said in an interview for a local magazine was setting his mind alight with new possibilities. Unsatisfied with the state of London nightlife, he created his own roving club experience called The Mobile Suit, combining Japanese costuming with imported music from their fast developing new wave scene. He toured The Mobile Suit around the country, to modest success. (Interestingly, Claridge’s nomadic troupe is still remembered fondly among fetish enthusiasts.)

Seeing an opportunity to introduce Britons to music from what he called the “Far East,” he worked with major label Phonogram to create an imprint called The Mobile Suit Corporation aimed at highlighting his latest obsession. The label would ultimately not amount to much before he abandoned the venture to return to puppets; the bulk of its output would be a single LP and a set of supporting singles for the Indian-themed group Monsoon. There was, at least, one honest attempt at seeing his vision through: Tokyo Mobile Music I, a compilation of the new music from Japan that Claridge found to be most forward-thinking.

Because there are no liner notes to speak of, it’s not clear why Claridge selected this particular collection of songs. If I had to guess, these are the records he encountered in his personal explorations around Tokyo. The only documentation of his travels are the short field recordings between songs, taped on his handheld Sony Walkman pictured on the album cover. They’re an audible travelogue of him hopping on and off public transit, skulking around in stores, and eavesdropping on people making orders at a Shibuya McDonald’s. It also seems that he had every intention to make it a series of releases, given the title bears a roman numeral, but there would only ever be the first installment.

The lack of any useful information about the artists herein fascinated me as a curious listener that had never heard anything like any of these tracks before. Tokyo Mobile Music I is an incomplete picture, compiled by an amateur that was only just beginning to grasp what he was seeing. I had to do a lot of my own legwork to learn about these artists and understand where they fit into the history of Japanese music, so I’ve taken the liberty to write some liner notes for this release myself. I hope they’ll be a good jumping point to find some new music you love.

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Hikashu

If Yellow Magic Orchestra is patient zero of Japanese new wave, Hikashu was hot on their heels. The band would reinvent themselves a fair few times in their career, flirting with prog, jazz fusion, and melancholic darkwave—but by the release of Tokyo Mobile Music I only had a couple albums to their name. I don’t think it would be too derisive to call their early output pretty straight-ahead Kraftwerk worship, especially considering one of the two songs they contribute to the compilation is a cover of the German group’s biggest hit “The Model.” Vocalist Makigami Koichi, with a vocal style inspired by Kabuki theater, gives the Japanese language rendition a bit of unique texture. The other track, “New Tribe” comes from their 1981 album うわさの人類 (Uwasa No Jinrui, TL: The Legend of Humanity), which marks the beginning of their more experimental pivot.

Akiko Yano

Also represented by two tracks, both from her art-pop masterpiece ただいま。(Tadaima, TL: I’m home), is Akiko Yano. She studied jazz piano in high school, became a sought-after studio mercenary shortly after graduating, and before her 21st birthday had begun work on her first studio album. Through industry connections she met her one-time life partner and lifetime musical partner of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who produced Tadaima. and supported her with writing and arrangements. The standout track is “Rose Garden,” which seems to have just about every sound a well-equipped studio can make—wobbling bass, thumping taiko drums, and quivering vocoded voice like a wounded animal heard through a high-speed oscillating fan.

Earthling

Earthling might be the most difficult artist on Tokyo Mobile Music to find any information about. The short-lived dance punk trio was Jin Haijima on vocals and lead guitar, Yoko Fujiwara on bass, and a man credited mononymously as John on the keys. John and Yoko (no, not those) were textile and fashion designers before starting a band together, and presumably went back to their careers after putting out two records in ’81 and ’82. “You Go on Natural” appears on both albums, as a studio cut on their debut Dance and as a live recording on the follow-up Rhythm. For whatever reason, Claridge decided to pick the live version here, but I think it’s the right choice; the song’s a bit one-note but the sounds of a crowd coming alive give it a much-needed energy infusion.

Yukihiro Takahashi

Takahashi probably needs the least introduction of any artist featured here, but nevertheless: he was one third of the internationally treasured Yellow Magic Orchestra—the group’s percussionist, occasional vocalist, and writer of songs like “Rydeen” and “Ballet.” Of the three, Takahashi’s interest in new wave was the strongest. He would go out of his way to form working relationships with English musicians, eventually flying to London to record with many of his New Romantic heroes on 1981’s Neuromantic. But before he had the opportunity to work with musicians from Roxy Music, he was content to simply imitate them; on “Mirrormanic,” from his second album Murdered by the Music, he digs deep to give his best version of Bryan Ferry.

Shoukichi Kina & Champloose

It’s easy to feel like Tokyo is all that matters in the landscape of Japanese popular music, but so much is owed to people that have been pushed to the fringes. Shoukichi Kina, from the southernmost Okinawa Prefecture, insists on putting his culture front and center. He performs Okinawan folk standards alongside songs he’s written himself, and though he’s a proficient guitar player also makes frequent use of an electrified sanshin—the indigenous instrument of the Ryukyuan people that, through a century of iteration, became the shamisen in mainland Japan. Featured here is “ミミチリ坊主” (Mimichiri Bozu, TL: ear-cutting monk) an Okinawan traditional song meant as a lullaby for children. The mimichiri bozu is a yōkai that threatens to lop off the ears of young boys if they stay up past their bedtime. Eek!

Lizard

Claridge writes that the artists featured offer a “foretaste of what is to come from Japan,” but Lizard has the distinction of being the one act whose story appeared to be over. Originally formed in 1972 under the name 紅蜥蜴 (Benitokage, TL: Crimson Lizard), the band put out a series of lo-fi 7” singles recorded in dingy live houses. Influenced by glam rock, the group gradually transformed as English punk started to wash up on Japanese shores. By 1978, when they rebranded as “Lizard,” they were on the frontlines of Japan’s nascent punk scene. The group disbanded in 1982 due to their frontman, Momoyo, being incarcerated on drug charges. He wouldn’t sit in the slammer for long, but the experience seems to have scared him straight; Lizard would remain dormant for four more years and would only release one more album and an EP before calling it quits for good. The song featured here is “SA・KA・NA,” which Lizard recorded on several occasions. This is an especially obscure version from a 1980 single labeled “Disco Style,” though it sounds more like ska than anything else.

Salon Music

Credit to David Claridge: in at least one instance, he really did put his money where his mouth was. New wave rockers Salon Music would go on to have a long career and put out twelve albums, but by this point in 1982 had yet to put out their first. The first song they ever released, “Hunting in Paris,” debuts here in a rough early form. The Mobile Suit Corporation, the sublabel Claridge created under Phonogram (where he did A&R work), also pressed a split single of “Hunting in Paris” alongside Lizard’s “SA・KA・NA” on the B-side. Salon Music would polish up the song and record it again for their inaugural record My Girl Friday, but their scrappy beginnings can be heard on Tokyo Mobile Music I.

Thanks for reading this fifteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Having a good 2026 so far? Good. Me neither.

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For a long time, it felt like the history of vocal synth was being forgotten. Hatsune Miku, the official mascot of the Vocaloid software (and the unofficial mascot of essentially all music made with voice synthesis), remained popular. She’s a recognizable presence in anime, music, visual art, and video game fandom, acting as a connective tissue for every disparate corner of otaku culture. She performed at Coachella. She’s in Fortnite. You can run your instrument through an effects pedal that makes your guitar sound like her. But there’s an entire supporting cast in the vocal synth universe that, as time marches on, has fallen out of the conversation. It’s not that the knowledge of these other characters has been lost—herculean community efforts like the Vocaloid Database and Vocaloid, UTAU, and SynthV wikis have more information about obscure characters and voicebanks than you could read in a lifetime—but they were simply not capturing the interest of younger creative people developing new interest in vocal synth.

On July 13th, 2008, vocal synth producer LamazeP published the song “Triple Baka,” along with an accompanying music video he animated himself. Joining Miku are two other characters, coded red and yellow, complementing Miku’s pale blue motif with a triumvirate of primary colors. The upbeat denpa-inspired song would prove popular on Japanese streaming site Niconico (formerly Nico Nico Douga), becoming an early viral vocal synth hit and helping to popularize the two virtual idols flanking Miku on either side. But who are they? Kasane Teto and Akita Neru, conceived as parodies of Miku, have similar but distinct origin stories. Until fairly recently, it felt like “Triple Baka” would be the peak of their respective popularities—but both of them have managed, against long odds, to make what seemed like an impossible comeback. Tracing the mythology of each member of the trio individually, a pretty solid record of vocal synth fandom starts to take shape. So starting from least to most obscure, let’s examine the history of the Triple Baka.

Hatsune Miku

In 2004, the first Vocaloid program was released by Yamaha. It’s a vocal synthesizer software that could convert lyrics and melodic input into “singing” via pre-configured voicebanks. Like existing speech synthesis software of the time (think classic Microsoft Sam), recorded voices from a real person are used as a model to develop a virtual singer. The earliest Vocaloid voicebanks, Leon and Lola, were only compatible with English speech and their voice providers are still unknown. It was an interesting but niche piece of software that was only used by a limited number of digital music enthusiasts.

Then, in 2007, everything changed. Yamaha partner Crypton Future Media, who were already in the business of creating sound libraries and BGM collections, internally developed their own voicebank for the improved Vocaloid 2. Their original character, Hatsune Miku, wasn’t just a disembodied voice like previous iterations. They commissioned the famous voice actress Saki Fujita to provide vocals, and manga artist Kei Garo created an illustration of an android pop idol with flowing blue hair. She immediately resonated with bedroom producers and visual artists alike; they created new works and shared them on Nico Nico Douga, which launched only the year prior. It was the frontier of a new fandom, using new technology, being distributed on a new platform.

The marriage of music and visual was always an important aspect of vocal synth. Supercell, one of the first breakout Vocaloid artists, uploaded their first single “Melt” to NND featuring a striking original illustration of Miku by the artist 119—used without permission. Following the unexpected popularity of the song, ryo (the producer for Supercell), messaged 119 to apologize for grabbing their art without asking. From then on, a partnership was formed and Supercell became a collective of artists and producers. As Vocaloid started to gain international attention and spread to sites like YouTube, that culture persisted. (Morii Kenshirou, a flash animator who made a name for himself providing visuals for Vocaloid songs by siinamota, 40mp, and DECO*27, would go to work on mainstream anime productions like Fullmetal Alchemist.)

Crypton would continue to push Miku as the face of their flagship product, but they didn’t have to market her very aggressively; creative folks naturally wanted to use her as an avatar for their projects due to her lack of any canon characteristics. She had a stated age of sixteen, but it was also encouraged that she could be aged up or down. She doesn’t have any lore to speak of, either. Miku would become almost like a folk hero, malleable and able to transform into whatever best suits the expression of the person telling her story. This flexibility would ultimately extend to other vocal synth characters, with the most common recurring themes being decided by the fandom and, in some cases, acknowledged in a more “official” capacity. (The famous depiction of her holding a green onion, for example, comes from a fan cover of the Finnish song “Ievan Polkka” in which she’s drawn waving around a vegetable.) She’s whatever you need her to be.

Kasane Teto

Teto was conceptualized as an April fools prank by users of the Japanese 2channel message board in 2008. In response to Miku’s rapid ascent, a spoof of her design was created to trick Vocaloid fans into believing a new character was coming. Teto bears a strong resemblance to Miku (her clothes, especially, are almost identical) but the iconic aqua color scheme was swapped out for a deep red and the long twintails were replaced by a pair of tightly coiled ringlets. A “04” tattoo adorned her left shoulder, referencing what would have been her status as Crypton Future Media’s fourth character in the Vocaloid series. (Miku is 01, the twins Kagamine Rin and Len are 02, and Megurine Luka is 03.) Later iterations of her design have changed this to “0401,” or April 1st—the date of her birth. She was given a voice, provided by Mayo Oyamano. Her “official” art, illustrated by Sen (線), was close enough to Crypton’s early Miku art to fool enough people.

Despite never being intended to be anything other than a joke, interest in Teto persisted and she started acquiring genuine fans. Her voice was recorded again to make a voicebank in the shareware vocal synth software UTAU, and producers immediately got to work making original songs. (One of these early songs, “Kasane Territory,” poked a little fun at the fact that Miku’s voicebank would set you back nearly 16,000 yen while Teto was free for everyone.) A doujin circle called TWINDRILL was even created to manage and market the character.

Teto would receive nods of official acknowledgement here and there, but it was mostly nothing substantial. She was added into the Project Diva 2nd rhythm game, but only as a cosmetic skin. You could see her singing and dancing, but the voice coming out of her mouth was still Miku’s. (Fans on Nico Nico Douga and YouTube would create cover versions of songs in Project Diva with Teto’s voice and pair them with visuals from the game so it almost felt like the real thing.) Wataru Sasaki, the engineer who created Hatsune Miku’s voice in Vocaloid, tried his hand at replicating Teto for the official software in 2012, but couldn’t get it right and the project was scrapped.

It wasn’t until 2023, when Oyamano was tapped to record new vocals for Synthesizer V Studio, that Teto finally received an air of legitimacy. Alongside this voicebank for the Vocaloid competitor software, Teto received a refreshed design that did away with her references to Miku. Finally, she looked like herself. Similar to UTAU, SynthV is more accessible than Vocaloid with a variety of cheaper options and free voicebanks. Unlike UTAU, though, it’s much easier to use. This combination of increased visibility for Teto and easier software to get your head around led to an explosion in popularity. Younger producers that were less attached to Miku were particularly charmed by her. For the first time, some of the most ubiquitous vocal synth songs featured Teto (both instead of and in addition to Miku). In a surprising reversal, one of the Teto’s biggest recent songs, “Tetoris,” was being covered by Miku instead of the other way around—and the Vocaloid poster child’s version was far less popular.

Akita Neru

Whereas Teto was conceived as a bit of fun, Neru was born from a conspiracy theory that got out of hand. In late 2007, as Vocaloid was quickly spreading throughout the Japanese internet, it was enough of a phenomenon that television programs were running stories about the new cultural sensation. One characterized the Miku faithful as “jobless anime freaks,” which didn’t sit well with the nerds on 2chan. In the coming days after this negative piece, images of Miku disappeared from Google search results and the Japanese language Wikipedia page for the fictional idol disappeared. Naturally, netizens figured, this must have been the work of a shadowy agency actively coordinating to erase an emerging otaku trend from existence.

Speculation about why someone might want to quietly delete Miku raged on the message board for days, and of course, the threads attracted the attention of people that just wanted to troll. A deluge of messages with some variation of the phrase 「飽きた、寝る」(TL: I’m bored, going to sleep) appeared, which the channers dismissed as agitators on sock puppet accounts. Eventually, it would surface that the search results were a temporary server-side error and the Wikipedia page was removed due to a claim over copyrighted assets. Still, the timing seemed suspicious and some people continued believing there was a real anti-Miku mafia.

Inspired by this bizarre flare-up, illustrator Smith Hioka designed an inverted Miku persona. Her outfit resembles her counterpart, though her accent color is a bright yellow. Her hair is fashioned into one long side ponytail instead of two. In place of Miku’s friendly demeanor, Neru’s face is twisted into a permanent scowl and she’s brandishing two cell phones—one clutched tightly in her hand and the other in a holster on her thigh—that she uses to make hateful posts about Miku at all hours of the day. She would be named Akita Neru (亞北ネル), which reads phonetically identical to the message being spammed by the Miku-hating trolls.

Neru gained a modest following as a fanloid in the following years, being used as the subject of songs and music videos despite not having a voicebank of her own. Generally, when someone makes a “Neru” song, it’s just Hatsune Miku’s voice—sometimes unaltered, sometimes pitched up an octave. More rarely, it can also be Kagamine Rin pitched down. Similar to Teto, Neru would receive some minor acknowledgement from Crypton in the form of Project Diva cosmetic DLC, which Hioka says he got the opportunity to design himself.

In early January of 2025, producer Hiiragi Magnetite created a song called “Zaako” with the Vocaloid Kaai Yuki as a voicebank. The song attracted a bit of controversy due to the choice of character, with some insisting she was the wrong choice for such a suggestive song because her voice provider was only a fourth grader. Hiiragi quickly pulled the song and set to work “fixing” it, surprising the vocal synth community a month later by replacing the voicebank and having the artist reanimate the entire music video with Akita Neru. Notably, there's a segment where Miku and Teto appear alongside her and Vocaloid fans went insane. 17 years later, the Triple Baka are finally back together. ✿

Thanks for reading this thirteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Wow. I love Vocaloid. Go follow my brilliant oomfie william_ leonard, who drew the incredible header image and makes really cute comics.

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Imagine you’re playing a classic video game for the first time. You’ve taken control of the hero, sword and shield in hand. Your first objective is to venture into an enigmatic forest and find the key that will grant you entry to the first dungeon. Having bested a mob of enemies, you reach a grassy alcove surrounded by trees. A rotund raccoon stands in the brush, beating on its belly like a taiko drum. You speak to it. It gives a vague response about its nose being sensitive to dust. Keenly aware that the game has given you a hint, you absorb the information and proceed. You try to exit the overgrown canopy from the north and the creature bellows at you. “You're goin’ ta be lost, thanks to me! Heh heh!” You’re swiftly warped to a different location. However, the moment has been cheapened. You’re looking down upon your hero with a bird’s eye view, and the adjacent areas are clearly visible. The Mysterious Forest isn’t that big. As it turns out, you’re really not lost at all. The developers have clearly failed at making an impactful moment here, haven’t they?

Well, not exactly. What I’ve just described is an early moment that illustrates one of the key problems with The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX HD, a fan remaster of the renowned Game Boy title from 1993 that’s been generating a lot of buzz. By all rights, it’s an incredible hack with a load of modern updates that re-frame the game in ways never before imagined. It fills the entire screen, shocking you with the impressive scale of its locale. It’s a beautiful way to tour the Koholint Island you’ve come to love over years of exploring its distant corners, but it’s not a great way to experience it for the first time. Link’s Awakening, like any other video game, was developed around the limitations of the hardware it was made for. The Game Boy’s screen was only 160 by 144 pixels, with a paltry 8 kilobytes of RAM available to play with. Naturally, this meant your window into the world of your adventure was small, and the game couldn’t “remember” much of what was happening beyond the bounds of that frame. Demolishing these load-bearing walls creates unintended problems.

The Link’s Awakening team took advantage of their hardware constraints by building the game as a series of dioramas. Each screen was carefully arranged to convey specific information to you. As you head south from your starting point of Mabe Village, the cliffs and pathways leading to the shores below cleverly communicate that you can continue going south. To the right, there’s a large expanse blocked off by rocks, but it’s careful not to give too much away; all you need to know is there’s something to see once you can clear the path. Some screens are self-contained objectives, while others are built to point you in the direction of those objectives. The encounter with the raccoon is one of those key instructive moments, fundamentally changed by DX HD.

The lesson you learn is that some screens have conditions that must be satisfied. You’ve got to find some powder to make the little guy sneeze. That much is evident. When you’re whisked away from the direction you tried to go, you’re receiving another subtle bit of guidance: there are alternate pathways to take. You can’t go there yet, but there’s something else you missed! Your mental map updates, and you make a note to come back once you’ve found what you’re meant to find. The Mysterious Forest is a dry run for the first dungeon, Tail Cave. By the time you’ve reached the first true test of your mettle, you should already be somewhat familiar with how the game expects you to engage with it.

The raccoon room also functions as an evocative set piece—a startling moment that undercuts the grounded puzzling and spelunking with a bit of fantastical dream logic. Stepping beyond the boundary of each scene is a leap of faith that shows you new areas or challenges to face. Beyond the practical reason for its inclusion, it also makes you feel something. You want to get the little rascal back, but you’re also wondering how he pulled that trick on you. What else is he capable of? What other frustrations lie in wait for you?

There’s a version of the Lost Woods in nearly every Zelda, dating back to the original from 1986. This section of the Mysterious Forest is a miniaturization of it, distilling the disorienting theme into a single moment that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Imagine if, upon your first encounter with its iconic iteration in Ocarina of Time, you could see right through the dark shrouds that obscure each path and it’s immediately clear which ones take you back to the entrance. You would be robbed of the realization that you needed to pay closer attention. By seeing beyond the bounds of the raccoon room, the moment loses tension. It’s obvious that you can simply go around. You don’t have to remember where you’ve been when the entire screen serves as a constant proximal clue. Proper dungeons suffer from this high definition treatment even more; the illusion of each area as a gauntlet of challenges is shattered, and it nearly trivializes the fact that you don’t have immediate access to a map.

No matter how you look at it, remasters are revisions of history. Something is lost when you bring a period piece in line with the standards of the modern era. You might lose the physical experience of holding the hardware in your hands, the unique visuals of an obsolete display, or the limitations that informed the game’s very design philosophy. In the case of Link's Awakening DX HD, you lose all of the above—but that’s not to say you don’t gain anything for your trouble. Koholint in widescreen is vibrant and bustling, feeling like an immersive world as parts of it spill off into your peripheral vision. The fact that the entire overworld is active is interesting. Enemies from different “screens” can interact with you and chase you down, and you can no longer reset the state of certain rooms without backtracking further or exiting an area entirely. This changes some core functions and upends decades-old design, but makes the world feel much more connected.

My recommendation to anyone that hasn’t played Link’s Awakening would be to try the original or the colorized DX version on the Game Boy Color. I don’t mean to imply that the DX HD fan project doesn’t have its place, but I don’t think it’s a replacement—nor do I believe it intends to be. It’s a lovely way to breathe new life into a world you know like the back of your hand, but you’ve got to know it to begin with. It’s fun for a replay and I’m glad it exists, but it’s best appreciated as a feat of technical prowess and an expression of devoted love for a timeless classic. To understand how history has changed, you should make an effort to live through it first. ✿

Thank you for reading this eighth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Link’s Awakening is my favorite game, so I had a lot of feelings about this project. I hope it doesn’t seem like I don’t want you to play it! I’ve just played this game more than any other video game, and my mind went wild considering what a first timer’s experience with this game might be. The more I thought about it, I realized I could illustrate a lot of my ideas by focusing on one specific scene. I had an epiphany that the raccoon room is an extremely important early moment in the game, which I may never have considered had I not played this thing. That alone made it worth the experience!

Nintendo has already acted swiftly to take this thing down, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you’re curious about playing it. Just look around. Or ask me, if you must. I don’t mind helping!

Of course, this wasn’t the post I had in mind when I promised you one for today. I just wanted to get this out while it was timely. I’ll probably save that other one for next year. I don’t want to inundate your inbox. See you again at the end of the month, yeah?

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This piece was originally written for Lost in Cult’s Lock-On gaming journal, issue 003 of their print magazine. In light of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s recent passing, I’m sharing it here on my newsletter. I lived inside the universe of L.O.L. Lack of Love for a while, immersing myself in the game and poring over interviews so that I might understand the ways this work uniquely represents a meeting of two singular minds. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kenichi Nichi met at a critical juncture, while both their creative lives were in a state of flux. Here’s the story of that fruitful friendship.

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The creation of video games is often an intensive labor of love. Most people involved in their development, no matter how small the role they play, are usually eager to get into the details of their personal contribution—though that wasn’t always the case for Kenichi Nishi. Some of the most highly regarded and formative games in the genre of role-playing—namely, Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger—feature Nishi’s name as some of his earliest credits, but he’s not too keen on boasting about his time at Square. Asked about his role as a map planner on the titles in a 2006 interview with Cubed3, Nishi was quick to downplay his involvement. “I was rather a lazy employee who often did not show up to the office among the big team that consists of more than 100 people,” he said, continuing, “I think it is more appropriate for me to say I was more like pretending to be involved in the development.” He finishes with a laugh, but his answer speaks a solemn truth: he hadn’t yet found his place in the industry.

The tide would begin to turn for Nishi when he defected from Square in 1995 with aspirations to start his own studio. Inviting some of his closest friends that he made while at the company, the newly minted venture would be known as Love-de-Lic—a reference to one of Nishi’s favourite albums, the fifth release by electronic music pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, Technodelic. The working environment at Love-de-Lic, which had thirteen employees at its peak, was significantly different. Yoshiro Kimura—who contributed map and combat design to Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 while at Square—recalls it being a strange place to work, though that strangeness would elevate the collective creativity. “It was like a band playing an ad-lib session, with ideas flowing freely from every direction,” Kimura told Vice in 2020. “There was no ‘band leader’—we each respected one another, and we could express ourselves individually.”

To say that Love-de-Lic’s freewheeling atmosphere would leave a lasting impression on its staff is an understatement. In an interview for The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers book sometime in the mid-2010s—long after the studio’s dissolution in 2000—Kimura was still able to sketch the office floor plan from memory. He recalled playing GoldenEye 007 and StarFox 64 in a communal recreation room with coworkers, eating dinner made by the company’s manager with everyone almost daily, and even the positions of each employee’s desk, which were pushed closely together to encourage conversation while working. “Like we’re a big family,” he said.

Love-de-Lic’s environment of creative freedom would be immediately apparent from their first project, the self-described ‘anti-RPG’ called moon, released in 1997 for the PlayStation. Drawing from the team’s collective experience working on role-playing games with Square, they aimed to create a subversive take on the genre that was informed by a love for what brought them together and a desire to see it from a new perspective. Moon puts the player in the role of a ‘supporting’ character in a typical RPG, allowing you to bear secondhand witness to the deeds of the archetypal ‘hero’—a nakedly apparent reference to the protagonist of Dragon Quest. The hero slays innocent creatures for experience, barges into houses, and causes disruption to the lives of the townsfolk, leaving the player to deal with the aftermath. By observing the NPCs and helping them with their everyday lives, as well as bringing peace to the souls of monsters felled by the hero, you gain love instead of levels (a concept that inspired Toby Fox to explore similar themes in Undertale).

It’s crucially important to note that moon was not meant to be a criticism of RPGs, but a loving send-up; Nishi’s favorite game, at the time, was 1988’s Dragon Quest III. Love-de-Lic’s status as a group of people in comparatively minor, but nevertheless important, roles creating games that would crystallize the design language of a genre for years to come made them perhaps the most qualified to turn it on its head. They had firsthand experience, but were still on the fringes, appreciative of where they’d come from but unbound by fealty to convention. Though Nishi would describe his next project with Love-de-Lic as an RPG, it would be even more decoupled from any recognizable tradition. For L.O.L.: Lack of Love, the studio’s swan song released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast, Nishi followed his heart.

To hear Nishi tell it, Lack of Love began with a chance encounter with one of his creative muses—none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto, keyboardist of Yellow Magic Orchestra. A mutual friend of the musician and the game developer told Nishi that Sakamoto would be coming to the legendary Club Eden, and that they could be introduced. Nishi dropped everything on his docket to make the meeting happen. Nishi and Sakamoto hit it off instantly, discussing shared interests in video games, film, music, and computers. They exchanged email addresses to keep in contact, and while writing back and forth discovered another significant point of overlap: a deep concern for the planet’s environment.

Sakamoto’s life had been tracking along a parallel path to Nishi, striking out in his own creative direction after parting ways with Yellow Magic Orchestra. From an origin point of arcade game influenced techno with the band that brought him fame, he dabbled in classical piano, experimental electronics, and scores for film. By the time the two creatives met, Sakamoto had surrendered himself to the melancholy of Baroque-style chamber music, a reflection of his worsening view of the state of the planet. “The sadness comes from my concern about life,” he explained in 2019 to 52 Insights. “I knew that the world would become disastrous with environmental problems. I decided to speak out about that in the late ‘90s and a lot of fans thought I was mad.” Sakamoto famously said, after a visit to the nuclear disaster site at Fukushima, that “a tsunami acts almost as a state of restoration, trying to get back to its original state.” His belief was that the Earth would reach a state of equilibrium, if allowed to play out its natural course.

Nishi did not think Sakamoto was mad. The topic of environmental scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis—which posits that the Earth possesses a natural ability to self-regulate—came up in the email discussions, and Sakamoto floated the idea of making a game about it. Nishi couldn’t possibly turn down the opportunity to work with one of his greatest influences on a subject so close to his heart; he had the concept for his next project. Development began in earnest in 1998, with Nishi and Sakamoto brainstorming ideas through regular correspondence. The game’s title was a suggestion from Sakamoto, alluding to the dangers of environmental negligence. “We wanted to question the way in which our lifestyle lacks love,” Nishi told Retro magazine in 2010.

Like moon, Lack of Love plays with your expectations from the outset, introducing you to the Lack of Love Project, a program devised by humans seeking to find other planets so that they can terraform and populate them. A robot called Halumi is dispatched to the planet where the game’s setting takes place to carry out this task, and at first it seems like the cute little automaton might be the protagonist. As Halumi unleashes a torrent of machines from his spacecraft to get to work on the planet, control is given to the player and you discover that you’ll be playing the role of a microscopic organism trying to find a way to survive on this planet now under foreign duress.

As you progress through the game, the creature grows and evolves in unexpected ways, and as it becomes more capable, it gains the ability to assist other creatures. (One stage of evolution is a black and white puppy-like form—a reference to Nishi’s dog Tao, whom he finds a way to slip into all of his games.) The game contains no dialogue or text, leaving only audio and visual cues to determine how best to elevate one another against a common threat. It acts as a potent metaphor for the fight against ecological harm, where the solutions aren’t easy and there is a need to reconcile differences in everyone’s needs—human or not—for the good of all the planet’s inhabitants. Sakamoto’s soundtrack, used sparingly to punctuate the most emotional moments in Nishi’s writing, channels the aching sadness of their environmental angst to underscore feelings of loneliness and a longing for togetherness.

Each game in Love-de-Lic’s repertoire exposes the bleeding hearts of the human beings that created them, and expresses a deep affection for something or someone. In the case of Lack of Love, it shows that one can gain fulfillment from finding common ground with others in ways you never considered. Working toward a future you’ve never known—whether that’s environmental prosperity or anything else your heart yearns for—starts to make sense because, through forging connections, you’ve finally learned it’s possible. Or, to put it another way: if it hurts, that means it can heal. ✿

Thank you for reading the fourth installment of once bitten, twice shy. I wrote this piece before many were expecting the untimely passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but I put a lot of heart into it and I remain proud of what I’ve written. Sakamoto, along with his friends and collaborators in and around Yellow Magic Orchestra, are responsible for nurturing my curiosity for almost everything I love. They each spread out into wildly unique paths, touching every form of art with unrestrained creativity and zero care for convention. I hope to evolve into a similar fearlessness.

In the meantime, while I gestate in my chrysalis, I will simply pay forward my gratitude. Rest in peace to both Ryuichi Sakamoto and the late Yukihiro Takahashi. I lay a thousand flowers at your feet.

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