In 2000, Jake Kaufman scored his first game as a professional chiptune composer: a mobile version of a silly little arcade game called Qbert for the Game Boy Color (GBC). Qbert is an archetypal 8-bit game: On essentially one single screen, with no substantial narrative, the objective is to step on squares to change their colors. It was a basic, consequence-free game, but the composing process was the opposite. With the GBC’s sound chip limiting him to just four individual instruments (bleeps and bloops), Kaufman could have taken the easy route and phoned in a simple score for a simple game, dodging the headaches of composing complex music with constricting hardware. Instead, the Q*bert soundtrack bangs. And, limitations be damned, so does the rest of Kaufman’s subsequent GBC work.
Twenty-six years later, Kaufman was tapped to score indie developer Yacht Club Games’s Mina the Hollower, a throwback to the look and feel of 8-bit GBC games but with the type of colossal world, grandiose story, and elaborate gameplay typically reserved to the Soulsborne games. Kaufman hadn’t composed with the Game Boy sound chip in years; now, he had to do so for a seemingly endless open-world game with infinite 8-bit ambitions. “I felt a sense of dread,” he said upon learning his task. He didn’t want to go back.
But if there was a game worth suffering through the Game Boy’s compositional migraines, it was Mina—a game that’s just as inventive as it is expansive, featuring lovably determined Secret of NIMH-esque anthropomorphic characters inside an immersive 1700s gothic horror setting. Full of progressive arrangements, intricate sound programming, and lush ambiance, Kaufman’s four-hour soundtrack brings the absolute most out of such confined tools, reaching the lofty heights set by arguably the most visionary 8-bit game of the decade thus far.
Mina may pull a great deal of influence from fellow 8-bit gothic horror games like Castlevania, but there isn’t much in the way of a rocking “Bloody Tears” or catchy-as-hell “Vampire Killer” on its score. Rather than restricting its music to classic chiptune’s pop and classic rock-influenced immediacy, Kaufman takes a tempered compositional approach more fitting for an open-world game than a level-based one, where players are best suited to hear progressive arrangements that build over time instead of shorter riff-based refrains. “A Sinking Feeling,” which plays as the player gradually learns the game’s mechanics throughout the story’s inciting crisis, starts at a creeping trudge before building to a grand crescendo at its midpoint, mirroring both the gameplay and story’s inclining tension. Later in the game we hear “The Quiet Frontier,” which meets the climatic moment it scores with something akin to 8-bit prog rock—square waves ring out in a multitude of electric guitar-like riffs, vocal-like waves howl in the background, and as soon as the staticky drums start pounding, the song reaches its thrilling apex.
Mina’s score sounds like it has way more going on than just the Game Boy’s four available instrument channels, and it does. After “sweating” for months in the composing process, Kaufman learned of an expansion for the Game Boy sound chip that went unused throughout the system’s game library. These few extra channels—combined with some sounds ripped from an expansion for the MSX, another 8-bit console—were enough to transcend the Game Boy’s original limitations while still evoking the handheld system’s primitive beauty. You hear all these pieces and parts at once on tracks like “The Great Hereunder,” where looping plucks soar up and down on all sides of the mix over a deep, fuzzy low end. That same low end introduces the equally detailed “The Brilliant Truth,” whose array of memorable refrains collide together in as stunning of a finale as you’ll ever find in an 8-bit track.
Mina feels like Kaufman’s love letter to the archaic but rewarding process of chiptune composing. The accomplishment is solidified by his “personal game music hero,” legendary chiptuner Yuzo Koshiro, contributing two outstanding tracks. Both “Rolling Steam” and “Theory of Everything” seamlessly join the score while retaining Koshiro’s signature twinkly rocking style, offering a break from progressive songwriting in favor of classic-as-can-be 8-bit grooves. Mina’s greatest achievement as an 8-bit game is doing so very much with so very little. From its proggy level themes to the diegetic tracks in the game’s “Music Hall” and the chiptuned thunderstorms, Kaufman achives the same results with his score: It stands alone as a strong collection of ornate compositions, built from remarkably sparse resources.
