Sometimes, you’ve got to give your ears a rest. You set down your guitar, take off your headphones, shut down the DAW, and head for the nearest, softest couch. After a few minutes of thinking about something cringeworthy you posted on social media years ago, you flip through the nearest book. You look through the available channels and streaming services. You swipe through all the profiles and all the apps on your phone. You wonder what you’re doing with your life.
But then you remember that you reinstalled Fallout: New Vegas after seeing the wasteland come to life on Amazon Prime. Or maybe you bought Hi-Fi Rush on sale after hearing that despite the game’s success, the game’s developers were recently ordered to shut down. Maybe you don’t actually play games these days, but you watched the Summer Games Fest and Xbox Showcase a couple weeks back and found yourself strangely nostalgic for the times you could sit down and play anything other than nervously-tip-tap-the-guitar.
_
Fecking Bahamas’ readership is almost exclusively composed of people who are interested in math rock, and perhaps some will state that musicians have an industry collapse of our own to deal with, and that we should just stay in our lane. But more often than not, we’re more than thankful for those brief moments that games can alleviate some stress and provide an escape. We should be protective of it. Not just for the love of the games themselves but for the sake of the teams that create them – we have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to struggle for months / years to churn out the best possible version of a vision, and if you’re reading this, you probably do too.
Gaming’s most recent headlines (misuse of AI, payola schemes, mass closures, cross-console feuding) have us routinely enraged, but after talking to enough people directly experiencing the aftershocks, it dawned on us that it was finally time to level up and try something new as dozens of our friends in math rock and prog have revealed to us that they’re also involved with video game industry. Reading those headlines, we might not always understand the larger implications, but we do think of our friends and wonder how they might be effected.
_
This intrigue only grew after a brief freelancing experience with ViaCom earlier this year, which was a lot of fun, but also showed us the levels of crunch necessary to keep an operation of that size running. While the situation quickly became unsustainable, internally, the mark had been made. We’d gotten a look at the insides of a different animal altogether, and soon, we’d have to explore things at our own pace at Fecking Bahamas. So here’s the part where we tell you what you already know:
math rock sucks.
JK you know we love it. We know you love it, and at its peak, the blog’s chosen overlord genre was a highly specialized and technical kind of music that almost exclusively appealed to highly specialized and technical people. Up until the early 2000’s, you could say something similar about video games. Sure, they’ve been a global phenomenon since the introduction of arcades in the 1970’s, but the parents of Gen-Xers all over the world could see it immediately: some of these kids were absolutely born to realize a whole new level of imagination through computers.
What was originally designed as a tool for work quickly became a tool for play as well, and subsequently, profound art. Before the 1980’s even began, what was now collectively referred to as video games had officially entered the mainstream as a new medium for expression, exciting people in all the same ways that their favorite records, books, and movies did, even when it fluctuated in terms of popularity.
_
Now, before you get to thinking, no, we’re not gunning to be the next GameRant or Kotaku. God help us. And we don’t have the time / budget to launch something on the scale of say, Noclip Documentaries. To be honest, we’re not even entirely sure what all we’re attempting to do yet. We’re still defining the space, but something told us now was the right time to get it out there. We threw down everything we had this weekend to provide a solid base, with articles like 32 OST’S THAT MIGHT REMIND YOU OF MATH ROCK, 16 MATH ROCK RECORDS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN AMAZING OST’S, THE 8 BEST 8-BIT MATH ROCK YOUTUBE COVERS WE COULD FIND, and even a couple interviews to boot. Check them out at the new Games section here.
Hopefully it’s enough to demonstrate that for now, pretentious pricks or not, we’re giving you the same version of us we always do. No puppeteers attached, just a super warped and curious blog that used to cover one nerdy thing in particular, but now covers two.
Anyway, don’t worry – there’s not going to be any shortage of the expected math rock content on Fecking Bahamas. We’ve got the fullest plate of noodles we’ve ever had. But more on that in the usual spaces. For now, whether you’re a casual gamer, aspiring developer, or seasoned software engineer, join us as we dive into the mysterious crossover of math rock and video games. As a famous Italian plumber once said…
“…Here we go!”