ReMix:Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun "Partons à l'Aventure" 2:58

• The Good: Sir_NutS (Paul Michael Molina) turns in a sweet, bumpin' synthwave jam on a catchy tune from a previously unmixed game...
• The Bad: Too few VGM fans fully appreciate the magical works of composer Alberto J. Gonzalez, who truly made the Game Boy sing (among other platforms!)...
• The Ugly: By modern standards, some of the depictions of indigenous Inca peoples in this particular Tintin are... a bit dated. And we don't talk about that time he went to the Congo...

Regardless of whether you've ever even heard of Tintin or played the game, AJG wrote some *amazing* tunes, and Mike is here to pay one of them homage:

"Here I am again remixing yet another incredibly obscure game. Why? Because Alberto J. Gonzalez is a genius, and a tribute from me, a fan, was due.

For those who don't know, Tintin was a very popular character quite a long time ago, in Europe and Latin America. Le Temple du Soleil (Prisoners of the Sun) was an animated movie, and a few games were released for several platforms, including the Game Boy Color, and this is one of the tracks in that game. There's not much to say about the production of this track because it was super easy as I already loved the original. The only slight difficulty was translating the more swingy/triplet-based melodies to a more straightforward synthwave-y track. For the vocoded voice, I actually didn't record myself or anyone this time around and went for a bit of a more old school approach, using a voice synthesizer and then running it through a couple of vocoder effects.

I want to do more remixes based on Mr. Gonzalez's music in the future (his work on the Turok: Rage Wars OST for GBC is masterful), but, for now, this is a good start, I think. Enjoy!"

It's always a good time when Mike (or Jorito) busts out the vocoder, and this particular melody has been adeptly modified to fit an appealing, easily-digestible & infectiously-groovy synthwave context. Gario says it plain & right:

"The style is clean, and the energy maintains itself throughout the track. The source tune checks out, certainly, though it does a nice job using more-or-less original material to build momentum in the beginning. While the soundscape sounds light, there's a lot of cool texture work going on under the hood that really does elevate the track overall. I like it, and I think other people will, too."

I'm other people, so his prophecy has already been fulfilled, but I'm hoping those unfamiliar with the source will still check this mix out, cuz musically I think it has pretty universal appeal. It reminds me more of 1980s sci-fi disco space exploration than anything involving either Incans or the sun, but I dig it quite a bit, and am ALWAYS stoked to see more mixes of Alberto José González' music!