It's refreshing to enter a club with no prior knowledge of the night's performers, only to see that the "rig" for the next band consists of video game accessories.

One is immediately hit with waves of both nostalgia and inspiration. You think, "Hey, I can play that shit too." This sense of identification and allegiance is found in no other scene. If a pile of video game wires can chip away at the wall between common nerd and performance artist, then there truly must be some radness at play.

The technical name of this genre is "chiptunes" or just "chip." Be stringent about your usage of these terms, for there are some who would...well, they would sneer at you while they drank their Mountain Dew, that's for sure. Under no circumstances should this genre be referred to as "Nintendo music," which is comparable to referring to all adhesive bandages as Band-aids. Secret online wars are waged about this sort of thing.

I know that you're thinking, "Not in my community!" Unfortunately, I must inform you that these people do exist in our humble city of Portland, and they don't dress like the nerds from “Saved By the Bell.” It's not so easy to spot them in the wild. Floating in an echelon above their geeky counterparts are actual chiptunes artists, and Portland is home to an exploding chiptunes scene.

Exploding so rapidly, in fact, that local venue Ground Kontrol has graciously allowed their premises to be used as a fallout shelter. It is here that the majority of Portland's chiptunes shows are held, along with an annual festival known as "Micropalooza."

2009's Micropalooza has already come and gone, hosting a sizeable chunk of local chiptune artists, including 486, Operation Mission and Spamtron.

With the gap between modern music technology and 8-bit computation widening more each day, local chiptunes artists are here to remind of a time when dead bad guys suddenly transformed into food or money.-g