Welcome to the GameChops Substack

New format, same great video game music

Dj Cutman here, welcome to our new newsletter, the source for all things video game music.

If you’ve been following me or GameChops for a while, you may be wondering what’s up with this new format. Since it’s been a few months since our last email, and many of you on Substack may be learning about us for the first time, here’s a little backstory…

I started GameChops as a humble mixtape in 2010. Working as an assistant engineer in a record studio in Ithaca, after-hours I chopped up samples of video game chiptunes and layered them with hard hitting, east coast drum beats reminiscent of the city where I was born, New York.

I called my first mixtape “Game Chops” and released it on Bandcamp in 2010. That’s where the seeds of this mailing list were first planted. Over the next couple years, I toured Comic Cons and anime conventions, playing my video game beats to whoever would listen. I met some great musicians out on the road, and in 2012 we released our first collaborative album, The Triforce of Bass.

It was a rough-around-the-edges dubstep tribute to Legend of Zelda. Much to my surprise, the album received dozens of reviews and write-ups from gaming blogs and news outlets around the world. It was the first big surge of attention I saw for any of the music I had worked on.

The success blind-sighted me, a newbie DJ who was just looking to put together an album I could play out at my next gig at a local convention.

I began continuously licensing video game covers and building up an email list. As my friends and I released new music, I’d send out an email. At first just posting via Bandcamp, and then moving to MailChimp, and eventually to the budget friendly but workflow rich MadMimi.

But after a decade of DIY newsletters, a tech giant killed our email list.

This year MadMimi was bought out by domain name juggernaut GoDaddy. They shut it down, migrating our newsletter to their bloated promotional dashboard. GoDaddy wanted nothing more than to hammer our audience with targeted advertisements, AI generated content, and aggressive user tracking.

Suffice to say, we weren’t having any of it.

We launched this new Substack newsletter to re-create our newsletter as a focused delivery system for news about video game music, albums, and vinyl record releases. Essentially, to let everyone who’s interested find the details that get lost in the social media shuffle.

We’ve even started a vinyl-specific section to help record collectors and music connoisseurs keep up with vinyl pressings, re-pressings, and new releases.

Our legacy newsletter rounded up multiple releases each week, while our Substack will focus on just one project in each post. It will be up to you to dive deeper, or simply tap to the stream and start listening.

Now that social media is more fragmented than ever, and character count is at a premium, it felt like the right time to reboot our newsletter. My hope for this Substack is to build a supportive community of game music listeners, or at least make it a little easier to find that one Zelda remix you heard on a livestream.

Comments are enabled on every post, and I look forward to your feedback and requests as we roll out new music. If you’re a Substack veteran, or new to the platform like me, I welcome you to drop a comment to let us know what you think of this new format.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the music.

- Cutman