Buckner & Garcia - Pac Man Fever 1982 CBS

1. Pac Man Fever
2. Froggy's Lament
3. Ode To A Centipede
4. Do The Donkey Kong
5. Hyperspace
6. The Defender
7. Mousetrap
8. Goin' Berzerk

In this modern world of iPads, smart phones, music downloads and Social Networking I sometimes have an overwhelming desire to travel back to simpler technological times! To an age in which I wasn’t completely overwhelmed with choice, a time where video games had soul and the fact that I had to save up my hard earned money for weeks on end in order to purchase an album or a video game made me a more discerning consumer! But as the years progress I can feel the twenty first century slowly chipping away at my attention span on a daily basis, with the advent of YouTube and Spotify it’s so easy to just flick through an album without giving it a second thought. Perhaps if I’d spent a month saving up for Crystal Castle’s latest album, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to afford another album for another month, then maybe I’d have given it the due care and attention it may have possibly deserved. As it happens I flicked through it on Spotify, hated it, didn’t give it a second thought, and then I moved on to another album I’d heard good things about somewhere in the blogosphere. Of course the flip-side is that if I didn’t have Spotify, I may not heard the album at all, and of course via such modern technologies I’m exposed to a lot more media than I was in the past, but I digress, and my original point still stands.

Every now and again, I just want things to slow down a little; I want less choice and less technology. Just for a short space of time I want to enter into an age where two dimensional, pixelated graphics weren’t just some kind of a “retro-cool” thing to be splashed across the T-Shirt of some spotty sixteen year old who’s never even played Frogger, has absolutely no idea who Matthew Smith is and has probably never even watched an episode of Games Master!

Enter Buckner and Garcia, with their 1982 album Pac Man Fever, which spawned a top ten single of the same name, this eight track masterpiece, is the greatest and as far as I’m aware possibly the only dedicated video game album in existence. These guys actually sat down and carefully crafted eight individual pop songs about eight individual games that are now seen as iconic parts of our video gaming history, and they weren’t just trying to cash in on a fad, just listen to those lyrics! These guys obviously had a passion for the games in question, this is evident in the fact that they’re referencing gaming techniques and even subtle things such as the names of the ghosts in Pac Man “I’ve got speedy on my tail, and I know it’s either him or me..” and to top it all off they’ve even got the original sound effects from the games spliced into the songs.

This is an honest, humorous and heartfelt album that encapsulates a magical time when the lyrical subject matter wasn’t “retro” it was state of the art. Each song does it’s very best to reflect the personality of the game it tackles, just listen to Do The Donkey Kong, and you’re presented with a menacing melody taken from the game itself, followed by a mischievous melody, and lyrics that entice you to keep going, just as an addiction to the game itself may have “Come on, come on! Do the Donkey Kong!”

So do yourself a favour, get yourself a vinyl copy of Pac Man Fever, switch off your computer, your mobile phone, and your iPad, dust off your turntable and shut out the outside world for the duration of these eight wonderful tracks, and you’ll re-enter the atmosphere with brand new sense of calm, an appreciation of classic video gaming and maybe, just maybe some healthy feelings of disgust for people who use terms like “retro cool”.

Highlights include Pac Man Fever, Do The Donkey Kong and Froggy's Lament



SCORE: 9/10