Pterodactyl Squad (2025)

17/03/2025

Emanon was the second release we put out by lpower in 2009, who I believe at this time was still going by his full name: Lawrence Power. And yes, that is his real name.

Unlike Tropicalesque, which was written for the NES 2A03 chip, this is where Lawrence started to experiment with softer-sounding, more varied samples. So this doesn't feel like your standard chiptune release - there's definitely a more custom sound palette drawing from various consoles and synths.

It was another faux soundtrack, one for an arcade racing game idea he came up with. It's energising, and the kind of music that would drive you on to victory. But it's also kind of chill and relaxing at the same time. The minimalistic cover art lets you imagine your own visuals.

It was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to put out. Looking back it has a feel of the European synth composers like Harold Faltermeyer and Giorgio Moroder.

The energy mostly remains the same throughout the album, just like an authentic arcade soundtrack, although when you get to Third Challenger and Fourth Challenger, things seem to step up a gear.

Lawrence has always had a real ear for melody and emotion - it's why I love his stuff. But more than anything he's just trying to paint a picture, with complete dedication to the concept. Perfect escapism.

24/02/2025

Next in this series of looking back through our old releases... We released A Pterodactyl Squad Compilation in 2009. Imaginative name, right?

It was a mix of unreleased tracks from Spamtron, NESMETAL, arcadecoma, lpower, Spheres of Chaos, and more. Listening back, it feels like a sampler of artists I knew or who were floating around the label at the time. A lot of them I’d connected with through the Gamewave Podcast. Plenty of artists didn’t fit the pure chip mould, and I was happy to release that kind of stuff. You could call it chip or VGM-adjacent now, but no-one used that term back then.

The artwork was a little scene I made out of Fuzzy Felt. Remember that? I scanned the board, and voila, we had some artwork.

Looking back, it’s a cool snapshot of a piece of the chip scene in 2009. I'm glad we've still got this stuff up for people to hear if they want to. So much music from that era is just gone. A lot of it with MySpace going down the drain, or domains that someone never bothered to renew, or purges when someone quit chiptune ha. It's sad.

10/02/2025

Once again, I (Joe) really can't take much credit for this next release, which is undoubtedly the biggest thing we ever put out. It was Ross/arcadecoma who curated the whole tribute.

When he sent it to me I was blown away, but I still didn't know it would get the attention it did. Yes, this is Weezer - The 8-bit Album.

Ross had been mentioning it to a few people here and there, and it ended up getting linked on the official Weezer website around the time of release. At that time we were putting things out on a very basic website I'd built and hosting the MP3s on the Internet Archive.

News of release then got picked up by blogs like Kotaku, Wired and Synthtopia, and we had to ask friends if we could use their webspace because the Internet Archive downloads were running too slowly. Then it ended up burning through all the webspace we'd borrowed. I remember being told we'd hit 10k downloads within a few days on just one of those webhosts. Who knows the total number of downloads?

I think there are a few reasons it got huge. 8-bit tribute releases always do well, but here the music is just great. Sometimes when you put out a comp, people can phone it in, but that didn't happen here. Pretty much every track is a banger. Some of the covers added a fun slant (Videogame Orchestra, Nordloef), while some seemed to tap into the true spirit of the original and run with it in chip form (PDF Format, Tugboat). Anamanaguchi and Bit Shifter busting out the vocals was a lovely surprise too (something I wish they'd both done more of). Yeah, the lineup was just stellar in general.

Secondly, the cover art from David Mauro did exactly what it needed to. It's bright, it's iconic and it's a knowing twist on the Blue Album cover for Weezer fans.

Thirdly, I think it hit at the right time. Weezer was relatively popular in 2009, and chiptune was kinda blowing up, and it just seemed to tap into the musical trends of the time. Nerdy indie and electronica was big, as were netlabels and downloading MP3s.

A cool thing happened a few years later when I was just walking round my hometown and I heard one of the shops was playing it over the speakers. I'm glad people are still listening to it and it had the reach it did. People have said to me it was the first chiptune they ever heard. I also remember it getting mentioned in an interview with Rivers Cuomo and he said he was fine with it, so it was dope to get that final seal of approval from the man himself.

It also almost led to an opportunity to work with the band. But maybe I'll say more about that when we get to the Weezer - The Second 8-bit Album in this series...

05/02/2025

Next in our nostalgic look back over the catalogue is this three-way split from arcadecoma (Scotland), L'homme Manete (Portugal), and seal of quality (France).

I wasn’t really a part of this one; Ross/arcadecoma put it together while he was still heavily involved with the label.

The artwork is fun, and listening back now for the first time in years, it’s an interesting release and works well as an introduction to all three artists, each bringing their own style. That said, if you want to hear them at their best, I’d definitely recommend checking out their solo releases.

I’ve found that’s sometimes the case with splits and compilations - they don’t always flow like a standalone EP or album. But there’s something cool about hearing different artists side by side, and this release does a good job of showcasing what each artist is about.

And stay tuned, cos next we have a compilation that certainly didn't lack in flow or quality...

21/01/2025

Spamtron and I used to chat a lot back in the day. He was a prolific and interesting guy. I haven't spoken to him in years. Was there some big drama at some point? Probably. Can I remember the details? Nope.

Anyway, he had a label called Mega Twerp that released Spheres of Chaos. It was cool, but the label would sometimes go offline. Spamtron would sometimes take his own music offline too. I really liked his tunes and wanted to have them somewhere safe where they would always be available. I think that's kinda one of the reasons Pterodactyl Squad came into being, thinking about it.

This is a giant release covering so many styles, and showing how talented Spamtron was - how he could imagine a style, turn his mind to it and just nail it. This release also fulfilled the faux soundtrack idea I'd had. Well, here there are many faux soundtracks within one album. Over thirty tracks in total, in fact. There's even a Legend of Zelda cover. And I decided to play drums along to one of them and add it as a bonus.

Yeah, I feel like this album was out on Mega Twerp once, and that bonus track marked this as the Pterodactyl Squad version... Maybe. Who knows. It's great anyway. Such a wide range of influences and it sounds so fat. A lot of the samples feel SNES-era.

14/01/2025

This release marked the start of working with lpower, who was called 'Lawrence Power' at this point.

At the start of the label I was wanting to get as many 'faux soundtracks' out as I could - I just thought that was a neat idea, and Lawrence had this perfect release just sitting there, waiting for someone to put it out.

I believe we came across each other on the old 2A03 forums. I shot him a message and he said he was down for working together. He's the kind of guy who doesn't necessarily think people want to hear his work cos he's quite humble, but I think many of us are very thankful for his output. Honestly, it's meant a lot to me that we've been able to put his stuff out because he has such an artistic vision for each release, and basically it's just excellent music.

Lawrence is a fine artist IRL based out of Germany, which explains his approach to music too. We met up once when I was in Berlin.

There'll be plenty more of gushing over his releases in this series, but Tropicalesque is a really fun, NES-style fake soundtrack heavily inspired by games like StarTropics. Definitely check it out if you haven't before.

13/01/2025

Ha OK, so this was the final EP of the band I was in. Looking back with hindsight, we didn't really know what we were doing (just like with this label).

We were still in school and our bunch of friends all played the right instruments to form a band. We were all huge video game nerds, so the first thing we played together was the Pokemon theme. Then we naturally progressed into writing our own instrumental stuff that sounded like a video game soundtrack played by a rock band. We were basically writing prog before really listening to it ourselves. I think on the second track we also wrote a doom song before knowing what that was either. Mike did his best to make his guitar sound like a squarewave but we didn't understand gear much at the time either!

We recorded this in my bedroom/garage using all borrowed equipment, including a Korg D12 12-track recorder. I added some short passages/samples I wrote on Famitracker, then mixed it all. Listening back, you can tell it's completely DIY. I often wondered what the songs would have sounded like with a more pro setup, because I think they're decent.

We played some shows around our hometown, but honestly, we didn't really know how to get them. We'd literally just walk into venues and ask, and bearing in mind this was the mid-noughties and in Sheffield everyone just wanted to sound like the Arctic Monkeys... Yeah, most people, including the punters, never understood what we were doing. Probably even our friends never understood. Everyone used to say why don't you have a vocalist.

Our biggest ever crowd was playing to the school when the teachers band asked us to 'support' them at a lunchtime show in the school hall. After that we played with Anamanaguchi, Henry Homesweet, Sabrepulse, Random, Fighter X etc. when they'd come through Sheffield. We'd usually throw in the odd Sonic cover, which would get a better reaction than this original stuff, of course.

Still, it was fun.

10/01/2025

A Speck in the Universe by SLiVeR

Mike O'Brien aka SLiVeR put out one of the greatest EPs of 2A03 music ever (IMO) then just vanished. Even I can't get hold of him on the email he used before. I hope he's doing OK.

He didn't care about the chip scene too much from what I remember, just loved making music. He didn't even play video games. He just saw the NES as a music making machine.

But yeah, this EP of eight tracks is just so well done. Even though it's getting on for 20 years old now, it still sounds GREAT. Each song is so tight and melodic with great instrumentation. They're amazing compositions in their own right but could work as an authentic soundtrack for a NES game too.

I felt having this release on the label gave us a lot of legitimacy in the early days.

08/01/2025

Gamewave Podcast Compilation Vol. 2 by V/A

Now we have the second Gamewave Podcast compilation. I literally just edited the number on the cover so we could use David Mauro's art again 😂

I believe I asked the artists for exclusives for this one. Got another submission from Disasterpeace (Marathon), which turned out to be one of my favourite tracks he ever put out.

A lot of metal/rock styles on here. I guess that played to my personal tastes but looking back probably wasn't for everyone. I think I was trying to give some variety and have plenty of chip-adjacent stuff, before that was a term.

I was still pretty young putting all these things together. Didn't really know what I was doing tbh 😂

07/01/2025

The Game Boy Tree Adventures by arcadecoma.

When Pterodactyl Squad first started up, Ross/arcadecoma was the second person in the team. He's no longer active as an artist these days, but around 2008 we'd got to know each other via the Gamewave Podcast. He'd guest hosted an episode which I thought was great, so we started working together on a label.

This was his first release, which he also put out on CD. It was one of a handful of releases that our new label launched with.

I always liked the concept of the front cover, recreating that time in his childhood when he couldn't afford a Game Boy, so he'd sit in a tree with a photo of one glued onto cardboard. I think that sums up the pure nostalgia we're often going for when it comes to making chiptune - it's more than just the music.

I still have the CD somewhere. It came with 3D glasses and a special 3D cover.

06/01/2025

I'm going to start working through every release available on our BC page and posting some thoughts for each one. It might remind you of something you haven't heard in a while, or something you'd like to check out for the first time...

So we have to start off with the Gamewave Podcast Compilation Vol. 1 by V/A!

Pterodactyl Squad really grew out of the Gamewave Podcast, which was my first foray into chiptune. My cohost, Mike and I made the show for years while we were still in school, and it's how I met a lot of people whose music would end up on the label.

This volume actually came out on another label, Betamod in 2006, and it features a couple of artists in Disasterpeace and Anamanaguchi who'd go on to do great things. It's a bit like a snapshot of what was happening in chip in 2006.

Phlogiston made a custom track for the comp with samples from the podcast. There's even a naïve, garage recording of Spheres of Chaos, the VGM metal band Mike and I were in.

When Betamod collapsed, I wanted to give this compilation a new home and it was one of a handful of releases that kickstarted the catalogue of Pterodactyl Squad in 2008.

I still love the pixel artwork that David Mauro sent me, originally as a bitmap file. It shows exactly how the podcast was made and listened to in the era of iPods 😎

31/12/2024

If you enjoyed our latest release from Corset Lore, here's the release show. Taking place on 9th Jan featuring Bit Shifter and more!

Pterodactyl Squad