Pterodactyl Squad (2026)

13/12/2025

As I continue my look back through all of our releases (with huge gaps between each post), let me tell you a funny story. It's about The Dark Side of the Moon - The 8-bit Album.

After the success of the Weezer tribute, we wondered what else we could do in the same vein and I was going through a big Pink Floyd phase at the time. Because of the nature of TDSOTM and all of its experimentation and textures, I knew it would make for a great chiptune tribute. I even wondered why it had never been done before.

This one would be different to the Weezer tribute though, and it required more planning. I knew it needed to basically track to the original, in the same way that each song flowed into the next in one giant sequence. That's kind of complicated when you're planning to use different artists, but I thought that would be a selling point of the release too. So it was a little tricky getting the right artists on board and having them commit. Inevitably some people dropped out and needed to be replaced.

People were working on their tracks, but I remember it taking longer than I'd anticipated. Then the funniest thing happened - someone else released their own chip version of TDSOTM and beat us to the punch! That person was Brad Smith with his MOON8 release. And it seemed to get picked up everywhere - I guess similar to what had happened with our Weezer release. The idea of chiptune tributes was still novel around 2010/11 and they seemed to really hit the zeitgeist.

I was pretty dejected about it to be honest. Had I known someone else was working on it, I wouldn't have bothered with ours. It almost seemed pointless to carry on, but in the end I felt ours did offer something that the original didn't, i.e. variety in the styles and sounds. For example, we had tracks like Money by sergeeo with the sound font from Sonic the Hedgehog's Casino Night Zone (very clever), alongside Game Boys, the Speak and Spell etc.

Steve Jenkins from Telefuture did the art, which I, again, think is really clever. I thought we'd engaged and bounced off the original well.

But then something even more ironic happened - one of the tracks that got submitted utilised audio from Brad Smith's release so I had to go to Brad and get clearance to use this. He graciously said yes, so that's why you see his name on the last track, but in the end I was just happy to see the back of the project.

It was weird being the second chip TDSOTM, and I definitely felt ours could have been a bigger deal had it been first. Looking back now, I do feel it's a great release, and I believe we achieved that flow with the way it all sequenced up and matched the original.

08/09/2025

We got the sad news that Kageyama Masashi passed away. The composer of one of the most beautiful retro soundtracks of all time, Gimmick! I've listened to it so many times, and I have it on again right now.

We were so honoured to have Kageyama-san contribute a track to our Train Radio compilation in 2021. I believe it was the first music he'd released in a while.

RIP to a chip hero.

25/08/2025

It was great to put out Noisewaves' self-titled debut in 2010. As I've said before, there were plenty of other labels doing straight up chip releases really well around this time, so I aimed to put out chiptune + something else, whenever the opportunity arose. In this case it was 2A03 chip stuff with guitars as the special ingredient. I'd say there are plenty of similarities to The Depreciation Guild here.

Yeah, looking back from 2025, this EP really embodies a lot of what was happening and popular at the time. Post rock/indie mixed with electronic stuff, those verbose song titles (e.g. Do I Look Like I Want To Play Volleyball?), one word but plural band names, and album art with lots of geometric shapes. I miss that era a lot. I feel like chiptune really had a moment then. It was never mainstream but it did fit in with a lot of what was happening in the big indie and electronic scenes.

I seem to remember Noisewaves doing some live shows around this time (with live drums?). I haven't spoken to Shawn in a very long time, I wonder what he's up to now.

12/08/2025

I'm finally getting back on it, looking back through the label's releases. 5 months since my last post, but better late than never!

Today I'm thinking back to Short Attention Fan by Weave of K. which we released in February 2010. Weave of K. is Kevin Durr, who worked as a sound designer - still does I believe, check out A Sound Effect. This line of work definitely showed in his tunes.

While these tracks were 'songs' I guess, there was an emphasis on sound and texture more than anything. And they do sound lovely and crisp even now, produced to perfection. I remember on Kevin's MySpace page it used to read "Listen with good quality headphones".

Plenty of the samples for this 5-track EP were taken from Atari 2600 carts and circuit bent toys - I always enjoyed handling stuff that wasn't from LSDj and the Nintendo chips. And I remember digging the unusual nature of this EP but wondering if others would, and it kind of surprised me when this one got a lot of downloads and nice feedback.

And if you're wondering what the future holds for the label, I do know of a small handful of releases in the pipeline. I just checked and it's been a year since the last thing we put out (from Corset Lore), so I'm hoping we can get something new out sooner rather than later.

As always, if you have something you're working on, get in touch.

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.

Pterodactyl Squad

13/12/2025

08/09/2025

25/08/2025

12/08/2025

17/03/2025

24/02/2025

10/02/2025

05/02/2025

21/01/2025

14/01/2025

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