N-Philes

Interview with OCRemix's djpretzel

Posted February 16th 2006 by John Ondrey.

David W. Lloyd, known more commonly in the music world as djpretzel, is a musical guru of numerous talents. He's composed over 65 videogame remixes (many of which from the NES, SNES, and N64) and hosted all of them, as well as over 1,300 other remixes submitted to his illustrious website OverClocked Remix.

OverClocked Remix was created by Mr. Lloyd in 1999, and it now serves as the unofficial game music arrangement community for all game composers, listeners, players and everyone else who just loves to listen to fantastic, imaginative, music. It has been featured on Slashdot, Salon, and TechTV. Saying Mr. Lloyd is the John Williams to game remixes may be an understatement.

In this exclusive N-Philes interview with djpretzel, hear what an illustrious game remixer thinks about the state of game tunes – in particular, Nintendo's – and listen in on what the future holds for our game music!

N-Philes: Thank you for joining us Mr. Lloyd ... err djpretzel. OC ReMix is a fantastic website for up-and-coming composers of music.

Please tell our readers how you came about the creation of it.

djpretzel: It initially started as a side project for a 3D web comic about the emulation scene called simply 'OverClocked', hence 'OverClocked ReMix'; basically, I used the comic as a way to improve my skills at 3D design and Photoshop, and I figured I should do the same for music. I'd always been a fan of game music (though admittedly more Sega than Nintendo, in my youth), and while there were sites out there that did remixes of Commodore 64 music, usually in techno, there was nothing that was open to games from all platforms - computers, console, arcade, handhelds - and which encouraged mixing in all genres, i.e. jazz, classical, rock, etc. instead of just electronica. Hence OCR was born.

N-Philes: One of your missions of OC ReMix is to honor men and women who write quality music for a medium that is considered to be "disposable." Why do you think the medium of computer and videogame music is in many ways considered "disposable?"

djpretzel: Well, videogames themselves are considered disposable by some - they haven't attained widespread recognition as a true art form just yet. But often what people don't realize is that the original melodies that videogame composers come up with are more innovative and have more lasting appeal than much of what gets circulated in 'popular' music. Ten years from now, most people will forget (...one hopes) the latest song by Avril Lavigne or Linkin Park, but I'll bet if you whistle the main theme from Mario or Zelda you'll still get instant recognition from quite a few. Nevertheless, I think music in games is often looked down upon as an afterthought; there's an attitude that it's not as 'serious' as film composition, for example, which it's very similar in nature to, because games are targeted towards more limited demographics and aren't introspective or complex enough to inspire the type of music that would have broader appeal or be 'mature' enough to be taken seriously.

I think this attitude is changing, slowly but surely, and we're here to help convince more and more people and make that change in perception more pervasive.

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