The chiptune genre is the red headed stepchild of electronic music. Aside from Beck’s chiptune-remix album Guerolito, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a lot of mainstream releases of chiptunes; that’s because the vast majority of the genre’s practitioners (including many of the contributors to Guerolito) are enthusiastic homebrewers working in front of arcane tracker displays to concoct their tributes to the age of bleep-heavy vintage computer music.

Anyone who’s played Super Mario already knows arguably the most ubiquitous chiptune in existence: the Super Mario theme song, known to millions and always a crowd favorite. The Arcade Fire know it by heart, and so do you. But since the heady days of the Commodore 64 and the NES, when the only way to compose music was to use the built-in music synthesizer chips, chiptunes have expanded beyond their video game origins. While actually creating the music is still a somewhat complex proposition, you don’t need a lot of recording equipment, and most people already have a computer—everything you need to start composing your own chiptunes. As to the sound quality, there are plenty of practitioners who enjoy the constraints of a limited sound bank. And then there’s the irresistable retro quality: a lot of people grew up playing games and listening to chiptunes without ever really thinking about the music. What elevator music and commercial jingles were to the 60s, chiptunes are to the 80s: ephemeral music with cultural import we’re only now beginning to recognize.

But sometimes you don’t care about cultural import; sometimes it’s just that stuff sounds really cool when it sounds like it was played on an old computer. virt’s one of a legion of chiptune artists who do a lot of covers. And this is one of his latest creations: the theme to the PS2 classic Katamari Damacy, in chiptunes form.