My Favourite Game

The chiptune artist on Game Boy wizardry, perfectionist tendencies and the game that expanded her world

Niamh ‘Chipzel’ Houston on Game Boys and life sims

Niamh Houston is a Northern Irish musician recording under the name Chipzel. After releasing a string of EPs and albums, she began to soundtrack videogames including Super Hexagon, Spectra, Interstellaria and Crypt Of The NecroDancer. Here, she talks about the joys of making music with Game Boy, how Cities: Skylines brings out her perfectionist streak and the pain of losing a 400-hour save.

What’s your earliest gaming memory? My first memory of games was my older sister playing Super Mario on the Super Nintendo, and me never being allowed to play because if I took a turn on a level then I would just mess it up. We had all the classics: Street Fighter II Turbo, Super Mario, Kirby. I remember being obsessed with the music and sound, how different it was. And then when I got some money for my First Communion – that’s a big point in your life in the Irish community, where you’re able to buy something for yourself for the first time – I got a Game Boy Color. I got Pokémon Blue, and I played it to death. I’d play with headphones in. I was just taken away by the sound. I loved how raw it was.

When did you first start thinking about making music with a Game Boy? It was around the MySpace days, and I was desperately searching for new music. I used to love anything that was a Nintendo remix – you know those hardstyle ones, where they’d just put the Tetris theme over the top of it? I was like, I love this, I don’t care how cheesy it is. So then I discovered chiptune, this cool underground community of people hacking toys and creating software so that you can make music on a Game Boy. I thought, how do I do this? And it was surprisingly easy. You just need a Game Boy, you go to the Little Sound DJ website, download it, put it on a cartridge – boom. Within about three months I had my first shows, and it just kind of went a bit nuts from there.

What’s it like to work with a piece of videogame hardware? It’s incredibly intimate. You feel the fascination of people that are watching you, because when there’s no laptop people are like, ‘Where does the music come from? Wait, she’s just got a Game Boy?’ One of my favourite things when I perform is turning on the Game Boy, hearing the startup sound and seeing the reaction of the crowd. It resonates so much with people. Then you just throw some bangers in their face and they think you’re a wizard. I love to instil that fascination that I had when I first saw it. So much of it is about the crowd’s energy which gets me more excited, which then gets them more excited – it’s just a really cool way to make music.

Do you have time nowadays to play? There are games I always come back to. When I first started playing games on PC, I was mad about The Sims and Sim City, so I have a real love for Cities: Skylines. I’m a perfectionist at heart, so I’m always like, okay, I’ll make this city amazing – no, it’s shite, I hate it, I’m going to scrap it and make a new one.

Do you make music in the same perfectionist way you play games? Weirdly, no! I’ll go with all the happy mistakes. It’s actually when the best of my creativity comes through – when I do something by accident, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that actually sounded really cool’. That’s what I love about Game Boy stuff: it allows for a lot of moments like that. There’s a really good relationship between how quickly you can get an idea down, and how quickly that idea can give you another bit of inspiration. I find that whenever I’m trying to work on a computer, I’m constantly fighting with the technology, and I’m like, ‘How did I get to a point where it makes more sense to make music with this thing?’ [laughs]

What’s your favourite game of all time? There is a special place in my heart for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, because that was my first open-world experience. You know that stereotypical image of a girl in her pyjamas and she hasn’t washed her hair in ten years? She’s just eating crisps and bread from the bag? That was me with that game. I played 400 hours of it, until I lost my save. I just turned on the Xbox one day and it was gone. And I was like, oh my god! All that work, down the drain! But the music in Oblivion was just absolutely beautiful. That was when I was like, okay, I want to make something in my life that’s not just Game Boy music.

“When there’s no laptop people are like, ‘Where does the music come from? Wait, she’s got a Game Boy?’”