In my last post, I rejoiced to acquaint you, Gentle Reader, with my finding the much-sought "Game Over, Yeaaaaaaah!" soundclip from the ancient racing game Sega Rally Championship. Lest my exuberance over this bit of electronic archaeology earn the wounding-but-typical "Nerd alert! Nerd alert!" comment from the rarely-in-the-gaming-know LWB, I'd like to now help you understand more thoroughly what an impact that soundclip has had not just on your humble servant, but on this our popular culture.

You see, recognizing that soundclip for the golden nugget of gaming trivia it is ranks with grasping such esoteric mysteries as:

• The origin of "Hyper-Fighting" in the Street Fighter II series.
• Where the sound "Toasty!" comes from in Mortal Kombat II.
• Why playing Final Fantasy Tactics looks and feels so much like playing Ogre Battle.

The illuminati of gaming cherish and preserve these morsels of lore and more, but such are not commonly appreciated by the public at large, who in general prefer attention to clearly ancillary concerns like personal hygiene, disposal of takeout containers within a week of acquisition, and the outdoors.

Jerks.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that the legacy of this soundclip lives on is in the ways it is reinvented and folded back into our popular culture. Countless¹ reviews of the game itself and its successors make a point to reference the announcer -- many of them written long after the time when the reviewers could expect their primary audience to have seen or played the game firsthand. Their collective accounts afford us a synaural record of the true impact of this soundclip's first advent.

I therefore encourage you, Gentle Reader, to go out now and read everything you can about the cultural detonation that was "Game Over, Yeah!"

No, I mean go now. Just go read that stuff, and then come back. Go on.

(Cue research montage clip, perhaps with tasteful inclusion of "Eye of the Tiger" music or similar)

Back already? I should also have mentioned that there's even a website now called "Game Over, Yeah!" It's about videogames, of course. Go back and look at that too, okay?

(Montage reprise)

I'll bet you're inspired and invigorated from that, aren't you? And well you should be, Gentle-and-Newly-Informed Reader. And so I'll leave you with a personally transformative video that further testifies to the enduring power of this soundclip, courtesy of Fenslerfilm:

Click Here!

¹Meaning I didn't bother to count. There were definitely a lot of Google hits.

Way back in the dawn of polygon gaming, back before the first analog controller was released for the Sony Playstation, there was a phenomenal rally racing¹ game for the Sega Saturn.

Yeah, that's right, I owned one of the ill-fated Sega Saturns. A darn good system too, I might add, were it not for Sega's hamfisted marketing. It coulda beena contenda.

Back to the rally racing game: it was called Sega Rally Championship, and despite the fact that you had to use a digital pad to tap-tap-tap your way around turns, the game had one of the most amazing feels of any rally racing games before or since. It also was the first game, IMO, to have a replay function worth actually watching.

Being a Japanese product, though, it was not immune from the cultural peculiarities of its design team. Perhaps the most notable non-racing feature in the game was the fact that it had this full-cheese announcer who, when the race was finished for whatever reason and the phrase "Game Over" appeared on the screen, would sing "Game Over, Yeeeeeeaaaah!" in a voice that sounded like an indie Seattle-scene vocalist doing some moonlighting. It was freakish, and instantly became part of the vocabulary shared between my brother and I.

So I've been looking for that soundclip for probably five years now, and nothing's come up. This is made harder by the fact that the game is so old, and also because until recently there weren't any good emulators of the Saturn system I could use to capture it.

But last week I found it. It's a crappy recording, clearly done by someone with no attention to detail, but who cares? It's good enough for a telephone ringtone, much to my officemates' annoyance.

Listen to all its gloriousness yourself: Click Here!

¹Rally races are auto races that take place offroad, the most famous of them being the Paris-Dakar rally.

Things happening down 'round our way:

• Painted the living room. Finally, we did it. A lovely shade of green called "Hellebore." Got to play with my power sander and breathing mask, as well. We decided to replace the ancient sconces (think 1/4 giant ping-pong ball), and that meant dealing with the fact that they had been painted and painted around for the last few decades. There was a crater left when I pulled them off, and so I had some sanding and filling to do to get things flat again. Now, though, even though we are waiting on the sconces to arrive, it's like we have a whole new room.
• Stayed home for Xmas. Yep, we had planned to go out to Stanford to hang with Shel's sisters and their husbands, as well as our baby niece. Nothing doing, though, thanks to a decision to play it smart financially this holiday. Tough decision, but the right one.
• Got a Bosch router. This has been on my wish list for years -- ever since I started goofing around making arcade joysticks. This will let me make some nice custom sticks, and maybe even some other less geeky bits of woodcraft. Now all I need is a router table. And a table saw. And that drill press I was looking at. And lotsa bits. And a place to put it all. And a million bucks.
• Taken up GBA playing again. Specifically, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. What a great game. Also playing Mario Golf and Virtua Tennis again. Every time I play Mario Golf, though, I hear Piers' Mario impression: "Nice Approach!"
• Still playing online chess; still sucking. Let's just say that improvement is a long-term prospect. I really enjoy it, though. I feel like my only hope for absorbing all the chess knowledge out there is through some kind of electronic osmosis. I am using a program to practice tactical motifs, though: CT Art 3.0. It collects over a thousand real situations from historical games and groups them by difficulty and theme, so you can work your way up over time, learning to recognize certain combinational possibilities when they appear. Or that's the theory. Did I mention I still suck?
• Out with crap phone, in with BlackBerry. Now I can work all the time, and answer annoying emails when they are in fact most annoying. Nothing says speedy communication like typing an angry message at top speed using only your thumbs. You can sit around doing nothing, with your thumb up your rear, and you can get mad and put a foot in someone else's rear; with the advent of BlackBerry, though, you can now put a thumb up someone else's rear.
• Learning to wiki. Going to build a wiki that serves as a platform for user-oriented communication with my instructors. I want to give them access to needy information in a much more intuitive way, and I want them to have the opportunity to respond to it and improve it. Gonna be cool.

That's about all for now. Later!