It’s doubtful that any of us ’80s babies realized it at the time, but we soaked up a lot more than words like “shoryuken” and meme-worthy phrases, like “all your base are belong to us,” while we sat cross-legged on the floor, frantically tapping our plastic Nintendo and Sega controllers.

It would seem that our tiny, developing brains—hyped up on sugar-laden cereal—were absorbing the soundtracks to our favorite video game titles. And now, fully grown men and women all over the country are picking up guitars, keyboards, drum kits, and, in some cases, Game Boys, to pay homage to these iconic melodies from the Reagan and Bush I years.

The Rockage 5.0 festival, slated to take place March 11-13 at venues all over San Jose, corrals a cohort of musical groups that specialize in either reproducing the music of Zelda, Mega Man, Super Mario Bros. and the like—or else take cues from those crunchy, 8-bit synth sounds.

There are 17 bands performing over the course of three days at The Ritz, Café Stritch, SoFA Market, AFK Gamer Lounge and the lobby of Metro’s downtown headquarters. That’s a lot of music in a very short period of time—it’s enough to vex even the most seasoned music festivalgoer. But instead of throwing your Wiimote at the nearest screen, or punching your neighbor in the arm, like you used to do when your younger brother beat you at NBA Jam, take a deep breath. We’re here to help you prioritize.

Here are six bands you’ll definitely want to check out at this year’s Rockage.

Bit Brigade
This quartet is so serious about replicating the experience of their favorite video game titles that they’re actually a quintet. Which is to say, that in addition to drums, bass and two guitarists, Bit Brigade also have a full time game-player in their lineup. Noah McCarthy blasts through levels of Metroid and Mega-Man while the band “meticulously replicates every musical cue, cutscene and boss battle in perfect synchronization.”

COLA
In addition to all the chiptune groups at this year’s Rockage, there are also a few straightforward rock & roll groups. And few San Jose bands do straightforward rock & roll like Cola.

Fartbarf
With a name like Fartbarf, it’s pretty apparent what you’re gonna get. Except not. Rather than being a group of greasy-faced adolescents who ran out of good ideas for what to name their band, Fartbarf is a trio of Cro-Magnon mask-wearing analog modular synth enthusiasts who sound a lot like a drunker (a much, much drunker) Tobacco—with live drumming and an obsession for chiptune flourishes.

Vector Hold
The genre known as chiptune, is also commonly called 8-bit music and sometimes “Nintendocore.” But for Vector Hold—a.k.a. Pete Rice, bassist for local stoner metal trio, Forgotten Gods, it’s all about the 16-bit sounds of the Sega Genesis … and the buzzy, lo-fi synths of John Carpenter films.

Hawk Jones
Given their traditional rock instrumentation—guitar, bass and drums—and their tendency to lapse into spacy, feedback-and-delay squalls, it would at first seem that Hawk Jones, like Cola, are outliers in a festival stacked to the brim with bands who take so much inspiration from the world of early console game soundtracks. But when you consider the Tera Melos-esque angularity of their rhythms and guitar lines, it makes sense. The limitations of 8- and 16-bit chips is precisely what gave the music that crystalline feel. These local boys simply replicate that ping-ponging sharpness with strings, membranophones and the chips inside their effects pedals.

Nick Reinhart
This guitarist and bandleader also produces music that recalls the wild and spastic sounds of Tera Melos—probably because he co-founded the group. The Sacramento band’s frontman gets far noisier and stranger than he ever did with Tera Melos. His cracked-out attempts at free jazz run parallel to the tunes of fellow Sacto psychos, Hella. And, like Hawk Jones, the music he creates may not have a direct connection to video games, though he certainly makes a valiant effort at sonically representing the explosive, synaptic bursts so many of us experienced as children—zonked on Lucky Charms, staring at the cathode ray tube and rubbing our thumbs raw on those tiny, red A and B buttons and black D-pad.

Rockage 5.0 plays on Mar 11-13, Various Times, $30 at Multiple Venues, San Jose.

Some day, Kevin Wick hopes to play video games in his own video game bar. That day, he tells me on the back patio, will be “The day I can sleep more than five hours a night.”

The 24 year-old co-owner of the new AFK Gamer Lounge has lost sleep for months preparing for this weekend’s grand opening, making it difficult to tell whether rumpled and deadpan is his usual persona, or whether I’m speaking to a barely caffeinated husk of his former self. A few skillful straight-faced jokes make me think the former though, as he shuffles me around the new restaurant dressed in jeans, flip-flops and an SJSU Spartan’s sweatshirt. The décor in the 18,000 square foot space (formerly Los Gatos Brewery) is mostly complete, though still necessitating various ladders scattered around the dining room. The design and color scheme approximates what might happen if someone installed a nightclub inside a giant Xbox.

It’s Monday and AFK is closed for the day, but as we pass through the ground floor from the patio, the staff is undergoing a training regimen consisting of not only restaurant service strategies, but also introductions to video games, specifically League of Legends, a premiere eSports title that has already drawn crowds to AFK to watch big matches. Once the 65 PC basement LAN center is complete, which it should by the grand opening, ‘League’ will be drawing the hardcore gamers as well.

Wick brings me down to the basement, fully stocked with slick black PC towers and custom green and black faux-leather chairs. In a Reddit thread six months back, Wick estimated that all the outlay for these renovations and equipment runs into the “multi-hundred-thousands” of dollars. He is resolutely vague on the exact numbers at the request of his investor, who is also resolutely anonymous. I caught myself wondering how some long-haired jeans-and-flip flop guy my own age got someone to stake him a “multi-hundred-thousand” dollars for a business unproven at this scale, but then I remembered where exactly I lived and that most people here spend their time doing things other than surfing, smoking weed and writing for the alt weekly. (Maybe I chose the wrong “career” path? Nah. But I digress.)

A screenshot of League of Legends, a very popular e-Sports title.

AFK had a soft open at the end of March, so I showed up on a recent Friday with a couple of nerd friends in tow, to find a line for the host stand and the bodies two deep at the bar. Our enthusiastic pony-tailed host explained how things worked, with any food or drink purchase coming with two hours of game time on an open console, something hard to find on a Friday night. We got a table towards the back windows of the restaurant, looking on to a patio full of people who showed no signs of leaving during our visit. Surprisingly, the ratio of men to women was pretty good, which for nightlife in San Jose means about 10 to 1. Fantastic.

Our server was a pro, writing nothing down and getting everything exactly right, though it took about 20 minutes for the drinks and another 15 or so for the food. But really, if you go to a yet-to-be-opened restaurant at 7pm on a Friday and expect the best service of your life, you should be shot in the street and charged an automatic 25 percent gratuity on the cost of the bullet. (I’m not at all bitter about my time in the restaurant industry, no way pal).

To drink we ordered various game themed cocktails: the Companion Cube ($12), a gin, raspberry and egg white mixture served in a fancy little coupe glass; the Whispy Woods ($9) featuring bourbon and apple juice (the best of the bunch); and Tortimer’s Mai Tai ($11), made with Don Q and Ron Zacapa rums.

“At first I wanted crazy gamer cocktails,” Wick tells me later, bright neon concoctions reminiscent of gamers’ energy drinks, but David Nepov, president of the United States Bartenders’ Guild and creator of AFK’s bar program, steered him in a more craft cocktail direction. Wick says singlebarrel is his favorite bar in San Jose, so he was happy to go that way, but although most of the cocktails float around the singlebarrel pricepoint, they didn’t measure up to singlebarrel quality. They certainly get points for daring ingredients though: Walnut bitters? Hell yeah.

The food was similarly above the average bar fare, but maybe a bit pricey for the quality: we got the buffalo wings ($12), the mac and cheese ($7), the chicken walnut salad ($14), and some french fries ($3). We joked they should have added gourmet bagel bites to the menu, and apparently that idea was indeed floated during the menu planning stages, though scrapped due to the high heat of the woodfired pizza oven AFK inherited when it moved into the former home of the Los Gatos Brewing Company.

Of course we wanted to jump on a few games during our stay, but the consoles were definitely in high demand, especially those playing Super Smash Bros., one of which sat next to our table. Memorably, we watched intense and repeated matches between players named “Hodor,” “Poop,” “D” and “Nojohns.” The story behind the lack of johns was never discovered, but we did manage to snag a Super Nintendo for a round of Super Mario Kart, which, compared to Mario Kart 64, is really goddamn hard. A staff member walked by, telling us “I’m gonna put Streetfighter in when you guys are done.”

Falcon Punch! Get’s ‘em every time.

Downtown restaurant spaces this big haven’t had the best run recently, with Los Gatos Brewing Company leaving, plus P.F. Chang’s going out of business and its replacement M Lounge already struggling with accusations of wage theft. But AFK has something else going for it.

Originally, Wick tells me me, the idea for AFK was “A culmination of a lot of things, including living in the dorms, especially having the community of gamers who would take over the common room and just LAN up and hang out. Even though we could do the same exact thing together with the same people from our rooms, we’d all rather go into the main room and play side by side.” If AFK can give gamers a real life manifestation of the community they already have online, then they’re not going anywhere any time soon.

For tickets to the AFK Gamer Lounge’s grand opening party, click here.