For six years, Kevin Martinez slaved over his Nintendo Entertainment System and Gameboy. Chopping up the buzzes, bleeps and bloops, and painstakingly pasting them together with crunchy explosions, cooing laser beam blasts and sawtooth synths until he had something entirely new.

But by 2006, Martinez was feeling that the scene he loved—“chiptune,” as it is commonly called—was drying up. So, in the same way he had compiled his collages of 8-bit sound, he pieced together a collection of like-minded musicians and bands for his very own, two-day chiptune festival. He called it “Frequency.”

“The first Frequency was a joke,” says Martinez, who performs under the moniker Wizwars. “The first night had 15 paying customers. The second had 20. I did it in a little art space—a week later it got shut down because one of the people living there was selling drugs.”

While the first Frequency—or Freq.Fest, as it has come to be known—didn’t sell many tickets, one of the attendees, Jesse Avila, saw great potential in Martinez’s concept.

Avila and Martinez hit it off immediately, and decided to work together on the second Frequency, which they held in January 2013. The second time around Freq.Fest drew 120 people each night. The pair also formed 8BitLA, a collective of artists and musicians focused on producing chiptune music, pixelart and other creative 8-bit endeavors. They regularly organize chip shows and other events under the umbrella of the broader 8-bit scene.

This Friday and Saturday Avila and Martinez bring Freq.Fest to Northern California. Co-sponsored by their sister organization, 8BitSF, the event will be held at Art Boutiki.

The chip scene in general has evolved a lot over the past decade. Most of the chip musicians started out playing electronic music which relied heavily on Gameboys as the primary instrument, Martinez’s band, The Kevin Gnartinez Band, included. Now many groups within the chiptune scene have expanded their sounds significantly—a fact made apparent by Freq.Fest’s lineup: The Kevin Gnartinez band mixes chip with pop-punk; Curious Quail plays indie-folk with subtle 8-bit flourishes; and San Francisco’s Crashfaster are essentially industrial rock with just a hint of the chip sound.

“You find a bunch of bands that are not stylistically or musically similar at all, but we all have something in common,” Martinez says. “I think there’s something for everyone, and Frequency celebrates the diversity of what chiptune can be.”

Freq.Fest.Norcal will be held this weekend, Sept. 11-12, at the SLG Art Boutiki.

Crashfaster’s performance Saturday at Rockage 2.0, alongside Slime Girls, Bit Brigade, Minibosses and more, was an unexpected surprise. Morgan Tucker has a deep, smooth voice in conversation but on stage he uses a Gameboy, NES, C64 and a Vocoder to manipulate his vocals into a gritty female robot effect.

Tucker started Crashfaster as a solo project before bringing in Keiko Takamura, Devin Nixon and Ryan Case to form the chiptune band. When Tucker went on tour with the Glowing Stars almost two years ago he was inspired by the richness of incorporating 8bit loops and effects with additional vocals, guitars and drums.  Nixon first learned about chiptune through Lizzie Cuevas [The Glowing Stars], then joined Crashfaster and experimented with circuit bending, Gameboy modding and Little Sound DJ on his own.

The band’s name came to Tucker when he worked at a tech company, using Microsoft Visual Studio. “It was prone to both random and predictable crashes, some of which would hang the entire system for minutes at time,” explains Tucker. “Often I’d scream at my computer ‘crash faster!’ It just kind of stuck after that.”

Tucker played countless games on his NES and Gameboy in his youth and he especially loved tinkering with vintage video games and dabbing in circuit bending to create new sounds long before he realized that there were small communities for chiptune production. “[They were] making music with the ‘actual’ vintage hardware I was aping,” Tucker says. “They called their craft ‘chiptune’ or ‘chip music.’ I was instantly obsessed, and I’ve never looked back.”

Slowly crashfaster is growing their Bay Area chiptune presence through their online community, 8bitSF, a website and Facebook page dedicated to sharing news on chiptune shows and band developments.

Crashfaster remains busy writing music while helping to grow the Bay Area chiptune community. The band releases a split 7-inch vinyl with the the Glowing Stars on Feb. 14.

Just last week, I was at a bar ordering a drink, and when the bartender turned around to set it down on the counter, I saw that he had a tattoo covering his entire inside forearm recreating a screen from the old Donkey Kong arcade game. For some reason, the first thing out of my mouth was the dumbest question I could have asked: “Have you seen The King of Kong?

He looked at me like I was nuts, and said “Do you think I’d have this tattoo on my arm and not have seen The King of Kong?”

Luckily, this inauspicious opening did not keep us from an in-depth discussion of the finer points of the cult-favorite 2007 documentary, which has left many a viewer—even ones who never play video games—saying to themselves, “I can’t believe this movie is making me care about Donkey Kong.” You may be thinking right now, “Oh, that would never happen to me,” but once you start following the movie’s dramatic real-life fight over the world high score for Donkey Kong, you’ll be hooked.

The movie is also somewhat controversial, generating endless debate online about how it goes to great lengths to make its main subject Steve Wiebe seem like the earnest Everyman hero, and uses creative editing to make longtime arcade-culture celebrity Billy Mitchell look like a mustache-twirling villain.

One person who can definitively speak to some of the movie’s issues will be at the Calfornia Extreme Video Game Expo at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara tonight at 6pm, when Walter Day, seen in the film as the referee who tries to reign in all this high-score chaos, will be interviewed and take questions.

CAX, as it’s been known to South Bay fans for 16 years now, is a celebration of retro arcade-game and pinball culture, one of the most respected in the country. It runs Saturday and Sunday this weekend, beginning at 11am both days. The admission charge gets video-game lovers in to play dozens of arcade games and pinball games for free, as well as participate in tournaments and sit in on panel discussions. Attendees can play, for instance, not only the original Donkey Kong arcade game, but Donkey Kong II: Jumpman Returns, Donkey Kong Jr., and Donkey Kong 3. The long list of other games runs from Arkanoid to Zookeeper.

A more recent addition is live music on Saturday nights, which this year is presented by Rockage, the festival which had its debut this year as sort of the underground, more console-friendly version of CAX, and will return with Rockage 2.0 next February.

This year’s music is headlined by two top acts from the Bay Area’s video-game-inspired chiptune scene: Crashfaster and the Glowing Stars. Other performers run the gamut from chip to indescribable: Doctor Popular, Hello The Future, Cartoon Violence, Slime Girls, Gnarboots and DJ Coco.

Music starts at 7pm. For ticket info, go here.

Many people would assume that any festival promising to combine old-school video games with experimental electronic music has one main target audience: nerds. Also, geeks. Personally, I was betting on plenty of hipster crossover, as well. But I was genuinely surprised at the diverse crowd that the new Rockage festival drew to downtown San Jose over the weekend.

Most of the arcade and pinball games assembled on the floor of the San Jose Woman’s Club for Rockage came out before 1985, so I wasn’t expecting so many teens and 20-somethings who hadn’t gotten around to being born when arcades were cool. Nor did I expect so many girls, who weren’t known for hanging out in actual arcades back in the day (or kicking so much ass on the games, like the woman who took second in the Guitar Hero tournament). But there was a democratic, united feel to the whole event. It was more like how people wished arcades were—cool music playing, cool people hanging around—then how they actually were.

Speaking of the music, I most wanted to see the Glowing Stars. Rockage primarily showcased video-game-inspired chiptune music, and to me the thing about this duo of Lizzie Cuevas and Matthew Payne is that they really humanize the genre for people, and to my mind have the best chance of crossover success. It’s hard for a lot of people to wrap their minds around the chip sound, which generally features at least one Game Bay or other piece of video-game equipment being played as an instrument. Try to explain how 8-bit processors play a role and even a lot of the cool kids shut down.

But thanks to the Glowing Stars mixing of electronics with the traditional band setup—Cuevas plays guitar and sings, Payne drums and does some vocals in addition to his programming duties—I think they bring out what’s interesting and new about chiptune while still being accessible to the rock crowd. Their set was a crazy sonic assault, but also melodic and engaging. Cuevas’ lyrics (like “I swear I’m not a stalker/And I don’t need a doctor/To analyze what’s going through my head”) are funny and relatable, and they’re both great at connecting with the audience live.

For those interested in learning more about the ones and zeros of chiptune, there was a panel on Saturday, featuring Payne, Doctor Popular (who had played an iPhone for the last song in his set a little while earlier) and Morgan “Crashfaster” Tucker bringing their Game Boys on stage and actually showing how they do it.

Organizer Eric Fanali was happy about the festival’s first showing and has already announced that Rockage will return next year. Whether Rockage 2.0 will see highlights like the fully costumed Rocky Horror fans rolling around in the hair that had just been shaved off of Gnarboots during their set, Vic Ruggerio and Kepi Ghoulie combining their set times for an hour and a half of playing together, or a “Panic Park” tournament that actually drew blood remains to be seen.

With the first Rockage festival coming up this weekend, Grand Fanali Presents has released a trailer for the festival that gives the South Bay a first look at its retro-gaming-meets-electro-music style. Watch it below.

The all-ages festival, Saturday and Sunday at the San Jose Woman’s Club, will feature over 50 old-school arcade games on non-stop free play. But it also features nearly two dozen bands and DJs, who’ll perform throughout the festival both days. Some are indie rock acts, like Sacramento’s Tera Melos, Kepi Ghoulie and the Slackers’ Vic Ruggerio. But many play chiptune, the electronic-music subgenre that incorporates the 8-bit music of Game Boys and other gaming systems. The Bay Area has become a hotbed for chiptune—not too surprising since it spawned the video-game culture that chiptune idolizes—and some of the chip acts that will perform at Rockage include the Glowing Stars, A. Rival, Crashfaster, DJ Doctor Popular and more.

For those who’ve never heard chiptune, the trailer offers some quick flashes of what the music sounds like.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even this sampling, however, doesn’t give the full range of what chip music can be. The Glowing Stars, for instance, play guitars and drum on stage, along with a Game Boy—thanks to Lizzie Cuevas’ songwriting and Matthew Payne’s skill with arrangements, it basically sounds like indie-rock with a layer of Nintendo-type electronics. Crashfaster, on the other hand, makes sublime video-game-inspired synth soundscapes, although he recently added a full band to his live sets, as well. A. Rival’s most recent release was a drum-and-bass tribute to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Rockage runs from noon to 10:30pm Saturday and Sunday at the Woman’s Club in San Jose. Single-day tickets are $20 at the door; two-day passes, $30.