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.

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.

Eric Fanali doesn’t want you to go to San Francisco. The man behind the scenes of many downtown music events, from no-cover Blank Club concerts on Wednesday nights to the SubZero Festival and shows throughout Silicon Valley, puts all of his resources into nurturing the local music scene and connecting fans. His most recent effort, Rockage 2.0, arrives this weekend and goes even further—linking not only music fans with each other but also connecting music fans with gamers and gamers with bands. It’s all one big, rocking family.

I met up with the Rockage founder and concert promoter on a busy afternoon at Philz in downtown San Jose. Fanali looks the part, with shaggy black hair, a Cardigan, skinny jeans and a quirky personality that belies his not-so-secret ambition.

Originally from Connecticut, Fanali moved here as a youngster and grew up in the area. In 1997, at the tender age of 16, he took it upon himself to organize and implement an all-ages ska show—because he wanted to go to an all-ages ska show.

Since then, his DIY production company, Grand Fanali Presents, has put on thousands of concerts at a clip of eight or nine per month, ranging from indie to hip-hop to the new Bay Area–bred genre of “chiptune,” which transforms vintage electronic devices like Game Boys into musical instruments.

“I’m not profiting from these,” Fanali says. “Basically any money that comes in goes to things like gas and copies.”
He really just wants to provide San Jose music fans with somewhere to go—himself included.

Major cities such as New York and San Francisco, because of their geographic location and cultural cohesiveness, have an easier time maintaining a healthy music scene, the kind where you see the same people at every show you attend.

This area, however, doesn’t have the luxury of quick subway rides and accessible popular concert venues.

“San Jose is so large; there are too many factions that don’t know about each other,” Fanali says. His goal is to plug all the bands, fans, gamers and artists into the same system, and he’s already made headway in crafting a collective musical identity.

“It’s been a South Bay love affair between Eric and the chip-music scene,” says Matt Payne, of the eponymous solo “chamber-chip-doom-folk” project Matthew Joseph Payne, who performed at Rockage last year. “He’s been amazing about importing all the S.F.-based chip artists to the San Jose area, and we love him for it.”

The idea for Rockage came to Fanali five years ago when he thought about combining two of his passions, music and video games. He spent the next few years recruiting artists, raising funds and checking out venues.

“I went to 50 to 60 churches, auditoriums, Knights of Columbus halls,” before settling on the San Jose Woman’s Club on 11th Street across from San Jose State University, he says.

Anyone that went to Rockage this past February knows that not only was it really fun, it was unlike anything San Jose has seen before—old School video arcade games and live music in one room all at the same time.

Fortunately, it wasn’t just a one-time thing and the event should only be better in 2012. Promoter Eric Fanali has confirmed the dates for an expanded, three-day Rockage 2013 for February 8-10, 2013. It’ll be at the San Jose Women’s Club again, but there’s no word on how many video games or bands will be at the event 2013.

Fanali will continue to make announcements about Rockage in the coming months. Bands should be announced in May and tickets will go on sale in June.

“If we roll out promo early, then we can brand the name Rockage and when it comes around next year people will know what it is,”  Fanali says. “I’m very excited for Feburary 2013 to come because of how awesome the first one was. That’s the real reason.”

Check back for more details soon.

Photos from the First Rockage Festival.

Andy Kuntz remembers when arcade games suddenly became the hottest nostalgia item in Silicon Valley. It was during the dotcom boom, when the coin-op craze was gone and seemingly forgotten, and home consoles already ruled the video-game industry.

Kuntz and his brother, Chris, were running T Minus One, a company that rents, sells and services arcade games and pinball machines around the Bay Area. They had seen their business model shift dramatically as interest in classic arcade games dwindled. But nobody had counted on the impact all those hours and quarters spent in arcades had made on the new tech workforce.

“These startup companies were just giving money away,” says Kuntz. “You had all these nerds who had grown up playing Ms. Pac Man, and now they had a ton of money to spend. All of a sudden they’re making $80,000, $90,000 a year, and they’ve got all this money to blow. They didn’t go buy sports cars. They bought games.”

Kuntz has long been bringing arcade games and pinball machines to California Extreme, the coin-op gaming convention now in its 16th year in Silicon Valley. And he will also be bringing games to Rockage, the first Bay Area festival to combine old-school gaming with chiptune, or chip music. This underground subculture born  from video-game nostalgia incorporates the sounds and themes from classic games, and is often played on actual video-game equipment, usually Game Boys.

Held at the Landmark Ballroom in San Jose Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 11-12, the event will feature 20 bands and 50 classic arcade games on nonstop free play, as well as 10 console setups.

The live music lineup combines indie-rock headliners like Tera Melos, Slackers’ lead singer Vic Ruggiero and Kepi Ghoulie with several acts that have come out of the Bay Area’s thriving chiptune scene.

“If I had to pick a spot for something like this, it would have to be Japan or here,” says Kuntz of Rockage. “This is where it all started. This is where Atari and all these companies were born.”