While LVL Up undergoes construction, the newly minted LVL Uproar on First has been an excellent interim host for events like karaoke and live music. This Saturday, they cover it all in a layer of glitter as Drag Arcade takes over the brewery for a night of drag, dancing, performance and gaming that’s sure to jostle your joystick. Hosted by bewitching Bay Area drag queen Ava LaShay, and with booty-shaking beats provided by DJ Frank From Mars, Drag Arcade opens up a whole world of gaming-related drag puns and personae based around consoles like Killer Queen, Cruisin’ USA and, of course, Pole Position. Game on.

Drag Arcade
Sat, 7pm, $5
LVL Uproar, San Jose

When the house lights went down on San Jose’s Center for the Performing Arts on May 17, 1984, showgoers experienced “a tempestuous noise.” Thunder clapped. Lightning struck. And out on a raging sea, a lone ship made its way out towards a magical island.

On that May night, these initial stage directions from Shakespeare’s The Tempest were lavishly performed by the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, in an extravagant joint production staged by the San Jose Repertory Theatre. Not only was the symphony involved, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre contributed players as well, and funds for the night’s performance came from investment banking firm Merrill Lynch. Above the name “Shakespeare” on the marquee was the promise of a “Merrill Lynch Grand Performance.”

Yet, despite the glitz and glamor of this strangely feted Shakespearean performance, in hindsight, the most interesting thing about the night was the convergence of two of the production’s actors. In the role of the jester Trinculo was Charles Martinet, an actor who, a little over a decade later, would become the official voice of Mario in hundreds of video games from Nintendo. Playing Prince Ferdinand alongside him in the cast was the actor Michael Gough, who has likewise lent his voice work to hundreds of video games since the ‘90s.

That two of the most notable voice actors in the video game industry could be in the same San Jose Rep production together speaks clearly to the South Bay’s video game history. Too long overshadowed by the nearby giants up the peninsula and in San Francisco, San Jose and the South Bay have long played a role in nearly every part of the industry, from the programmers to the actors to the players themselves. 

In fact, just before Martinet and Gough performed Shakespeare together in San Jose, another man living just a few miles away almost sank the video game industry entirely—or so the legend goes.

PHONE HOME

Long before Super Mario Brothers, Minecraft and Fortnite, there was Computer Space, the first commercial arcade machine ever built. Loud and futuristic, 1971’s Computer Space tasked players with commanding a hurtling spaceship while avoiding aliens and enemy rockets—and it was manufactured in Mountain View by the tragically named Nutting Associates.

Though Computer Space was far from a runaway hit, the following year, the game’s creators formed a new company called Atari, and found their runaway hit with the table-tennis simulator Pong. The first cabinet of that game was beta tested by the public at 157 W. El Camino in Sunnyvale, current home of comedy club Rooster T. Feathers.

But in the years 1983-85, the video game industry went through an unprecedented crash, losing billions of dollars almost overnight. In Japan, this crash is known as “Atari Shock.” Though there were many factors at play at the time, the traditional narrative lays the blame for the industry crash on exactly one game: E.T.

“I did E.T. while I lived in Campbell,” says Howard Scott Warshaw, the game’s lone programmer.

As an official tie-in with the biggest movie of 1982, E.T. was set to be a smash hit. Instead, it was the exact opposite, confounding gamers with its opaque gameplay, confusing layout and constant onset of sudden death. Famously, Atari wound up burying a large quantity of unsold cartridges in the Alamogordo desert in New Mexico—along with other industrial waste.

In his recent memoir Once Upon Atari: How I Made History By Killing An Industry, Warshaw recalls how in July of 1982, Atari head Ray Kazar called and asked if he could turn in a completed E.T. video game by September 1st—a total development time of only five weeks. 

“Without missing a beat, I sa[id], ‘Absolutely I can,’” he writes.

Prior to E.T., Warshaw had programmed Atari’s official Raiders of the Lost Ark video game. Before that, the iconoclastic programmer had been assigned to make an Atari version of the arcade game Star Castle. Instead, he created a new one from scratch, a bizarre action game called Yar’s Revenge, in which players control humanoid flies called “Yars,” and attempt to chew up and spit out an evil alien ship.

“Yars is a really good window into my psyche,” Warshaw says. “Visually, audio-wise, all of these things, Yar’s Revenge is intrusive. It’s about doing something different and something that’s difficult to ignore. I wanted to do something that demanded people’s attention.”

Upon the success of his first two games, it seemed that E.T. was set to be Warshaw’s legacy—and in many ways it was. E.T. is regarded as one of the most consequential games of all time, not only nearly tanking an industry, but “practically set[ting] the standard that all video games based on movies will suck,” according to GamePro. 

Today, opinion has softened on that latter point, with many now saying the game’s impressionistic imagery and proto-open-world design were ahead of their time and technology. Warshaw, for his part, says that the impossible five week deadline accounts for many of the game’s, let’s say, quirks (for comparison, most other Atari games took at least six months to develop).

As for the industry crash of ‘83, Warshaw sees many factors at play bigger than one little game. Within Atari, there was dissension and mismanagement. And on a wider scale, there was the generally tumultuous early stage of the industry.

“To financiers and investors, it looked like a fad, and a lot of people on the investment side saw it as a fad,” Warshaw says. “But the people making video games knew there was no way that this was a fad. This was a new media.”

After leaving Atari, Warshaw never stopped engaging his creative impulses. He wrote a series of books on subjects ranging from college life to psychology to gaming, and in 2005 he made a documentary on San Francisco’s BDSM scene which has since been used in college sexuality courses. These days, he practices psychology, calling himself the Silicon Valley Psychologist. 

However, little compares to the strange few years he spent dedicating his life to video games—and then almost destroying them altogether.

“Atari was the fastest growing business in American history…and then became the fastest falling company in history,” he says. “It was like, ‘Let’s build the biggest balloon that goes up the fastest. It’ll go to a certain height and then it’ll pop.’ That was Atari.”

FRAT CRAFT

In January, former employees of Santa Monica game developer Activision/Blizzard filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging long-standing issues of gender-based discrimination, sexual harrassment and abuse at the gaming giant. 

The Activision/Blizzard suit paints a grim portrait of the gaming industry. In it, former employees describe an environment where harrassment and misogyny were common, and one developer’s room obtained the nickname the “Cosby Suite” for his habit of mistreating women. Said developer responded to the nickname by installing a portrait of the disgraced comedian/abuser in the room and regularly posing with it.

Sadly, this thread also connects back to the South Bay’s gaming history. Activation originally began as an Atari spinoff, created by a group of developers who all quit over lack of royalties and recognition. In the process, they created the first-ever third-party video game developer.

While all four of Activision’s founders left the company back in the 1980s, documentation of similar issues at Atari are not hard to find. Despite being at the top of the industry, Atari only had three women engineers developing cartridges, and only one working in the coin-op division. When, in 2018, the Game Developers Conference announced they would be honoring founder Nolan Bushnell with a Pioneer Award, numerous stories of sexual harrasment and discrimination at the company emerged, including explicit comments, literal objectification (shapely arcade machines were named after certain female employees) and attempts to persuade women employees into a hot tub.

In his memoir, Warshaw also recalls how Atari developers would often drive to Reno on what they called “Scumbagathons,” which were exactly what the name implies.

Now a psychologist, Warshaw says you can always find the mark of someone’s worldview in the art they create.  

“Everybody signs their work,” he says. “Everything that you look at that someone produced, it’s going to contain a lot of information about that person, if you know how to read it.” 

Perhaps it should be no mystery then why there have been such persistent issues of misogyny in gaming, as recently exemplified by the #GamerGate harassment campaign from 2013-14: if toxic males are creating the worlds young people are experiencing, and everyone signs their work, then those young people will likely experience the world through the eyes of a toxic male.

Thankfully, there have also always been great women working hard for gaming throughout the South Bay, including programmers, writers, artists, and every other part of the industry (personally, an aunt of mine was a developer for years at Sega, just up the peninsula).

On a more heartening note, Carol Shaw, one of Atari’s four women developers and the creator of the classic River Raid, gave an interview with Vintage Computing and Gaming in 2011. When asked if sexual harassment had been an issue during her time in the industry, she answered: “No, I never really ran into that. It didn’t seem to be a problem.”

VOCAL SUPPORT

Video games have come a long way since Atari, but one guy in particular has been jumping along from platform to platform for almost the entire ride: a little mustachioed plumber in overalls named Mario.

Within the world of video games, few voices are more famous than the sprightly yip, ya-hoo and here we go of Mario. Yet the origins of that voice have rarely been told. Though he is said to be from Brooklyn, and first came to life on a computer screen in Tokyo, surprisingly, Mario’s vocals were first performed right here in San Jose.

Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario since 1996’s Super Mario 64, was born in San Jose and spent his formative years in Cupertino. As he told Metro in 2018, he based his voice for the timeless hero on his performance of Gremio in a 1983 San Jose Repertory Theatre production of the Taming of Shrew.

But Martinet is far from the only video game voice to come from San Jose. Anyone who has picked up a controller, mouse—or even watched cartoons—in the last 35 years has likely heard the voice of Michael Gough.

“Stay a while and listen,” Gough intones in the voice of Diablo sorcerer Deckard Caine.

Over the last three decades, Gough has performed roles in more than 140 games, vocalizing in everything from Blizzard’s famous dungeon-crawling Diablo series to psychedelic new-wave nightmare Killer 7 to open-world fantasy epic Skyrim, in which he voiced 63 different characters, including the apocalyptic zealot Heimskr.

Gough’s most famous role, however, is something a little more green.

“One of the nice gigs I’ve had is that I was the official backup voice for Shrek,” he says.

At this point, Gough has voiced the inexplicably Scottish ogre in nearly every project that “Mike Myers wasn’t available to do or they couldn’t afford him or whatever,” including six different video games, advertisements for both McDonalds and Sierra Mist, and a Shrek themed attraction located along the River Thames in London. 

Gough got started acting on something of a whim, auditioning for a student one-act just before he graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in English.

“I had always enjoyed reading out loud, just kind of sitting around in my room doing voices. I thought it would be fun before I left school,” he says. “So I went and auditioned and this one gal picked me to be in her play. We’re actually still really good friends.”

Gough’s first major role as a voice actor was in the late ‘80s Winnie the Pooh cartoon, playing the hard-working, whistley-toothed Gopher. Gough describes voice acting—particularly for video games—as being like “vocal green screen acting.” 

“You kind of have to be a quick study,” he says. “Often, you’re just doing it yourself. Usually you’re not acting with anybody else. You’re given the context and then use your imagination. Hopefully you’re being guided well by the director.”

There was, however, that one time Gough got to work in person with another famous voice actor. 

Though he didn’t start acting until leaving the Bay Area for school in Santa Barbara, his first paid gig—the gig that would eventually get him into SAG—was that massive San Jose Repertory Theatre production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, alongside none other than the voice of Mario.

“This was long before either of us had any inkling of doing voice stuff for video games,” he says. “But we were in that show together.”

A review from the time published in the Mercury News describes the Rep’s Tempest as a qualified success. What complaints they have largely stem from how “many key elements” of the production were turned over to non-Rep workers, including the play’s director and main actor. However, the article does mention both Martinet and Gough for the strength of their performances: Martinet for his “funky, hilarious Trinculo,” and Gough for his “matinee idol” looks that “make the swooning with Mayock seem especially romantic.”

FAST AND PHILANTHROPIC

Watson Tungjunyatham stills remembers the first time he saw a MaiMai video game. At the time, he was at an arcade in Japan, where he was studying abroad. There, across the room, stood a large, glowing box with a circular screen that sort of looked like a washing machine. 

“It was such an eyesore because of how huge and flashy it was. I was like, ‘What is this game?’”

The game was MaiMai GReeN, the third in Sega’s rhythm series. In it, players slap a ring of buttons surrounding the circular screen to pop bubbles and stars and connect glowing trails from one side of the screen to the other—all to the beat of some of Sega’s most memorable songs.

Tungjunyatham was immediately drawn in, and not just because the game was “huge and flashy.” By that time, he was already well on his way to becoming a master of the rhythm game form. 

“I was really into rhythm games,” he says. “My friends all clearly knew that. They were like, ‘Oh, you’re the kid that can play DDR!’”

This past July, the young Sunnyvale-based software engineer also known by gamer tag Starrodkirby86 turned his rhythm game skills into an act of humanitarianism. In a performance lasting a little over an hour, Tungjunyatham helped raise $220,000 for Doctors Without Borders. The money was contributed by Twitch viewers excited to see him do what he does best: play MaiMai to near perfection.

Tungjunyatham’s performance came as part of the video game speedrunning festival Summer Games Done Quick. Held yearly over Twitch (and directed by a former San Jose resident), the event gathers video game fans and players together to experience some of the most incredible video game performances possible—all for charity. In total, this year’s event raised close to $3 million for Medicines San Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders. 

However, few performances were as impressive as Tungjunyatham’s. For it to even become available, viewers collectively contributed $120,000 during an earlier part of the festival. By the last song, the speed and precision at which the gamer’s hands were flying is difficult to believe. Between rounds, he paused to speak to the announcers and give his shoulders a break.

“It was only more recently in the past couple of years that I realized that MaiMai wasn’t just this kind of dance game, but instead more of a physically demanding game that actually has a really high skill ceiling that’s not easily perceived,” he says.

To help break through that ceiling, Tungyunyatham befriended the private owner of a MaiMai machine at a Fanime convention in San Jose. Before long, they were regularly hanging out in the garage, jamming along to Sega. 

“I made quick friends with this fellow, and I found that he lived about 5 minutes away from me. It was a delightful coincidence,” he says. “I got to come over a lot and actually practice the game and, I guess, kind of get really good at it.”

Whether programming them, acting in them or playing them to perfection, getting really good at video games is a thread that runs through the culture of the South Bay. 

“The Bay Area has a really good community of people who want to positively support each other,” Tungjunyatham says. “If it weren’t for these spaces and conventions like Fanime, I probably would have driven myself a little crazy while here in Silicon Valley.”

FOUND HOME

For the gaming community, the South Bay has always offered a distinct and robust homebase—the kind of place that provides community to players like Tungjunyatham, and allows future industry stars like Martinet and Gough to develop their chops. Warshaw, who went to school in New Orleans and spent eighteen years in New Jersey, says he felt it as soon as he set foot in the Valley.

“The first time I arrived, I had this feeling that I was home,” he says. “When I got off the plane and started walking toward the terminal, I had this overwhelming feeling of ‘This is my place. This is where I need to be.’”

Not that everyone agreed with him, after they heard him talk.

“But then when I’d meet people, the first thing they’d say to me is, ‘You’re from the East Coast, huh?’” 

Ever since 2016, when JVNA burst onto the EDM scene with a stirring and emotional cover of “Dearly Beloved” from PS2 classic Kingdom Hearts, the LA producer has been blurring the lines between dance music, video game culture and pure emotional outpouring. You don’t have to be a gamer to get caught up in these swelling pianos and sudden bass drops, but with covers of tracks from Maple Story and NieR:Automata (and Kingdom Hearts), it probably doesn’t hurt. The young producer and singer recently completed her highly anticipated first album, but first stops in Sunnyvale for a night of pure dance release.

JVNA
Fri, 10pm, $30
Pure Nightclub, Sunnyvale

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.

Every February for for the past three years, longtime local music promoter Eric Fanali has devoted all his energy to wrangling nerds—herding a large and disparate group of indie rockers, chiptune artists and video game fanatics into the same place for a weekend-long video game and music festival known as Rockage. His job description does not entail micromanaging what they do once they get there, however. Half the fun of Rockage comes from the chaotic and unexpected interactions that inevitably take place.

And besides, in many cases, Fanali says he just doesn’t want to know.

“I don’t want to be liable,” Fanali jokes, as he considers what the weirdo, anti-band duo Gnarboots might have in store for their Rockage 4.0 set. Last year it involved an Elvis impersonator and reams of toilet paper. This year, rumors abound, though no one really knows what’s going to happen—least of all the band, which consists of an iPod and two longtime musicians who intentionally don’t practice.

“We’re shaking you out of your band expectations,” says Aaron Carnes, one half of Gnarboots and Metro contributor. “It’s unusual and jarring in a fun way.”

It would seem that the Gnarboots philosophy lines up pretty neatly with Fanali’s. A spirit of spontaneity informs the planned (and unplanned) collaborations that result from cramming 42 bands full of talented and obsessive (often one and the same) folks into one room full of old-school arcade games and letting it rip.

Fanali recalls a scene from a previous year: local video-game-jazz-jammers Super Soul Bros. were backing rappers Boboso and Mega Ran when they suddenly broke into an impromptu cover of a song from the 1997 Playstation rhythm game, PaRappa the Rapper.

Not all of the groups have direct ties to video game music. Festival headliners, The Thermals, for one, are a Portland-based indie punk band with roots in the South Bay. The band is, however, super into retro arcade games. “Galaga is my favorite, I’ll never stop playing Galaga,” says singer and guitarist Hutch Harris, noting that bassist Kathy Foster likes Centipede and drummer Westin Glass has professed his love for Burger Time—an obscure 1982 arcade game based around assembling massive hamburgers.

And actually, The Thermals’ latest album, Desperate Ground, may have a deeper connection to retro arcade. “Not a plot, but this theme, this story running through Desperate Ground,” Harris says. “The story was this loner, lost in the woods, being hunted. Wes and I were playing so much Galaga when we were working on Desperate Ground, Galaga kind of fit into that theme. Like, someone who had gone rogue from the army was killing all alone. In Galaga, you don’t know who the hell you are.”

The Thermals have roots in the South Bay and love ‘Galaga.’

The other headliners, Bit Brigade and Minibosses, are direct video game music bands. Bit Brigade will be debuting their soundtrack for the original NES Metroid at Rockage.

The Minibosses were one of the first bands to seriously cover video game music, and have been building a cult following since they began playing NES covers in 1999. “They’re so good,” Fanali raves. “They don’t need to prove anything.” The band is planning a collaborative set with Gnarboots, entitled “Gnarbosses.”

Much of the rest of the line-up will be recognizable to local music fans: indie rockers Curious Quail, The Albert Square and Zen Zenith, chiptune acts Crashfaster, The Mineral Kingdom and Petriform, plus some out-of-towners like The Y Axes and Sacramento-based sister punk duo Dog Party.

Bands are pitching in to run parts of the event as well. Zen Zenith will be hosting the table top/board game area, in addition to running a live Dungeons and Dragons game. The Super Soul Bros. are managing one of the stages, on top of their four scheduled sets. “It’s a community where everyone joins in,” Fanali says.

Fanali, who’s been booking shows for the past 18 years in the Bay Area, has self-funded (and lost money on) Rockage each year. This year, a similar festival out of Maryland, MAGfest, is co-sponsoring the festival, hoping to gain a foothold for a West Coast version MAGWest. “I’d like to expand Rockage every year even with MagWEST around,” says Fanali. “But I don’t want it to be a giant 10,000-plus festival. I like to keep it more intimate where you have a chance to meet everybody. I like the opportunity to socially game with these people.”

Rockage 4.0 runs from Friday, Feb. 6 through Sunday, Feb. 8 at various venues around San Jose State University. More info.

Check out “Pillar of Salt” by The Thermals:

Silicon Valley pinball wizards and fans of classic arcade games gathered at Hyatt Regency Santa Clara for California Extreme 2013 to reunite with hard-to-find video games that, along with the pay phone, are becoming nearly extinct cultural artifacts from an era before Angry Birds and farming games took over.

Metro photographer Geoffery Smith II was their to catch the old-school gaming in all of its 16-bit glory.

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.

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.

Anyone who was disappointed when the Minibosses didn’t play their version of the Legend of Zelda theme at Subzero—hey, there are more of us than you think—can take some comfort in the knowledge that an entire show will be devoted to the themes from various games in the series when the “Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses” tour comes to the San Jose Civic on September 7.

A bit of explanation for the unitiatiated: Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda games have featured some of the best video game music of all time. Many of us can remember the spooky theme of the original echoing in our heads all day after being up all night trying to help Link fix that damn Triforce of Wisdom and hook up with the princess.

There are long, drawn out and sometimes heated debates across the Internet about which Zelda games have the best music, but here is the line-up of games touched on for this new four-movement symphony to be performed by a full orchestra: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Legend of Zelda: The Wind Walker, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Tickets go on sale Friday, June 15 at 10am, through Ticketmaster.