All the Cool Kids Are Listening to Phantasy Star Online Breakcore Mixes

push to talk #18 // feat. a musician making the future sound like the Dreamcast

If you wanna play Phantasy Star Online with the big boys you’re gonna need to gear up, buddy. Best get some QWERTY capabilities between those sticks.

2002 was a good year.

I'd come home from another grueling day of 5th grade, boot up my GameCube, and let the opening cutscene of Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II wash over me. 

I didn't have a modem adapter for my 'Cube, so I couldn't actually play PSO online. But no matter. Even offline, the game just felt so good to play. A big part its appeal was the unbelievably chill vibes of the PSO soundtrack, composed by Hideaki Kobayashi. 

Kobayashi's work has inspired plenty of people, including one music producer who—using the same equipment Kobayashi used on PSO—is producing incredible breakcore beats for a growing fanbase on YouTube. 

That story below. But first, this week's games industry news:

Scuttlebutt and Slackery

The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.

Rusty’s Retirement is an idle game that runs in the bottom 20% of your screen.

• Every Week, a New Indie Smash Hit - There’s been a lot of bad news hitting the AAA segment of the games industry recently, but it’s a different story for indie games on Steam. You know we’re in a golden age of indie games when tiny titles like idle farming game Rusty’s Retirement—shown above—are clearing 100,000 units sold in under a week. And games like this are coming out every few days! You can pick this one up for only $6.29. (Steam)

• Alan Wake 2 Still Isn’t Profitable - Remedy’s long-awaited sequel succeeded by most metrics. It was critically acclaimed and had sold over 1.3 million copies as of February. But, according to a new report it still hasn’t made a profit. This is coming after previous statements that it was Remedy’s “fastest-selling game so far.” A couple of things are going on here: dramatically rising development costs being one culprit. But the game’s also exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC due to Epic funding the game. (Tweak Town)

• Gray Zone Warfare Starts Strong, but Runs Hot - Just as Escape from Tarkov players declared war on its creators in reaction to a new $250 “pay-to-win” purchasable pack, would-be Tarkov competitor Gray Zone Warfare hit Steam in Early Access and immediately soared to over 60,000 concurrent players. The only problem: the game is taking a beating from Steam reviewers thanks to some performance issues. (PC Gamer)

• Game Recommendation: Another Crab’s Treasure - I don’t consider myself a huge fans of “Soulslikes,” but last week’s release of Aggro Crab’s second game is changing my mind. The game’s hilariously written, super polished, and features a bunch of juicy-feeling combat upgrade systems that have me totally hooked. It’s kind of like a challenging, grown-up 3D platformer? I’ve been playing it on my Steam Deck, and it runs great. Big vouch. (Steam)

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All the Cool Kids Are Listening to Phantasy Star Online Breakcore Mixes

YouTube's weirdly good for music discovery these days.

Part of the beauty of the 'Tube is that the uploaders are faster and more dedicated than copyright holders, so you can find high quality rips of soundtracks for just about any game ever made.

You're listening to some cooked Spotify "for you" playlist with the same 10 songs it serves you every day (sad!) while I'm out here jamming down to an 8-year-old fan upload of the entire Diddy Kong Racing OST. 

If you do this enough, eventually the YouTube algorithm will start to recommend new music that fits the vibe of late 90s and early 2000s video games. There's stuff like Pizza Hotline's 2022 album Level Select or, with over 2 millions views, this upload called Breakcore mix to dissociate.

I blasted that mix and others like it easily a dozen times through, and eventually realized that some of the coolest tracks were from Sewerslvt—by all accounts a genre-defining genius artist who has unfortunately stepped away from music production (at least for now). 

I really like the way one YouTube commenter summarized Sewerslvt’s sound:

Once you get into this stuff, you eventually find others like TOKYOPILL and MOTEL GHOUL and DXRKWRLD and a ton of other artists with all-caps names. If you’re into the impossible-to-properly-delineate Jungle / Breakcore / Drum-and-Bass space, you probably recognize these artists.

So one day, I was excited to find a totally new mix by an artist called Dusqk:

This whole thing is full of bangers. Track 4 in particular, Aquatic Heaven Simulator, just hits all the right buttons for me. Assuming this was another YouTube DJ combining the work of a bunch of different artists, I headed to the video description to see who was behind the mix.

But, turns out, it’s all the work of one guy. Per the description:

Wrote this album over the summer, heavily inspired by dreamcast/psx era dnb and breaks. Also inspired by early 2000's IDM. Used some old samplers and synths that were used to make [the] Phantasy Star Online OST back in the day. 

A few of the people in the YouTube comments had the same reaction as me:

Despite the speculation, Dusqk isn't famous—at least not yet. But he's also not a newcomer. 

The artist behind the handle is a 36-year-old guy named Chris who's spent two decades producing music. Five years ago, he says, he tried to give up music. He killed his long running project, MISFITCHRIS, and got a "real" job.

"I was trying to just do the 9-5 thing and lead a more traditional life," Dusqk tells me. "About three years into that I started realizing that wasn't going to work out... the pull of music started sucking me back in."

The core idea—a new identity focused on an imaginary video game character—came early on. 

"I decided the project would be about a central character, “Dusqk,” and I'd be building a world around her, making it more of a full on experience instead of just releasing albums," Dusqk says. "I was going to start completely from scratch and not let anyone know. When I came back to SoundCloud, I noticed it was pretty much dead, but saw that YouTube had all of these mixes popping off. So I decided I'd be using the mix format for Dusqk on YouTube and funneling listeners to other platforms."

The plan worked. With the success of Heaven/EXE, Dusqk formed a community in a Discord and found collaborators interested in the project. 

The second Dusqk release, an album called Gaia/RAE which was posted only two weeks ago, was created over a series of livestreamed sessions with that community—the "Dusqk Army." The album features a slick-looking Unreal Engine-powered "start screen" for an imaginary game:

This is next-level stuff—bordering on something like a concept album soundtrack for an game that doesn't (yet?) exist, and that vibe is intentional.

"We are almost looking at the project more from a perspective that a game dev team would," says Dusqk, "but we aren't creating a game! Just interactive experiences that encompass all art forms."

Read my full Q&A with Dusqk below:

PUSH TO TALK: Let's talk about the making of Heaven/EXE. You said explicitly you used "old samplers and synths that were used to make Phantasy Star Online OST." I was wondering if you could say more about that, what inspired it, your process, etc. 

DUSQK: Right. So for most of my composer/audio production journey I have worked inside of the box. Meaning using a PC, a DAW and VST's/audio plugins. This started getting really boring for me... I was losing the drive to compose, I also felt that certain sounds were just unobtainable. 

So when I quit and started working a traditional job, I had that extra income. When the drive to compose started seeping back into my life, one of the main central ideas in my head was to make a hybrid studio: Interface analog and hardware gear with the PC. So I started researching and slowly gathering the gear I'd want/need to do that. I acquired analog compressors and other audio processors so I could color the sound in ways I thought I'd like. I also stumbled across this old article when researching. In it, one of my favorite composers, Hideaki Kobayashi, straight up names off what his team used for my favorite game of all time, PSO.

So I bought a Korg TR Rack and Roland JV2080 and added them to my analog setup. These boxes are actually digital. They are romplers, basically audio workstations with a load of preset sounds that you can slightly edit. You can change the effects on the sound and also edit other minor parameters. To me they are essentially magic sound boxes, you just go through presets and find all these really unique sounds and a lot of times you remember them from games of your childhood. Romplers were used heavily in video games in the late 90s and 2000's. They still are but with the advent of products like "Kontakt", maybe not as heavily. 

Anyways, I started acquiring these old audio units but then also running them through my analog sound gear. It makes it sound even more authentic because you get the color of an analog mixing console. The game studios were also using that at the time—big mixing boards that you'd be running your sounds through. 

The whole process of using analog and hardware gear, which is the majority of what I use... is very magical. There is a childlike wonder of being able to move about your recording space, turning knobs, flipping switches and pressing buttons. I'm always adding to my setup as well. I'll be at work daydreaming about new gear!

PTT: Now it seems like you're sort of building a collaborative thing with the Dusqk Army, resulting in things like the insanely cool "start screen" for Gaia/RAE. How did that all come together? 

DUSQK: Yes! The Dusqk Army is our community, and I now exclusively produce music on stream. I didn't know if I would like live streaming, but once I did I was pretty much hooked. It's a magical thing to get suggestions and ideas from the community while I am working on music at home. It creates a deeper connection to the projects.

Team Dusqk is the group that works on the elements that show up on the YouTube channel. Right now that would be mostly myself (music) and PendingReality (Unreal5). PendingReality creates the visual scenes in Unreal Engine and I handle the sound elements. We have weekly meetings and we discuss the overall direction of the project. 

Early on I decided that the project should not be focused on me as a composer but focused on a team, like a game dev team (Sonic Team comes to mind—haha). We are creating a story through our character Dusqk, and through the releases on YouTube we're giving people experiences that they can connect with emotionally. Essentiall,y we want Dusqk to be the superstar, sort of like a Final Fantasy character. 

We brought on MultiMicah for the latest project as well, he created the start menu text and animation. KEVLAR:ESTUDIO handles the graphic design you see on covers, the white haired girl etc. I'm excited because I also just reconnected with an old friend/mentor Neil Voss. 

He's been working in the creative field for a very long time on music, design and app development—basically an all around genius. He created some music for the N64 as well. He took me under his wing when I was a younger composer and kind of helped shape my production and composing skills, he also did the final edit on the Gaia/RAE cover.

Team Dusqk will be growing, it can be a revolving door for some members where they may work on a project but may not on another. Everyone on the core team has a shared vision, just like a game dev team. PendingReality has a whole world of his own in Unreal5. We have both merged our projects in a sense. 

PTT: I found out about you from the YouTube algorithm, basically—if you listen to enough Pizza Hotline and Sewerslvt you inevitably get served your work eventually, I think. What do you think about YouTube's place in the music scene right now?

DUSQK: I think Youtube has the best discovery algorithm at this time. It's the fairest. It seems to work purely off of the view count/duration people have viewed a YouTube video. I think it favors mixes because those keep people on the platform longer. I'd encourage any new artists to start using youtube over other platforms, it has basically filled the void that SoundCloud once filled. There is the added benefit of being able to create in depth visuals to whatever mix or product you create! Much love to YouTube. I think they are going in the right direction! 

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Sidebar: Pizza Hotline on Why ‘95–’02 Still Sounds Like the Future

Pizza Hotline is a rising star whose mixes and original albums consistently rack up hundreds of thousands of listens on YouTube. I asked him why so many commenters seem to think his music sounds futuristic, despite being obviously inspired by music that’s decades years old.

His explanation, which I found fascinating:

“When the PlayStation was released it was clear by the marketing campaigns that Sony was aiming at a much older demographic than SEGA and Nintendo. They wanted to appeal to club goers in their 20s with disposable income. So, they used edgy marketing with countercultural themes and futuristic games like Wipeout. Incorporating underground club music was key to this narrative.

”I once played at a gig with Jason Page, a remarkable producer responsible for the iconic PlayStation 1 demo disc music. He told me that Sony’s one criteria was that the music had to sound like The Prodigy, who were in their prime during this era. They were straddling the line between the underground and mainstream music scenes with a futuristic feeling to their music.

“Level Select works as my own interpretation of this formative part of video game music history and looking towards the future is one of the stand out aspects of that time.”

To put together mixes like the one above, Pizza Hotline digs through dozens of PS1 game soundtracks in search of underappreciated hits.

“Sometimes there will be a track that’s only 10 seconds long, so I'll make an extended edit or remix it to make it more substantial and fit into a mix,” he says. “The drum and bass & jungle you find in these games has a very specific flavor. It’s stylistically undercooked, and not terribly well produced, but that’s what I love most about it.”

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PTT: Any other artists out there you'd wanna shout out—maybe ones that fans of your music would like? 

DUSQK: You mentioned Pizza Hotline—I really enjoy what he's doing! His audio production is on a professional level and the work he's putting out just captures a vibe. Very talented artist. 

My other influences (aside from video game music) for the current project would probably be Elite Gymnastics and Doss. I also have started listening to this artist Nuphory lately. Actually I'm listening to one of her songs right now. She had stopped by one of the production streams and I was blown away when I pulled up her YouTube channel.

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That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go chug a gallon of Code Red Mountain Dew and blast Ridge Racer OSTs for 47 hours straight.

See you next Friday.