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Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureFebruary 8, 2022

AM is back and brighter than ever

Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Three’s old-but-new breakfast show AM returned to our screens this morning. Tara Ward set her alarm to watch. 

The show formerly known as The AM Show returned to Three this morning, with a brand new team in a brand new studio. Presenters Ryan Bridge, Melissa Chan-Green, Bernadine Oliver-Kerby and William Waiirua were fizzing with nerves, and Bernie reckoned none of them had slept due to the excitement. “I had to take a sleeping pill last night,” Ryan agreed. “This is not doctor’s advice,” said Melissa, and AM was off with a bang.

While Breakfast snazzed it up with their new fancy techno set, AM kept things real. The flash new desk was normal sized and the couch looked comfortable enough, but wrap on your sunglasses and slop on some sunscreen, because this studio is bright enough to burn. Blue and yellow colours everything from the walls to the coffee cups, but who doesn’t like sea and sunshine? Who doesn’t want a dazzling ride on AM’s colour wheel of life? Wake up, New Zealand, the news is on.

New roving weather reporter William Waiirua made his first live cross shortly after six o’clock, admitting he’d been up since two using the huge makeup kit the show gave him. This prompted the team to discuss the power of a good blow-dry, because Ryan is a late blow-dry convert. “The minute I got my hair blow-dried, I’m never going back,” he said. “You can blow-dry me all day long.”

Sadly, AM is only a three hour show, or three-and-a-half if you count AM Early, the 5.30am news bulletin with Bernadine. While Bernadine delivered the news and Ryan and Melissa discussed surf safety and pandemic preparedness, beautiful aerial photographs of New Zealand scenery floated slowly on the screens behind them. It was as if we were in space. We were orbiting the world of news, first stop Planet Sprinkle.

The story about a UK bakery being banned from using sprinkles may have broken in October last year, but AM knows sprinkles are timeless. Melissa interviewed Leeds baker Richard Myers – the self-declared “Pablo Escobar of sprinkles” – about the impact of sprinkle censorship on his business. Myers, a man of few words and even fewer sprinkles, only wanted his freedom back. “We stand with you,” Melissa told him, because nobody puts sprinkles in the corner and gets away with it.

Who says sprinkle chat is awkward? Not me, not AM, maybe Ryan Bridge. “I feel baked after that interview,” he said, before crossing to William, who was pointing a cordless drill at the camera and planting sage in someone’s backyard. William waxed lyrical about “the Earth’s girth”, a phrase you don’t hear early enough in the day at the best of times, before Ryan quizzed Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet about this week’s celebrity fashion statements. The segment gave off a late-90s Good Morning vibe, and all that was missing was someone faxing in to ask why we’re still publicly judging women for what they wear in the year of our Lorde 2022.

But amid the blow-drys and the bakeries, AM covered the important issues of the day. Covid-19 meant guests couldn’t come to the studio, so the power of the internet brought us a political panel discussing Labour’s win in the polls, an economist discussing the economy, and Nadia Lim persuading us to use lettuce leaves instead of burger buns. Even the prime minister checked in. “I’ve missed you, Ryan,” Jacinda Ardern said, but I don’t know if that was true. “We’ve missed you too, prime minister,” Ryan replied, but I don’t know if that was true, either.

Look, the news doesn’t lie, and AM wants to do us proud. “We’re going to bring you the best breakfast news out there,” Bridges promised at the top of the show. There may have been some awkward nerves, but there was also energy, colour and, most importantly, sprinkles. What more do you need from breakfast telly? Fax in your answers, we’ll read them after the break.

AM Early screens on Three each weekday at 5.30am, followed by AM at 6.00am


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What happens when music and gaming collide? A damn rad Ladyhawke game on the Game Boy, that’s what. (Image design: Tina Tiller)
What happens when music and gaming collide? A damn rad Ladyhawke game on the Game Boy, that’s what. (Image design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureFebruary 5, 2022

Why does Ladyhawke have her own Game Boy game?

What happens when music and gaming collide? A damn rad Ladyhawke game on the Game Boy, that’s what. (Image design: Tina Tiller)
What happens when music and gaming collide? A damn rad Ladyhawke game on the Game Boy, that’s what. (Image design: Tina Tiller)

Sam Brooks discovers how the New Zealand musician ended up releasing a game on everyone’s favourite 90s handheld console to support her latest album.

The opening moments of Time Flies: The Game involve a small 16-bit figure paddling across an ocean to land on an island. A small black cat informs you that you’ll have various tasks to complete, which include a memory puzzle inside a brain shaped like a house, cleaning a house and cooking a dinner for a mother figure, jumping on clouds to gain wisdom from a cat, and throwing an egg at a local hooligan. 

This all happens while music that sounds suspiciously like Ladyhawke’s 2021 album Time Flies chirps and squawks at you. It chirps and squawks because it’s soundtracking a Game Boy game. Yes, that’s right. Ladyhawke has her own Game Boy game, and it’s actually pretty rad.

It’s a move that makes sense for the New Zealand artist, who has been an avid, lifelong gamer – she recorded an episode of popular podcast The Spark Parade where she enthuses, at length, about The Last of Us. She’s also found success as a Twitch streamer, with nearly 3,000 followers on the platform, and has used it as a key promotional arm for her latest album.

But what the heck led to Ladyhawke – Pip Brown, as her friends know her – releasing a game for a console that hasn’t had a commercial release in 24 years? I spoke to the team behind the album, including Brown herself, to get the lowdown.

 

The bedroom from ‘My Delirium’ as seen in Time Flies: The Game.

Time Flies: The Game was born out of necessity, prompted by – what else? – the impact of the Covid pandemic. With the ability to tour pretty much gone, releasing a game would be a way to keep the album campaign and buzz going beyond its initial 2021 release. The challenge was then finding something that lined up with the Ladyhawke brand.

“This is the first album that BMG had worked with Pip on, and we went into it knowing about her love of gaming,” says Fuchsia Davidson, NZ marketing manager for BMG. “She’d never been that keen for social networks, but really found her voice on Twitch.” 

The team knew they really wanted to lean into that side of Brown’s life with this campaign. Initial discussions revolved around potentially getting vintage Game Boy games and turning them into some sort of accessory, but the idea was ultimately abandoned –  it turns out vintage cartridges are super expensive and gamers aren’t especially keen on seeing them destroyed.

Having found a company on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba that makes brand new Game Boy cartridges, the team got to work on making an entirely new game from scratch. Harry Billinge, a computer science student in Wellington and the brother of one of Davidson’s friends, was brought on to design and build the game itself. “I’m relatively new to making video games,” says Billinge, “but I’ve messed around a bit, and I thought it would be a good test to try and build some of that stuff.”

The brief was simple, but broad: Make a game related to the album using the Game Boy Studio framework. 

The LadyHawke game, complete with keychain (Image: Tina Tiller)

It was decided that every song on the album would have its own quest, challenge or mini-game. Billinge says the game took just over a month to make from start to finish, with a lot of back and forth between he and Davidson to make sure it stayed in line with the core concept.

The end result is surprisingly funny, an aspect that Billinge didn’t necessarily expect players to pick up on. “I like it when people actually laugh at the jokes I put in! When I was first showing my friends, they were playing it, and I realised that I can actually be a little funny sometimes.”

Billinge says he learnt pixel art as he went along, eventually making all the characters and tile sets by himself. “I definitely went for that Pokemon look,” he admits. “The Game Boy Studio encourages that format of game. You can do some other styles, which I dabbled with a little bit, but it definitely fits that top-down Pokemon style.”

While artist Diego Rago did some of the larger, more complex artwork, the rest of the game is all Billinge. 

Except of course, for the music.

For the Time Flies soundtrack, Davidson reached out to Jeremy Toy, one of the producers on the original album. As luck would have it, he’d already remixed two of her older songs – ‘Paris is Burning’ and ‘My Delirium’ – in a chiptune style, which he’d recorded  onto a cartridge and given to her (with an old school Game Boy) for her birthday. 

“Luckily I knew all the songs quite well from mixing the record,” Toy says. “So I chose the most memorable bits of the songs – the most hooky bits – and put them into the program.” Toy had made songs on Game Boys in the past, using tracking software; not surprisingly given its association with a console that’s close to 30 years old, creating music for the Game Boy is a very stripped-back process, Toy says.

“You only get a melody, a synth, and some drums to play with. I broke down six songs into those three elements. I picked all the bits that my son would sing of Pip’s songs because he knows all the songs off the record, and he’s really good at picking up melodies. 

“He would sing the guitar parts or the vocal or whatever – so I used whatever bits he was really into.” The results speak, or sing, for themselves. The catchiest bits of the songs get stuck into your brain while you’re completing each quest; I’ll have the chorus of ‘Time Flies’ in my head for a long time thanks to the lyric jumble attached to it.

All was going well, but there was just one problem: they hadn’t told Brown about it. .

The ‘Paris is Burning’ music video, as seen in Time Flies: The Game.

“Pip had no idea what was happening,” says Davidson. “She knew we were creating something that would be part of the campaign, and that there was a game involved, but that was it.” 

Still, the project didn’t come as a huge surprise to the musician, who’s been performing as Ladyhawke since 2007, and has released four albums under the moniker. The first inklings came when Toy started sending her chiptune versions of tracks from the album. 

“I thought it was a gimmick for something else, just some extra content. I had no idea they were actually trying to put it on a Game Boy cartridge,” she says.

The standalone-game idea was eventually pitched to Brown, and she was a big fan – especially when she saw a photo of one of the cartridges. “I couldn’t believe it. It would’ve blown eight-year-old me’s brain. What the hell? I have my own game!”

So what does she think of the finished product? She says she loves it, even if it’s harder than she expected. Despite being an avid and very experienced gamer, she says she hasn’t actually finished the game, having got stuck on one particularly difficult memory puzzle (full disclosure, I was stuck on it for a full 20 minutes too). She hasn’t even met Billinge, but is full of praise for his work on the game: “He’s really done the genre justice.”

Even though the game is part of the many-headed hydra that is music promotion, what excites Brown most is introducing her younger fans to this old format. “I’ve had all of these interactions with them through Twitch and they’re so interested in gaming. The way we’ve done this has introduced a lot of them to old school gaming, which a lot of them have never known about, so that’s exciting to me.”

Billinge echoes her sentiment of introducing people to something new, or something old. “I like the idea of people looking at this and thinking that they can make a game as well, using Game Boy Studio. I love the idea of a small community based around something retro: reviving Game Boys and using these tools that people built that are all open source and really, really easy to use. I love that – encouraging people to make that sort of thing.”

That sums up the best part of the game, the one that came up repeatedly in conversations around it: your character, the Pip Brown-esque avatar, falls down a massive pit, and ends up strolling down a seemingly endless street. While it happens, a familiar sound happens: A tinny, chiptune version of ‘Paris is Burning’. It’s a beautiful melange of eras: a throwback to the 80s referenced by the song, the 90s heyday of the Game Boy, the late aughts of the original song, and the interaction of the player experiencing it right now, in the present day. 

Time Flies, a Gameboy game (but also a game you can play on itchi.oo for free) is available now. Time Flies, the album, is available wherever you can stream music.

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