Video Computer System

A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I’d reach way back into the archives (anybody still hanging around who was reading this site in 2000?) and dig out an old favorite.

Behold, “Video Computer System” by Brazil’s own Golden Shower. (Don’t blame me — I didn’t name the band.) One of the first chiptunes tracks to really take off online, the song was pretty good on its own merits, but was bolstered immeasurably by having a flawlessly-executed montage of Atari imagery as its accompanying video.

Delightfully, after nearly a decade, the original video is still online. It seems, though, that the quality of those old quicktimes clips is a little bit lower than what used to be downloadable from the site ages ago, so I’ve uploaded a higher-resolution copy of the video to YouTube and embedded it here. The original credits for the film are still online, listing Carlos B�la, Guilherme Marcondes, Mateus de Paula Santos and Mario Sader as the creators of the clip, for which they won an MTV Brazil VMA for Best Electronica Video. There’s a special credit for Alfredo Hisa, who created the video’s signature moment, a Matrix homage that is all the more impressive when you remember that the film that was being referenced was only about a year old at the time.

Golden Shower also offers a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes look at how the video was created. It’s worth a look just for the time capsule effect of seeing a bunch of old-school iMacs running OS 9 and now-vintage versions of applications. Most entertaining to me was the still-extant blog that the team kept, listing mentions of the video across the web.

There’s something to be said for web content that holds up well, even almost a decade later.