Title Added: God of Music
Finally, the air conditioner was installed. All those poor foreigners who came to visit would leave without ever experiencing this paradise. Of course, when I thought about how that Linux bastard used to spew nothing but venom, it felt pretty satisfying. He really should have gotten a taste of hellfire before he left. Anyway, my clothes would no longer end up drenched in sweat. On top of that, Eun-ji’s so-called “perfectly legitimate” no-bra look that she justified with the heat was finally over.
“Hiiing…”
For some reason, Eun-ji looked genuinely disappointed. I was starting to seriously worry she might actually have some exhibitionist tendencies.
By the time summer break had reached its midpoint, the twenty tracks for the rhythm game were complete. That was only possible because Eun-ji had claimed she worked better when I was right beside her, so we never went home and just kept grinding. It really did feel like my efficiency shot through the roof.
I couldn’t fill the entire soundtrack with trance. Still, half the songs were trance while the rest were hardcore techno, hardstyle, house, and similar genres, so it wasn’t exactly the peak of the trance era. For reference, I only included one track heavily laced with that insufferable “in-crowd” vibe. Personally I hate putting trendy songs in rhythm games, but Eun-ji put up such a fierce protest that I had no choice.
“So what do we do now?”
“We have to make the BGA.”
BGA. Short for Background Animation. It’s the video that usually plays beside the playfield where the notes fall. Of course the game works perfectly fine without it, since it has zero mechanical impact. But having one is still nice. Think of it like a music video for a song. Especially with rhythm game tracks, which often have almost no lyrics or just meaningless sampling, giving the song a visual narrative carries a lot of weight.
“First I need to call Ji-young over.”
The next day I dragged Yoo Ji-young, who had barely shown up at the PC bang lately, back with me.
“The motion graphics part you mentioned… I think I can handle it somehow. In the end it’s just placing a bunch of shapes and moving them around, so it’s basically just tedious labor. I should be able to manage…”
Of course, Ji-young would live to regret those words for a very long time.
“But actual animation is going to be tough… You seem to want it moving as smoothly as American cartoons, and even with your help, making even one of those BGA things would probably take me until next semester’s midterms.”
“No, that’s not what I’m asking for.”
The core idea was to use multiple separate images to create an effect similar to animation. In fact, that was how most BGAs worked in my original world. There were quite a few that used real animation or 3D graphics, but the majority relied on this technique.
In other words, you split up all the character, background, and effect assets, then use multiple layers. Effects go on the topmost layer, the character on the one behind it, and you simply move the position of each individual image. The result is the illusion that the pictures are moving like a video. That was the essence of BGA.
Which raised an interesting question. Why did modern BGAs and 90s BGAs feel so different even when the fundamental technique was the same? Why did modern ones feel more refined and clean?
There were many reasons—shifting art trends and so on—but the biggest factor was probably color expression. It’s easy to understand if you think about adding color filters in Photoshop. The washed-out, faded look of old digital art comes from exactly that limitation.
So was there a solution in this current situation? No. Or rather, I was in the middle of creating one.
Couldn’t you just add color filters to Photoshop or make an extension? Here’s the thing: Adobe is very different in this world. After they released PDF like some kind of divine revelation, they hadn’t had any major breakthroughs since. The WWW had developed far too quickly—almost as if someone had intervened—and as a result Adobe had been reduced to a company obsessed with web scripting and file-size optimization.
They weren’t even thinking about expanding into photo or video editing like they had in my original timeline. All that messing around with money in the original world had finally come back to bite them. Not my problem, though.
In any case, Photoshop? Flash? None of that existed here. I had to make it all myself.
There was simply too much work. The tiny snowball I had thrown into the air had grown into massive hailstones the size of cannonballs inside the clouds, smashing into people’s heads and replacing everything that should have come later with synaptic bundles floating in brain soup. A string of catastrophes kept unfolding.
Another example: as if someone really had intervened, the open-source camp represented by Linux had gained overwhelming momentum. While the pioneer of that stereotypical engineering fashion was gone, the company with the bitten-apple logo couldn’t maintain its closed ecosystem and had completely collapsed. That was probably the biggest change.
Of course, they had it coming. They had relied solely on their first-mover market share, created their own ecosystem and proprietary standards, and it had actually worked—turning them into nothing more than neighborhood thugs collecting protection money. They were simply paying the karmic price of the original world…
Huh. Maybe it really wasn’t my fault? When I thought about it that way, they were so fragile they would have died from a single pebble I tossed. Maybe it was just natural selection.
Anyway, back to the main topic.
I had managed to complete a version of Photoshop that ran surprisingly well even on the PC bang computers and produced output that was, by my standards, at least somewhat acceptable. Thankfully Ji-young already owned a drawing tablet.
Even I had to admit my productivity had transcended human limits. Who on earth could compose music, code a rhythm game, and code Photoshop simultaneously, making measurable progress in mere months?
Was Yoon I-seo—wait, she—a god? Even I thought so. My skills hadn’t simply improved; they had evolved compared to my original world. So a harsh environment really does make people stronger? The 90s really were a era where only the strong survived. To survive, you had to become strong!
Of course, Ji-young was dying inside.
‘What the hell is she? How can she just create everything that’s needed?’
Although she knew nothing about programming, even Ji-young could tell that my track record was completely insane.
‘Still… it’s not that I hate it. Even when she works me this hard, I don’t actually mind…’
She had unknowingly put on the thickest pair of rose-colored glasses, so she let it slide.
That night as well, the lights in the KIN PC bang (tentative name) stayed on late.
“I-seo-mong~”
“Here, you use this brush like you’re strumming a guitar—stroke it like this. Using it for line-based shading by adjusting the thickness like this works pretty well too.”
I had sent Eun-ji home and was now teaching Ji-young. At this rate I could probably open my own drawing classes later.
The rhythm game coding had made huge strides while working with Linux, so after making the club members grind just a little, it was finished. All that remained was the BGA and the actual hardware cabinet.
For Tetris we had recycled a broken two-player Galaga machine, but this time the situation was different. We had to build the cabinet ourselves.
“Yes, that’s how it turned out.”
“Programming’s done, so now hardware is the problem.”
“…Is there anyone here who’s ever used a saw before?”
“A saw?”
1. Acquire plywood.
2. Draw guidelines and cut the wood with a saw according to the blueprint.
3. Assemble according to instructions, then paint with spray paint.
4. Install buttons, PCB, and display purchased from Yongsan.
Fortunately we finished the whole thing in two weeks. All thanks to my excellent blueprints. Ahem.
It wasn’t exactly easy, of course. Connecting the circuits turned out to be harder than expected. After barely finishing, the machine would sometimes just swallow coins without doing anything, or the display would suddenly cut out. Every time that happened, I felt like my soul was being switched off too.
If I hadn’t dumped all the soldering work onto my senior’s mechanical engineering connections, it probably would have taken a month instead of two weeks.
Ji-young and I pulled all-nighters and somehow managed to create the BGA as well. I had thought there wouldn’t be any physical toll, but once we finished, an overwhelming wave of lactic-acid fatigue and total exhaustion crashed over me. At this rate I was going to die from overwork again, so I decided to take it easy for a while.
And so the rhythm game was finally complete…
“So what are you going to call it?”
Ah. I hadn’t thought about that at all.
I just stole the name from something that existed in my original world…
As soon as class ended that day, a certain male student headed straight for the arcade like always. He had come to play Tetris as usual, but the place was packed. There were so many people it was hard to even get inside.
From deeper within the unusually crowded arcade, music fundamentally different from Tetris’s cheerful electronic beeps was flowing out. It resembled Seo Taiji’s style but had no lyrics, and the music itself felt entirely new.
Drawn by that strange, almost magical sound, the young man squeezed his way into the packed arcade. The moment the door closed behind him, addictive electronic tones blended with piano crashed into his ears. By the final section, a frenzy of insane electronic sounds had sent him into a complete trance.
One song ended. The next began.
“Blue… White?”
Murmurs rose from inside. But the young man, still lost in the lingering aftertaste of the previous tracks, didn’t quite catch it. A new melody arrived just as the previous one began to fade. It started with a bright, uplifting atmosphere before suddenly calming, then emotional string sounds tugged at his heart.
He forgot what he had even come to do and simply stood there listening to the music. Like everyone else already waiting their turn, he no longer found waiting boring at all.
He had spent his life buried in studying with no real hobbies to speak of. That day, he finally found one.