SimTunes

Last updated
SimTunes
SimTunes Coverart.png
Developer(s) Maxis
Publisher(s) Maxis
Producer(s) Michael Wyman
Designer(s) Toshio Iwai
Programmer(s) Heather Mace
Artist(s) Toshio Iwai
Composer(s) Jerry Martin (main theme and samples)
Toshio Iwai, Benimaru Itoh, UrumaDelvi, and others (included songs)
Series Sim
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows
Release 1996
Genre(s) Simulation
Mode(s) Single-player

SimTunes is a children's software toy designed by Toshio Iwai and released by Maxis in 1996. [1] It involves painting a picture using large pixels, where each color represents a musical note. The player places up to four different-colored Bugz, which represent musical instruments or vocal syllables, on this picture, and can change their starting directions and relative speeds. The Bugz crawl over the picture, playing notes corresponding with the colors; and they turn, move randomly, or jump in response to function symbols that can be added to the dots. [2]

SimTunes was originally developed in the early 1990s by Iwai as a game titled Sound Fantasy for the Super NES/Super Famicom. [1] Many of the ideas and elements in Sound Fantasy are present in SimTunes.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fantasy film</span> Film genre

Fantasy films are films that belong to the fantasy genre with fantastic themes, usually magic, supernatural events, mythology, folklore, or exotic fantasy worlds. The genre is considered a form of speculative fiction alongside science fiction films and horror films, although the genres do overlap. Fantasy films often have an element of magic, myth, wonder, escapism, and the extraordinary. Prevalent elements include fairies, angels, mermaids, witches, centaurs, monsters, wizards, unicorns, dragons, talking animals, ogres, elves, trolls, white magic, gnomes, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, dwarves, giants, goblins, wuxia, anthropomorphic or magical objects, prehistoric creatures, familiars, curses and other enchantments, worlds involving magic, and the Middle Ages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ocarina</span> Ancient wind musical instrument

The ocarina is a wind musical instrument; it is a type of vessel flute. Variations exist, but a typical ocarina is an enclosed space with four to twelve finger holes and a mouthpiece that projects from the body. It is traditionally made from clay or ceramic, but other materials are also used, such as plastic, wood, glass, metal, or bone.

<i>Miracle Piano Teaching System</i> 1990 video game

The Miracle Piano Teaching System is educational software which uses a MIDI keyboard to teach how to play the piano. It was published in 1990 by The Software Toolworks for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Macintosh, Amiga, Sega Genesis, and MS-DOS compatible operating systems.

A scorewriter, or music notation program is software for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and produce high-quality printed results.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EyeToy</span> Webcam for the PlayStation 2

The EyeToy is a color webcam for use with the PlayStation 2. Supported games use computer vision and gesture recognition to process images taken by the EyeToy. This allows players to interact with the games using motion, color detection, and also sound, through its built-in microphone. It was released in 2003.

<i>Mario Paint</i> 1992 video game

Mario Paint is a video game developed by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992. It is packaged with the SNES Mouse peripheral.

<i>SimTower</i> 1994 video game

SimTower: The Vertical Empire is a construction and management simulation video game developed by OpenBook Co., Ltd. and published by Maxis for the Microsoft Windows and Macintosh System 7 operating systems in November 1994. In Japan, it was published by OpenBook that same year and was later released for the Sega Saturn and 3DO in 1996. The game allows players to build and manage a tower and decide what facilities to place in it, in order to ultimately build a five-star tower. Random events take place during play, such as terrorist acts that the player must respond to immediately.

<i>Electroplankton</i> 2005 video game

Electroplankton is an interactive music video game developed by indieszero and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS handheld video game console. It was first released in Japan in 2005, and was later released in North America and Europe in 2006. This game allows the player to interact with animated plankton and create music through one of ten different plankton themed interfaces. The first edition of Electroplankton in Japan is bundled with a set of blue colored ear bud headphones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toshio Iwai</span> Japanese artist

Toshio Iwai is a Japanese interactive media and installation artist who has also created a number of commercial video games. In addition he has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Like Toy Soldiers</span> 2005 single by Eminem

"Like Toy Soldiers" is a song by American rapper Eminem, from his fifth album Encore (2004). The song received positive reviews from music critics, and peaked at number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100. Outside the United States, "Like Toy Soldiers" topped the charts in United Kingdom, and peaked within the top ten of the charts in 12 countries, including Australia, Denmark, Germany, and New Zealand. The song samples the 1989 song "Toy Soldiers" by Martika. It is the fourth single from the album. The single would appear on the Curtain Call: The Hits compilation released in 2005.

Final Fantasy VII is a role-playing video game developed by Square and published by Sony Computer Entertainment as the seventh installment in the Final Fantasy series. Released in 1997, the game sparked the release of a collection of media centered on the game entitled the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. The music of the Final Fantasy VII series includes not only the soundtrack to the original game and its associated albums, but also the soundtracks and music albums released for the other titles in the collection. The first album produced was Final Fantasy VII Original Soundtrack, a compilation of all the music in the game. It was released as a soundtrack album on four CDs by DigiCube in 1997. A selection of tracks from the album was released in the single-disc Reunion Tracks by DigiCube the same year. Piano Collections Final Fantasy VII, an album featuring piano arrangements of pieces from the soundtrack, was released in 2003 by DigiCube, and Square Enix began reprinting all three albums in 2004. To date, these are the only released albums based on the original game's soundtrack, and were solely composed by regular series composer Nobuo Uematsu; his role for the majority of subsequent albums has been filled by Masashi Hamauzu and Takeharu Ishimoto.

<i>Sound Fantasy</i> Video game

Sound Fantasy, titled Sound Factory during development, is an unreleased video game for the Super NES/Super Famicom. Designer Toshio Iwai was inspired by his earlier interactive installation art piece titled Music Insects, to develop a video game at Nintendo between 1993 and late 1994. The completed product was never released by Nintendo, and the game's key elements were later developed into Maxis's 1996 PC game SimTunes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yamaha Tenori-on</span> Electronic musical instrument

The Yamaha Tenori-on is an electronic musical instrument designed and created by the Japanese artist Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori of the Music and Human Interface Group at the Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology.

Tetsuya Shibata is a Japanese video game music composer and sound director. He is credited for over twenty musical scores produced for Capcom's video game releases including the Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry series, as well those in the Darkstalkers, Power Stone and Resident Evil Outbreak series. His later works with the company involved organizing orchestral recordings for Resident Evil 5 and Monster Hunter Tri. In 2009, Shibata left Capcom and began his own music studio, known as Unique Note, with colleague Yoshino Aoki.

I Spy is a children's book series with text written by Jean Marzollo, photographs by Walter Wick, and published by Scholastic Press. Each page contains a photo with objects in it, and the riddles accompanying the photo state which objects have to be found.

<i>Otocky</i> 1987 video game

Otocky (オトッキー) is a video game released in 1987 for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan. Developed by SEDIC and published by ASCII Corporation, the game was conceived and designed by Toshio Iwai. Natsuki Ozawa endorsed the game.

The music of the video game Final Fantasy IV was composed by regular series composer Nobuo Uematsu. The Final Fantasy IV Original Sound Version, a compilation of almost all of the music in the game, was released by Square Co./NTT Publishing, and subsequently re-released by NTT Publishing. It was released in North America by Tokyopop as Final Fantasy IV Official Soundtrack: Music from Final Fantasy Chronicles, with one additional track. It has since been re-released multiple times with slight changes as part of the Final Fantasy Finest Box and as Final Fantasy IV DS OST. An arranged album entitled Final Fantasy IV Celtic Moon, containing a selection of musical tracks from the game performed in the style of Celtic music by Máire Breatnach, was released by Square and later re-released by NTT Publishing. Additionally, a collection of piano arrangements composed by Nobuo Uematsu and played by Toshiyuki Mori titled Piano Collections Final Fantasy IV was released by NTT Publishing.

Celemony Software GmbH is a German musical software company that specializes in digital audio pitch correction software. It produces Melodyne, a popular audio pitch modification tool similar to Auto-Tune, although the program itself is a manual tuning software.

<i>Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown</i> 1964 soundtrack album by Vince Guaraldi

Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown is the sixth studio album by American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi, released in the U.S. by Fantasy Records in December 1964. It is the soundtrack to the unreleased television documentary film entitled A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

References

  1. 1 2 "Pre-Cinema Toys Inspire Multimedia Artist Toshio Iwa" . Retrieved 2006-09-25.
  2. "SuperKids Software Review of SimTunes" . Retrieved 2006-09-25.