Green Day is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its seminal punk album Dookie by re-releasing tracks, although not in the way you’d think.
The band has partnered with Los Angeles-based art studio Brain for Dookie Demastered, which takes tracks you love and puts them on retro, sometimes completely inaccessible and unplayable, objects. Since this is the Tech Reader gaming section, we’re going to talk about how they put Welcome to Paradise on a Game Boy cartridge.
This means you can put this Game Pak cartridge into a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance (or an Analogue Pocket), and it’ll play all four minutes of the song. There’s also a bit of cover art that’ll display on the screen. And that’s kind of it! It costs $39.
Or rather, it’ll cost that much if you win the raffle. Fans interested in any of the products, which also include Burnout on a player piano roll ($49), Having a Blast on a floppy disk ($19), and Basket Case on a Big Mouth Billie Bass ($79), will enter a drawing for each and will get charged if they win. Each item is in short supply, so only 25 people will be able to buy a copy of the cartridge, for example.
The official site says that Dookie Demastered is an “unparalleled” listening experience, “sacrificing not only sonic quality, but also convenience, and occasionally entire verses.” However, the 8-bit chiptune version of Welcome to Paradise sample on the cartridge’s product page actually sounds exactly as it should. I’d say it’s like a very expensive HitClip (kids, look it up), if there wasn’t already an expensive HitClip already on the track list.
I don’t know if the cartridge is worth $39, but if you have the money and want a delightfully pointless piece of media, you have until 11 a.m. PT on October 11 to enter any of the drawings.
