MIDI Week Singles: "Main Theme" - Dancing Plate (A26)

 

"Main Theme" from Dancing Plate on the Atari 2600 (1982/83*)
Composer: Unknown
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Zimag / Bit Corporation
Developer: Zimag

Not to be harsh, but this main (and only) theme from Dancing Plate really isn't a banger, and while fun, it doesn't really slap either, as the youth of yesteryear would say.  What it is, is another rare example of early video game music on a home console that wasn't known for having music at all.  The Atari 2600 only had two sound channels, meaning it could only produce two sounds at the same time, so having a monotone track dedicated to music and limiting yourself to only one sound-effect without distorting or even stopping the music was a choice that most developers made in favor of creating a musicless game; unless there was a short title screen ditty.

I've wracked my brain and various alleyways of the Internet to find out if this is an original song or not, as it seems to have hints of a folksong, but I couldn't find anything to that effect.  So the song might be an original specifically to the Dancing Plate version of the game (see next week?) or it could be a distorted version of a song in the 1982/83 public domain.  Either way, it's just another great example of early video game music, and I always think it's great to know where the media originated and how far we've come.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

The Years Go On

*I've seen that Dancing Plate has both a 1982 and a 1983 release year from different sources online, so I'm not 100% sure which is the exact year, so we'll just use both for now.