Soundtrack available for download

When we decided to make a PICO-8 game based on Stand By Me, one element I was most excited about was making sure we could include some chiptune covers of the iconic film soundtrack. The question was which song to include – space in a PICO-8 cart is extremely limited, and there were so many fun options to choose from! I knew early on that we’d be leaning heavily on PX9 compression to pack as much of Donald’s pixel art into the game as possible, and I dared to hope that maybe I could leverage that same technique to squeeze more than the usual amount of music. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the tunes justice myself, as much as I would’ve loved to try. But I do know a bunch of amazing musicians, and figured they might enjoy taking a crack at the challenge as well. So I Tom Sawyer’d it up, had some folks express interest, and before I knew it I had submissions covering the movie’s entire soundtrack – well over 17 minutes of music! All I had to do was make it fit.

The final compressed version of all 12 songs is 6018 bytes of data in the cart. For comparison, 6018 bytes gives you around 34 milliseconds of uncompressed digital audio, so by my estimation we’ve compressed it at a ratio of over 31,000:1.

To celebrate, here’s the soundtrack in downloadable form, dumped directly from the cartridge and compressed to MP3s (which are still nearly 5000x larger than the source data in the cart). I’ve taken the liberty of including an extended version of Ryan Ike’s “Mr. Lee” cover, which was the one track I had to trim down to fit into the cart. You all deserve to hear the full version; it’s a total bop.

Let me take this opportunity to once again thank all the musicians who contributed to this project. Thank you Ryan, Ben, Elora, and Juho! Believe it or not, I don’t think any of them had used PICO-8 before I approached them for submissions in early November; isn’t that wild?