15 Feb 2013

Rooster Teeth just released a little tune we did back in the day for Grifball on iTunes!

For those of you who don't know, Grifball is an awesome sport in Halo that you should go play right now (it's on the Halo 4 and Halo Reach playlists.) It involves hammers, swords, a bomb, and the color orange, so it's pretty much perfect.

My love of Grifball started in 2007, when Burnie messaged me on Xbox Live and said "hey Nico come check this new Halo game we're trying out." It took about two rounds for me to "catch the disease," and this disease, Grifball, needed a song.

While working on the tune, I listened to a lot of 1970s TV sports show themes, but also wanted to use Taiko drums (like in Big Prize) because these huge Japanese drums captured the brutal, tribal aspect of the game, and sonically connected with the thunderous Gravity hammers in Halo 3 and Reach.

The tune didn't get finished until 2008, during a visit to the old Rooster Teeth offices on Congress. This was a very productive visit where a lot of Reconstruction was taking shape. When I wasn't distracted by the spectacular footage Burnie was capturing from Valhalla, I made some more tweaks to the song, adding the stacked thirds in the middle section, mostly to impress Matt, printed a mix, and then accidentally erased the entire project.

Anyway, thanks to Brandon (and Brian for the awesome art) our little Grifball ditty is now available at these fine places:

iTunes

Google Play

Amazon

A kind (or tortured) soul wrote a few words about it, which I'm sharing here because reading it makes me want to go play Grifball right now!

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME WANTON SADISM AND MORDANT RUMINATION ON THE EPHEMERAL NATURE OF EXISTENCE? Grifball, widely hailed as the only sport worth a damn, has a theme song that captures the heartwarming hilarity and stomach-churning slaughter that define the game.

HEAR the siren song of the horns calling you to greatness!

FEEL the drums hitting you like hammer blows to your sternum!

LOSE yourself in the roar of the crowd as your remains soar skyward during your final fleeting moments of existence!

Trocadero, the band that put the wang in the twang that accompanies episodes of Red vs Blue brings you the melody for the massacre that matters.