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Dev Diary

No Space for Music

When Bonkheads was originally created in 1996, it needed to ship on two 3 1/2” floppy disks (that’s a whopping 2.8 MB of total storage) and fit within 2 MB of ram. This meant that with a music budget of only around 128k (a typical modern mp3 is around 56 times this size), we needed to find a very creative way in which to deliver the sound track.

We decided to compose the Bonkheads’ theme from three separate chord samples, sequence them at runtime, and loop continuously. This meant that the primary challenge was to create something that would provide atmosphere and setting without driving players mad with repetition. After many, many iterations, we settled on a very simple bass line and chord strike to set the mood.

The Windows95 edition saw a slight reworking of these samples, adding in a bit more funk and a few additional instruments. And with the iOS release, a new and mellower reworking (because the original samples were missing at the time) was introduced.

As was quickly drawn to our attention, those who had already experienced Bonkheads with one particular version or another tended to want to stay with that, dare we say, groove. So we are very happy to announce that with the 1.0.5 version of Bonkheads, you can now choose your favorite Bonkheads’ groove.

And, since all modern mobile devices and platforms offer at least 64 times the amount of ram required for Bonkheads, we might finally get around to writing the complete opus. We promise though, we will leave an option for that as well.