Kale in Dinoland Soundtrack, Luming Hao, 2012
How to stand out from the deluge of retro-inspired indie games that have flooded mobile devices and other platforms? Game developer The Rotting Cartridge went with an intriguing, if cheeky idea. Just pretend that your new game is a port of a forgotten Game Boy title released in 1992. Of course, Kale in Dinoland was no lost classic from the olden days of gaming. Instead, it was simply a new 2D platformer, clad in those monochrome graphics that millions of gamers will fondly remember.
Part of that nostalgia-inducing design was of course an appropriately vintage-sounding score, created by Luming Hao. A friend of the game’s developers, Hao wrote the score on popular tracker software LSDj. At the time of writing the Kale in Dinoland soundtrack, Hao studied Computer Science and Music Composition at Lehigh University. That combination of technical and artistic skills would seem to make him a great candidate to pen a chiptunes score.