I don't know how many of you have heard about this little gem, and I recon there are even fewer who have actually tried it. Personally I got really excited when I found out that Toshio Iwai, the guy behind Electroplankton, was also responsible for this old (and since long forgotten) favourite of mine. You can imagine how I felt when I unexpectedly stumbled upon it at a local supermarket.
There are not a whole lot of information available on the Internet about this game, so I decided to make a post about it here.
You could say that SimTunes began its life as a permanent installation called Music Insects at the Exploratorium in San Francisco back in 1992. It consisted of a panel with a trackball and a few buttons connected to a monitor. Here you could select a colour and paint with and the four insects would react to the pixels as they walked past them.
About a year later, in 1993, Toshio Iwai wanted to make Music Insects available to people in their homes so he started to work with Nintendo to create a more advanced version for Super Famicom called Pix Quartet, and together with two other music based applications called Beat Hopper and Ice Sweeper it formed a game called Sound Fantasy . The game was finished but unfortunately it never got released for reasons unknown to me.
A few years later he teamed up with Maxis to create a new version of Music Insects called SimTunes and it got released for PC back in 1996, and even if this game dates back some 13 years now it doesn't make it any less unique today.
The basic premise of Music Insects is still here in SimTunes but it has evolved more into a pixel based painting program. Each colour you paint with represent a note on the musical scale and each of the four insects represent an instrument, you can also change the instruments by switching insects. There are also special blocks to paint with that change the direction of the insects or teleport them to another part of the image, and you can also define the speed an volume of each of the insects.
The whole concept behind SimTunes is very simple, but when you open up the example gallery that is included you realize that you can create quite advanced compositions. I believe this game is appealing to anyone with a hint of a creative gene, both young and adults, so have a look in the bargain bins at your local gaming store or dig it up on ebay if you're interested.
I have made a few screen shots and captured mp3s of the sound (just click the images for the mp3), you won't see those cute insects crawl over the screen but you get the idea.
