Production Breakdown: Hip Hop & Video Game Beats - A Match Made in Heaven?

We're living in strange times, when a track like Bei Major's “Gamez” can be conceived, recorded, produced and featured on the Booth without anyone seriously questioning the premise. For those of you who've been spending your summer days outside instead of keeping your eyes and ears glued to DJBooth.net, the mixtape track found the artist/producer asking hookwoman Keri Hilson to be his “video game lover,” with such instantly-recognizable effects as “the sound it makes when Mario collects a coin” and “the sound it makes when “Pac-Man dies” standing in for the f-bomb. (Listen to the track at the bottom of the page.)

I'm not hating – really, I'm not, even though I kinda-sorta was last time I said I wasn't hating on Bei Maejor – it's just weird. I thought the cultural consensus was that video games and sex go together like... uh, what's a very fresh and totally not played-out analogy... Tiger Woods and fidelity! While I'm fairly sure that making the high-score list in Pac-Man is no more likely to get you laid than it ever was (although I'm terrible at that game, so who knows), the bleeps and bloops emblematic of retro gaming have most definitely made their mark on the hip-hop scene. Too many artists have count have made old-school gaming samples part of their music, but here are just a few of my favorites:

On the subject of (Ms.) Pac-Man, remember “Game Over,” the joint that got Lil Flip sued by Namco back in '03?



Rappers have been tapping games for samples well before Eternal Champions on “Eternal,” a track off sophomore set E 1999 Eternal



More recently, Booth-acclaimed twosome U-N-I paid homage to Castlevania on this joint off Boondocks-themed compilation mixtape Hip Hop Docktrine:



And the always-dope Statik Selektah borrowed the theme from a childhood favorite of mine, Punch-Out , on this Big Shug-assisted cut off his debut solo set, Spell My Name Right:



And, of course, today's artists are doing more than sampling; in addition to the aforementioned track from Bei Maejor, rising pop star Mike Posner stepped into the Booth this week with “Please Don't Go,” a self-produced single which found him cooking up his own Nintendo-style synth sounds. Personally, I'm seriously digging the trend – and I look forward to the day when I see one of these contraptions at a rap show: