A Console With No Game and a Tape of a Game Nobody Played
In a flat above a bakery in Almaty, a cartridge sleeps on the shelf and an empty console glows. A cassette of the cancelled game's music does the rest.
The console is on and nothing is in it. The slot is bare, the power light is amber, and the tube television shows a grey field with a 50 Hz hum underneath. The hum sits just below a low G. Yerlan Dzhaksybekov will not fix it.
It is 5 degrees in the flat. The radiators come on on the fifteenth. He wears his coat and presses play on a battered tape deck.
The tape is a Type II chrome cassette, hand-labelled in blue pen, a press dub of the Saltwater Courier soundtrack. Hiss for two seconds, then the title theme. Pulse-wave lead at a duty cycle somebody clearly fell in love with. Triangle bass. A noise-channel snare that sounds like a sack of rice dropped on a pier. About 112 bpm, and it is already faster than the game would have been.
Track four is the harbour level. The melody is nine notes long and stays in a minor key, never getting worse, never getting better. The composer ran out of channels and let the arpeggio pretend to be a chord. It works. A fourth voice appears that does not exist on the chip. It is the hum, and it fits the key.
The real cartridge is on the shelf above, in its box. Yerlan has never pressed start on its title screen. He says the music is the game and the game would only be a distraction.
Under the floor the bakery starts its first bake at four. The boards are warm by the window. Track eleven is a level called Customs Shed, a slow one, and the hum rises a little as the oven fans kick in downstairs.
Yerlan turns the volume down so the hum can finish the chord.
